Knives Out

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

 

All you need to know about the secretary of defense is that in less than a month, with the United States at war with the most dangerous Islamist regime on earth, he’s driven not one but two news cycles involving Kid Rock.

 

The first came late last month when two Apache helicopters made an unauthorized fly-by of the Trump-loving singer’s Tennessee home. The Army quickly opened a disciplinary review, and Pete Hegseth just as quickly closed it. “No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots,” he crowed. Donald Trump’s military operates the same way the rest of his administration does, it turns out: Rule-breaking is fine as long as some MAGA crony benefits.

 

Hegseth doubled down Monday. As the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz dragged on, compounding an oil crisis that will soon get meaningfully worse, news spread that Kid Rock had arrived at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. Why? To fly around in Apaches with Hegseth, of course. “Apaches typically have two pilots,” DropSite News’ Ryan Grim explained in his report on the joy ride, “but they went up with one so the boys could each ride shotgun.”

 

Those helicopters aren’t normally stationed at Fort Belvoir, Grim added. Evidently the Army moved air assets around during a war so that the defense secretary could give a C-list right-wing celebrity a thrill.

 

Still, turning the U.S. military into a personal Make-a-Wish Foundation for Robert “Kid Rock” Ritchie is not why Pete Hegseth will eventually lose his job. From the West Wing to the Capitol to the Army itself, lots of people inside Trump’s government have much better reasons to want him gone.

 

And they do want him gone, it seems. The knives are out.

 

Vance.

 

The vice president and his camp have two incentives to want to get rid of the defense secretary.

 

One is political, as J.D. Vance is desperate for ways to atone to “America First-ers” who are disappointed in him for failing to prevent war with Iran. Pitting himself against Hegseth, the face of the conflict and the most smugly bellicose member of the Cabinet, is a small way to do that.

 

The other incentive is less obvious. Hegseth has it in for Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who happens to be an old law-school buddy of Vance’s. That friendship probably explains why Driscoll has survived numerous purges inside the Pentagon over the last 15 months, the most recent of which saw Army chief of staff (and close Driscoll ally) Gen. Randy George sent packing. Vance may have prevailed upon Trump to stick with Driscoll over Hegseth’s objections—so far.

 

But probably not forever. The president fired Navy Secretary John Phelan at Hegseth’s urging last week, remember. If Trump is headed toward having to choose between his secretary of defense and his secretary of the Army, it’s in the VP’s interest to start pushing now for him to retain the latter and dump the former.

 

Lo and behold, yesterday The Atlantic published a splashy piece about the vice president and his camp harboring suspicions about the man atop the Pentagon. The VP “has repeatedly questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the war in Iran” in meetings, the magazine reported. Specifically, Vance confidantes “believe that Hegseth’s portrayal has been so positive as to be misleading.”

 

I don’t blame them for feeling that way.

 

To watch a Pete Hegseth press conference is to come away thinking that the U.S. military isn’t just in control of the battlespace but has rendered Iran defenseless. (Apart from the coastline along the Strait of Hormuz, that is.) That’s precisely what his boss wants to hear, not coincidentally. But the reality is otherwise: Roughly half of the regime’s missile launchers were intact at the start of this month’s ceasefire, and others came back online as the Iranians dug them out from under rubble. Missiles are also being unearthed, with some sources estimating that Iran could end up recovering as much as 70 percent of its pre-war arsenal.

 

America has also sustained more damage than much of the public realizes. NBC News reported a few days ago that Iran’s air assets struck dozens of U.S. military targets on bases across seven Gulf countries at the start of the war. One attack on a site in Kuwait was apparently carried out by an Iranian jet that evaded U.S. air defenses, “the first time an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has struck an American military base in years.”

 

And repelling Iran’s attacks has come at a high cost. Since the start of the war, CNN claimed last week, “the U.S. military has expended at least 45 percent of its stockpile of Precision Strike Missiles; at least half of its inventory of THAAD missiles, which are designed to intercept ballistic missiles; and nearly 50 percent of its stockpile of Patriot air defense interceptor missiles.” That’s what Vance and his team are reportedly aggrieved about, per The Atlantic. America’s ability to fight future wars is quietly being sapped, and the Pentagon is largely mum about it.

