‘Bad blood’: Pentagon rocked by ‘festering distrust’ as ‘jockeying’ Hegseth advisers feud
The chaos in the Pentagon is only getting worse amid the fallout from the latest “Signalgate” revelations against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, reported Politico on Tuesday evening.
Barely a few weeks after the initial reporting that Hegseth, a former Fox News personality, leaked highly sensitive war tactics against Houthi terrorists in Yemen with a journalist for The Atlantic, news broke that he shared another trove of similar information in another Signal chat with his wife and brother. This already comes at a time when Hegseth is bleeding senior staff and rapidly cycling through subordinates.
President Donald Trump reportedly chose Hegseth because he thought Hegseth’s collected attitude on TV would make him well-suited to manage the operations of the Pentagon, per the report. Instead, he “surrounded himself with advisers who quickly turned into vicious rivals for power — whose bitter brawl has now unraveled into revenge power plays, surprise firings, accusations of leaking and embarrassing headlines that are blowing up the Pentagon, distracting from Trump’s agenda and possibly jeopardizing Hegseth’s job.”
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Moreover, according to the report, this isn’t the usual type of power struggle the Trump administration is known for.
“Many administration feuds are driven by ideological or factional differences, splitting old-school conservatives from MAGA headliners and ‘America First’ activists,” reported Rachael Bade, Daniel Lippman, Jack Detsch, and Paul McLeary. However, “This one is all about personality conflict, according to interviews with nine current and former Defense Department officials as well as others close to the feud, granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive political issue. Hegseth’s closest advisers privately jockeyed for influence, creating festering distrust and gamesmanship that has rocked the world’s premier defense agency.”
One person close to the fireworks told Politico, “There’s just a lot of tension, there’s a lot of bad blood. And there’s a lot of people trying to assert dominance in an area where it’s very hard to do without cutting somebody else.”
Trump, for his part, categorically denies any plans to get rid of Hegseth even amid the expanding scandal — but some experts believe it may be out of his hands at some point.