Are Defense Department Officials Freelancing on Major Policy Decisions?

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, July 09, 2025

 

Covering the restoration of U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine, yesterday’s newsletter asked, “If that halt in weapons shipments to Ukraine wasn’t ordered by the president . . . who did order that change in policy?”

 

Today, CNN brings an answer: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

 

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not inform the White House before he authorized a pause on weapons shipments to Ukraine last week, according to five sources familiar with the matter, setting off a scramble inside the administration to understand why the halt was implemented and explain it to Congress and the Ukrainian government.

 

President Donald Trump suggested on Tuesday that he was not responsible for the move.

 

Asked on Tuesday during a Cabinet meeting whether he approved of the pause in shipments, Trump demurred, saying only that the US would continue to send defensive weapons to Ukraine. Pressed again on who authorized the pause, Trump replied, “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?”

 

The episode underscores the often-haphazard policy-making process inside the Trump administration, particularly under Hegseth at the Defense Department. The pause was the second time this year that Hegseth had decided to halt the flow of US weapons to Ukraine, catching senior national security officials off guard, sources said.

 

With that in mind, note the Associated Press reports that the decision was “coordinated by Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby”:

 

Two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive internal discussions, said there was some internal opposition among Pentagon brass to the pause — coordinated by Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby — before it was announced.

 

One of the people described Trump as being caught “flat footed” by the announcement. The White House did not respond to queries about whether Trump was surprised by the Pentagon pause.

 

Politico also has a news story about Colby this morning, on a similar theme, contending that the undersecretary of defense for policy is enacting his agenda without coordinating with the rest of the administration:

 

But since joining the second Trump administration as the Pentagon’s top policy chief, Colby has made a series of rapid-fire moves that have blindsided parts of the White House and frustrated several of America’s foreign allies, according to seven people familiar with the situation. All were granted anonymity to speak freely about Trump administration dynamics. . . .

 

Colby also surprised top officials at the State Department and the National Security Council in June when he decided to review America’s submarine pact with Australia and the U.K.

 

“He is pissing off just about everyone I know inside the administration,” said one person familiar with the situation. “They all view him as the guy who’s going to make the U.S. do less in the world in general.”

 

Now, I can hear the griping about “anonymous sources,” but in the case of the CNN story on Hegseth, we do have the president, on the record, insisting that he hadn’t made the decision and asking who did. And the AUKUS review did seem to come out of nowhere; in his confirmation hearing, Colby had sounded like he had been warming up to the policy decision, and shortly after taking office, Hegseth said, “The president is very aware, supportive of AUKUS, recognizes the importance of the defense industrial base.”

 

Now, dissent is healthy. It’s good that the Trump administration has officials who have been, at least in the past, forthright supporters of assisting Ukraine’s resistance to Russian military aggression, and other voices within its ranks who keep an eye on munitions supply levels and raise concerns about the U.S. overcommitting to far-flung allies in a dangerous world. To reach the best decision, the president ought to hear all sides of the story and a variety of perspectives.

 

But former Trump special assistant Cliff Sims wrote that the first Trump administration cabinet was a “team of vipers” instead of a “team of rivals,” with everyone pursuing their own agenda and eager to stab rivals in the back. The president deserves honest, unvarnished advice, but once he makes the decision, everyone needs to be rowing their oars in the same direction. If they really don’t like the decision, they can resign. We’ve already had Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard seemingly registering her disapproval of a strike on Iran with her weird personal social-media video warning declaring, “We stand here today closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.”

 

If the secretary of Defense or any other Pentagon official wants to make a change as consequential as cutting off U.S. aid to an embattled free people under daily and nightly bombardment of civilian targets . . . it’s a good idea to check with the boss, isn’t it? Is that really too much to ask?

 

Psst! The Graham Bill on Russia Sanctions Is Unworkable!

 

Speaking of Russia and Ukraine:

 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday that he hopes to have an announcement soon on the fate of a long-stalled bill to impose new sanctions targeting Russia.”

 

“We’ll have more to say about that later this week,” Thune told reporters, adding that there’s a “lot of interest” in moving the bill authored by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

 

You would think I’d be among the biggest cheerleaders for Graham’s bill, but I’m not. I think Graham’s heart is in the right place, but we are not going to get to where we want to go by imposing a 500 percent tariff on any country that “knowingly sells, supplies, transfers, or purchases oil, uranium, natural gas, petroleum products, or petrochemical products that originated in the Russian Federation.”