 

Getting Hegseth axed for lying about a war that postliberals hate would be a redemptive masterstroke by the vice president, appeasing his fans with a scalp and affirming them in their conviction that the conflict was a mistake.

 

Republicans.

 

Other Republicans around Trump also have reasons to get rid of the defense secretary. As in Vance’s case, they’re a mix of policy substance and political ass-covering.

 

Lawmakers seem sincerely alarmed by Hegseth’s chaotic firing binges inside the Pentagon, as they should be. The man in charge has torched centuries of experience by ridding the military of more than a dozen senior officers since he took over, with arguably the two most consequential—George and Phelan—coming in the middle of a war.

 

There are other strikes against him, of course. Hegseth has encouraged those under his command not to worry about committing war crimes, for instance, and obsessed over picayune culture-war grievances like the Fox News host he was and still is at heart. Last week he announced that the military will no longer mandate flu vaccinations, a move that’s inexplicable as a matter of readiness but is sure to endear him to the anti-vax populist peanut gallery to which he’s forever playing.

 

Meanwhile, his religious rationalizations for the war have been so obnoxious that the pope himself felt moved to speak up about them. If there’s one more thing Republicans don’t need right now, it’s a needless fight with the Vatican and American Catholics.

 

But purging the Pentagon of able officers over petty grudges and blocking the promotions of worthy recipients for no legitimate reason is Hegseth’s cardinal sin. “The hollowing out of incredible leadership at the Pentagon has been a big concern,” one Republican senator complained to The Hill. Sen. Thom Tillis agreed, arguing that Hegseth’s “less-than-ideal personnel decisions” may be due to the fact that he’s managing “an organization that’s much larger, much more complex than anything he’s done.”

 

I will leave you to guess how Tillis voted on confirming Hegseth to lead that famously large, famously complex organization.

 

As the saying goes, if everyone around you is an a–hole, you’re the a–hole. Dismayed Republicans inside the Capitol have spent 15 months watching the secretary of defense gradually lobotomize the military in the apparent belief that everyone around him is an a–hole. They’ve finally located the real a–hole, it seems, just as the midterm campaign is about to ramp up.

 

Presumably they’re hoping that a quick end to the war followed by Trump firing Hegseth might mollify swing voters who are disgruntled over the conflict and want to see accountability for it. George W. Bush famously waited until after the 2006 midterms to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, too late to avert an Iraq-war backlash that drove Democrats to sweeping victories. The GOP doesn’t want Trump to make the same mistake.

 

Plus, Hegseth is the problem would provide a conveniently self-serving excuse for the political troubles of a party that willingly mortgaged its soul and its strategy to Donald Trump. Gas prices have reached their highest level since the war began, and Americans’ pessimism about their own personal financial situation is the highest in Gallup’s polling this century. Yet as I write this on Tuesday, the most urgent Republican cause on Capitol Hill is making sure the president gets to build the widely despised ballroom he’s craving—and that hard-strapped taxpayers pick up the tab for it.

 

It won’t be Pete Hegseth’s fault when the GOP is annihilated in the midterms. But a lot of people who do bear blame for that annihilation will want us to believe that it is.

 

The military.

 

The most interesting detail about Ryan Grim’s scoop yesterday was who it came from. “Multiple Army sources” confirmed the particulars of the Kid Rock joy ride for him, allegedly.

 

That’s not surprising. The Army “has seen many of its top three- and four-star officers with deep experience fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan fired or sidelined in recent months,” the New York Times reported several weeks ago. The branch’s vice chief of staff was forced out last October, then Gen. George was fired, and now Hegseth’s nemesis Driscoll, the Army secretary, is in the crosshairs.

 

The secretary of defense is culling respected Army officials without so much as an explanation to the public. His moronic stunts, like flying around in helicopters with rock stars (technically a former rock star in this case, I suppose), are an embarrassment. And he’s seemingly incapable of comporting himself professionally, from his grandstanding media-bashing briefings to his suck-uppery toward Trump. He “strives to tell the president exactly what he wants to hear,” one former administration official told The Atlantic. “I think that’s dangerous.”

 

Given all of that, do you suppose the Army brass is eager to see him go?

