Impeaching Pete

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

Yesterday Pete Hegseth delivered the Pentagon’s “State of the Force” address. Which was not a thing that existed in American government, as far as I can tell, until he made it a thing last year with his Strangelovian turn before a roomful of generals and admirals in Virginia.

 

Like his boss, another former television host, Hegseth is a performer at heart. The “State of the Force” address is a pretext for him to perform the sort of strutting machismo that seems to soothe the insecurity he plainly feels at leading so many men more accomplished than him. “We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department,” he informed his audience on Wednesday, as if the military he now leads hasn’t been the most fearsome on earth for generations. From now on, he added, there’ll be “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals.”

 

Whether there will be victories, given the state of play in Iran, is unclear.

 

Hegseth’s shtick has grown stale after nearly two years and now routinely verges on self-parody. “The ideological clowns are out,” he said at one point in his speech. “The patriotic cowboys are in with testosterone testing on top.” In another passage, he paid lip service to the virtues of a free press—before comparing America’s media unfavorably to Iran’s, accusing them of “treason” by “[smearing] the troops and the historic mission that they are undertaking.”

 

All the while he paced the stage, seeming less like a Cabinet official than a motivational speaker. The vibe, broadly speaking, was a sort of fascist version of James Cagney performing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

 

Hegseth did make bona fide news when he announced a new, and overdue, Pentagon initiative on autonomous warfare. He also revealed something called “Project Meridian” that will spend the next 120 days assessing the future of warfare and will be led by, among others, Elon Musk. The man atop SpaceX and Starlink won’t be as far out of his depth this time as he was the last time he did a short stint in the federal government, but the appointment still reeked of a gimmick given his lack of military expertise.

 

It’s as if Hegseth thought, “Who do I know who’s future-y and also hates ‘woke’?” and landed on the most obvious name. He already had brilliant minds with actual battlefield experience under his command who were thinking hard about the future of war. If that subject was a priority for him, why did he fire them?

 

Still, the most memorable detail about yesterday’s address came from a Wall Street Journal report on what happened beforehand. Quote:

 

Those [service members] in attendance, hundreds of whom worked out with the defense secretary outside the Pentagon that morning, received a book called “The War Department Field Manual,” a compilation of Hegseth’s past speeches. In a foreword written by President Trump, the troops were told: “As your commander in chief, I will not ask you to fight dumb wars.”

 

I will not ask you to fight dumb wars, the leader pledged, as the dumb war in Iran that he ordered the military to fight threatens to swallow his party whole in the midterms. That paragraph is a perfect time capsule of this absurd political moment; the thought of the troops receiving a bound copy of the defense secretary’s musings on testosterone is the icing on the cake.

 

Reading it reminded me of something that had somehow slipped my mind: Hegseth faces an impeachment vote next month.

 

Libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie introduced eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth in mid-September, most of them related to the illegality of various military operations. Because Massie made his impeachment resolution “privileged,” the House must take it up. Speaker Mike Johnson was so reluctant to do that with the midterms approaching that he chose to send the House home until November instead. There will be no impeachment vote before Election Day.

 

But there will be one after Election Day. How is the Hegseth impeachment process likely to play out?

 

The House.

 

I think there’s a chance that the House will vote to impeach.

 

Massie was clever twice over, first in his choice of targets. Every patriot shares (or should share) Kevin D. Williamson’s “cull ’em all” approach to impeaching the president and his Cabinet, but we all understand that the right’s personality cult will dismiss any demand for accountability from the particular personality around which it’s organized.

 

It’s easier for Republican lawmakers to rationalize not impeaching Trump than it is for them to rationalize not impeaching Hegseth. Massie declined to make it easy for them.