 

Keep in mind, a 500 percent tariff would be almost ten times higher than the current tariffs on China and effectively end U.S. trade with any targeted country. Also keep in mind, countries that are currently buying energy from Russia in one form or another include the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, and Brazil. Also keep in mind that the U.S. is still buying uranium from Russia, under long-term contracts set in place before the invasion.

 

This feels like an effort to get Trump to achieve what Graham wants — punishing Russia — by using one of Trump’s favorite tools, tariffs. I get the argument that plenty of countries, particularly U.S. allies, when forced to choose between cheap Russian energy and their access to the American market, will stop buying energy from Moscow. And who knows, maybe just threatening this move will discourage countries from buying Russian energy, reducing demand, bringing prices even lower, and so on.

 

But the Graham bill also feels like a way to get into Global Trade War 2.0, when we haven’t even come close to reaching “90 deals in 90 days.” Today’s the deadline, and so far, the U.S. has frameworks for deals with Vietnam and the United Kingdom. (CNN’s Harry Enten looks at the numbers and makes the argument that the public likes tariffs in theory, but finds they actually don’t like them when they get them.)

 

Wait, Just Who’s Reading the Sites of the ‘Misogyny Slop Ecosystem’?

 

I am fascinated by an essay by Kat Tenbarge in the New York Times decrying what she and another feminist commentator call the “Misogyny Slop Ecosystem” that is fueled by the likes of “gossip hounds like Perez Hilton.”

 

Male readers of the Morning Jolt, you may not be the most representative of the male demographic — you’re better informed, smarter, wealthier, taller, and more handsome than the population at large. But I want to do a quick survey of the fellas out there.

 

Do any of you guys know who “Perez Hilton” is? Hint, this is not the same person as Paris Hilton.

 

Do you . . . read a lot of gossip about female celebrities? I don’t mean do you look at pictures of female celebrities; I mean read about them.

 

Okay, next question: Can you identify Blake Lively?

 

Very good, yes, she’s the attractive blonde actress married to Deadpool and who’s often sitting next to Taylor Swift in the luxury box at Kansas City Chiefs games.

 

Can you identify Justin Baldoni? No, he does not play for the Red Sox. No, he’s not a member of the Italian parliament. He’s some actor who was in a movie with Lively and the pair have been making accusations and counter-accusations of bad behavior during the filming.

 

Do you read People or Us Weekly? Do you watch Entertainment Tonight? Do you frequently visit the websites PopSugar, E! Online, or the New York Post’s Page Six?

 

Mm-hmm, just as I thought.

 

That New York Times essay laments “an online public” that’s thirsty to see women claiming sexual harassment or abuse get “torn apart.”

 

There may indeed be a “Misogyny Slop Ecosystem” out there. But if there is, it isn’t really driven by gossip sites catering to a male audience. (Or dare I theorize it isn’t really driven by a heterosexual male audience?)

 

Don’t pin this one on us, New York Times. There is indeed a huge audience out there for celebrity gossip. But it’s an audience that skews heavily toward women — the Page Six audience is 59 percent women, the PopSugar audience is almost 64 percent women, and the Perez Hilton audience is 76 percent women.

 

I’m not saying we men don’t have our own flaws, foibles, and quirks. We will call in to sports-talk radio nearly in tears about the torn Achilles tendons of men we will never meet in person. We stand around a party host’s backyard grill, watching and nodding as if we actually have something useful to contribute. We make dad jokes that should probably be banned under the Geneva Convention.

 

In fact, we here at National Review write about mowing the lawn with an unnerving frequency. (Check out the work of Luther Ray Abel, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Mark Wright, James Lileks, and Graham Hillard. We cover lawn-mowing with the regularity and depth of a John Deere corporate newsletter.)

 

But if the online celebrity gossip world has created a subculture of misogyny, well . . . that one’s not on us, ladies. That “online public” that’s so eager to see female celebrities “torn apart” is driven largely by women who have an appetite for that kind of news. That doesn’t make it any better, but it also makes it hard to shoehorn this phenomenon into the extremely familiar New York Times narrative of villainous “right-wing media professionals,” “so-called men’s rights activists,” and the “Americans [who have] have aggressively rejected the gains made under the #MeToo movement.”

 

The “Misogyny Slop Ecosystem” begins with the problem of the audience that chooses to eat that stuff up with a spoon. And it isn’t mostly guys.

 

ADDENDUM: You’re going to want to read Wilfred Reilly on how a surprising number of seemingly American alt-right accounts are actually run by foreign citizens. Apparently, some of the most enraged and ardent advocates of “America First” are not actually, you know, Americans.