 

To make matters worse, Hegseth seems not to have realized what he was getting the military into in Iran. Earlier this month Time magazine reported that he was “caught off-guard” by the ferocity of Iran’s retaliation during the first days of the conflict: “In internal deliberations before the war’s launch, Hegseth had pointed to Iran’s muted reaction to Trump’s past attacks as evidence that calibrated force could impose costs on Tehran without triggering a broader war.”

 

“He was expecting the Iranians to fight back in some form,” a source told the publication. “When they started attacking virtually the entire region, it sort of hit him like, ‘Whoa, we’re really in this now.’”

 

It’s one thing to put up with bad behavior from a brilliant strategist like George Patton, who’s going to win wars. It’s another to put up with it from a TV host who didn’t expect that a campaign framed explicitly in terms of regime change might cause the regime in question to hit back with everything it’s got. You can understand why Team Vance wants to lay the deepening munitions shortfall at Hegseth’s feet: He was the one who badly underestimated how vigorous America’s regional defense would need to be, it appears.

 

And so, for the Pentagon, the way forward isn’t complicated. It can bite its collective tongue and continue to be saddled with a cosplaying poseur and incompetent yes-man at the top. Or it can leak episodes like the Kid Rock chopper ride and hope that even Donald Trump has some limit to how much humiliation he’s willing to endure from Pete Hegseth.

 

The next chapter.

 

I think it’s widely assumed that Hegseth is headed back to right-wing media if he’s bounced, and for good reason. That’s where Trump administration washouts tend to end up. Besides, if there’s one skill that the current secretary of defense genuinely does possess, it’s fluency in the sort of boorish cultural tribalism that plays with right-wing infotainment consumers.

 

There’s big money in it for him potentially. He’ll do it for a while, I’m sure. But probably not for very long.

 

Having had a taste of real power, a person like Hegseth is unlikely to be satisfied with mere wealth and fame. I suspect he’ll look around for some smallish red state to move to where he might plausibly win elections on name recognition alone and look to run for governor eventually.

 

He’d be an interesting figure in populist politics, as there aren’t all that many members of the current establishment who are as belligerent to foreign enemies as they are to domestic ones. The most strident lib-haters and woke-bashers in Trump’s GOP tend to be postliberals who dislike picking fights with illiberal regimes like Iran’s, believing that national resources should be applied toward eradicating the scourge of liberalism within. That’s why they’re mad at Trump: They thought he agreed with them about that.

 

The president occasionally tempers his considerable belligerence for reasons of political expediency, like when he dialed down ICE operations in Minneapolis amid a national backlash. If Hegseth enters electoral politics, I expect he’ll position himself by contrast as a man who’ll never back off an enemy no matter who that enemy might be—the libs, Iran, vaccines, the Geneva Conventions, you name it.

 

His ethos would be “no quarter,” to borrow a phrase he’s been known to use. The two episodes I recounted at the start of this newsletter capture that mindset succinctly: After taking heat last month for refusing to discipline the Apache pilots who flew by the singer’s home, of course Hegseth would defiantly compound the transgression by taking Kid Rock up for an Apache ride of his own.

 

No apologies. No remorse. No quarter. Ruthlessness in all things. Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.

 

I’m curious to see how that platform would fare with Republican voters after even Trump felt obliged to campaign on tamping down certain forms of ruthlessness, such as in foreign policy. Despite the “end endless wars” argle-bargle, most of the GOP has supported the president in every military adventure he’s undertaken, Iran included. How would they respond to a candidate who dropped all pretense of restraint and promised to brutalize both the left and the Khomeinists?

 

Maybe better than we think. Especially if that came packaged with hardline evangelical posturing that bears a suspicious resemblance to Christian nationalism.

 

If he’s fired tomorrow, Pete Hegseth will be able to credibly say that no other member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet waged culture war within the department he ran as aggressively as he did. Pair that with his knack for bombastic performances of “toughness” and you’ve got someone who’s well-suited to a party that now treats grave matters of state with roughly the same degree of seriousness as it treats pro wrestling. There will be many miserable bequests from Trump’s presidencies, but “Gov. Hegseth” would be an unusually obnoxious one.