 

He was also clever in his timing. By waiting to file his impeachment resolution until shortly before the election, he forced an agonizing strategic dilemma on Johnson. If Johnson had put the resolution on the floor immediately, House Republicans would have faced a lose-lose choice. Opposing Hegseth’s impeachment would have amounted to symbolically endorsing a hugely unpopular war, angering undecided voters. Supporting it would have amounted to a symbolic vote of no confidence in the White House’s management of that war, angering the MAGA base.

 

Johnson spared his members that lose-lose choice by recessing early. But by doing so, he increased the odds that Hegseth will be impeached when the House returns: If a huge blue wave crashes down on Republicans in the House and Senate next month, turning dozens into lame ducks, those members may no longer feel pulled by partisan duty to support the president and his Cabinet.

 

The opposite, perhaps. Some might feel so disgruntled at having had their careers short-circuited by Trump and Hegseth’s foolish war that they’ll want to impeach. Revenge is a factor here.

 

Even Republicans who support the president and his defense secretary might conclude that impeaching Hegseth during the lame-duck session is preferable to not doing so. Defeating Massie’s resolution would make it easy politically for Democrats to revisit impeaching Hegseth when they’re in charge next year—which they sound motivated to do—on grounds that it’s unfinished business.

 

Whereas impeaching him now and letting the Republican-run Senate dispose of the charges against him before January would make any future Democratic attempts feel a bit like double jeopardy. “Are they impeaching him over Iran again?” voters might wonder. “Didn’t they do that last year?”

 

Add to all of that the many grievances that congressional Republicans have with Hegseth—the war, his bizarre jihad against respected Army officers, the fact that “he and his staff are dismissive of their questions and frequently unprepared for briefings”—and there’s no reason to think that partisan goodwill will tip the balance in his favor on a tight impeachment vote. He could plausibly end up as the whipping boy for a post-wipeout lame-duck GOP House majority.

 

The Senate.

 

The fate of a Hegseth impeachment in the Senate is both simpler and more complicated than it is in the House.

 

It’s simpler with respect to the outcome. Senate Republicans are incapable of mustering the courage needed to remove a Trump toady from office for committing impeachable offenses, at least when he has the support of the president and the MAGA base. There’s no chance that there will be 67 votes to remove Hegseth, even after a blue wave.

 

And in a way, that’s fitting.

 

The first three articles of impeachment in Massie’s resolution accuse Hegseth of unconstitutionally exercising war powers that rightly belong to Congress. But why should Senate Republicans suddenly awaken to those abuses now, after seven months of meekly deferring to Trump on them? The time for them to get chesty about their constitutional prerogatives was last year, before the president gained so much confidence in his ability to steamroll Congress that he thought it’d be fine to start a major war in the Middle East on his own say-so.

 

The Iran war is a failure of House and Senate Republicans’ leadership more than it is a failure of Hegseth’s, and the impeachment process risks obscuring that. The most one can say about removing him from office now, very belatedly, is that it’d be a small first step toward Congress reclaiming power from an administration that’s so disdainful of legislative authority that it often doesn’t bother to let lawmakers know what’s going on.

 

The complicated part of the Hegseth impeachment process for the Senate isn’t the outcome, which is foreordained, but the path to it. Would Senate Majority Leader John Thune and his GOP conference agree to hold a trial, or would they dismiss the charges summarily, as Senate Democrats did after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was impeached in 2024?

 

The calendar matters in that calculus, especially if Democrats end up flipping the Senate. Thune and his colleagues won’t want to devote precious time during the short lame-duck session to a fruitless Hegseth impeachment when there’s more urgent business to attend to—funding the government, for one thing, as well as confirming various Trump nominees in the pipeline before Republicans lose their power to do so.

 

The war could complicate things further, as the president has said publicly and privately that another round of attacks on Iran could come after the midterms. How likely are Senate Republicans to put Hegseth on trial at a moment when the bombs have begun falling again, requiring the Pentagon’s undivided attention? That would be a perfect excuse to choose the Mayorkas option by rejecting Massie’s articles of impeachment before taking them up.

 

On the other hand.

 

Revenge is a potential factor in the Senate too, as a blue wave could wash away numerous red-state Republicans who expected to hold their seats for decades. Combine them with the members of Thune’s conference who’ve already been driven into retirement by Trump—at least one of whom appears to support impeaching Hegseth—and with the chamber’s 47-member Democratic caucus, and there’s a solid majority in the making who might relish sticking it to Trump by putting his defense secretary on trial.

 

There’s even a strategic reason for Republicans to consider doing so. (Well, two strategic reasons if you count the “double jeopardy” point from earlier.) Thune and his colleagues could use the potential embarrassment of the spectacle as leverage to persuade Trump to fire Hegseth and nominate someone more qualified. “The new Democratic majority will squeeze you on Pete’s replacement if you wait until next year to get rid of him,” Thune might tell the president. “Ditch him now, and we’ll ram through a new nominee before January.”

 

He might even come to Trump with a list of names whom Senate Republicans are willing to approve. A lame-duck GOP majority would have leverage here as the president’s last, best chance at congressional cooperation on key priorities before he leaves office in 2029. Take advantage, Thune might say. Soon, replacing Hegseth will be hard, if not impossible.

 

Who knows? Trump might end up welcoming that ultimatum, seizing it as a ready-made excuse to rid himself of his Hegseth problem. Sparing his next crop of nominees from having to run the gauntlet in a Democratic Senate next year should suffice for most of his fans as an explanation for why he needs to let go of some of his Cabinet now.

 

The president.

 

But it’s never that simple with Trump, is it?

 

Asking Trump to dump Hegseth after a midterm drubbing would be tantamount to asking him to admit that Iran was a mistake and drove the popular backlash that ousted his party’s majorities. As a matter of temperament, Trump is no more comfortable with losing face than House and Senate Republicans are with political courage.

 

His instinct following a Democratic rout will be to double down on his defense secretary, partly to signal his conviction that voters’ judgment about his war is incorrect and partly out of juvenile spite.

 

All the more so, I think, if the House impeaches Hegseth. Firing him under those circumstances would compound the sense that the president had been badly weakened by the Democratic landslide. Instead of coming out “fighting” against the new legislative threat to his authority, he’d be bowing to it by handing his enemies in the House and Senate a scalp. Who is Congress to tell him who he should and shouldn’t have in his Cabinet?

 

Give in to them on that, and soon they’ll be thinking they’re an equal branch of government.

 

There are other factors that might lead Trump to keep Hegseth around. A big one is that he may believe, with some justification, that the tide has turned in America’s favor lately in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. Navy’s stranglehold on Iranian oil exports is working, enough so that the regime recently sought a ceasefire that would have lifted the blockade temporarily. (Trump declined.) Iran’s own stranglehold on the strait isn’t working as well, meanwhile: More oil from America’s gulf allies has been getting out lately, driving regional crude exports up toward 80 percent of their prewar levels.

 

Come November, the president might assume, it’ll be sufficiently clear that America has regained the advantage over Iran that Congress will lose its appetite for targeting Hegseth.

 

He might also want Hegseth on his team for a reason famously articulated by Lyndon Johnson, that it’s better to have potential troublemakers “inside the tent p—ing out than outside the tent p—ing in.” As hard as it is to imagine a Renfield-tier toady like Hegseth turning against Trump, it’s also hard to imagine the psychological impact of being booted out of the world’s most prestigious military job and sent back to the dismal obscurity of weekend-cable-news-chat-show-host hell. Our secretary of defense seems to be prone to grudges; if he were to lose his gig playing Patton before captive military audiences because the president chose to make him the fall guy over Iran, he might understandably resent it.

 

And if he did, he’d be a potentially useful witness for Democratic investigators who are planning to put the Trump White House through the wringer next year. Hegseth might even feel obliged to cooperate with them to save his own skin, knowing that Democrats are after him too. Trump might conclude that keeping Hegseth in the job, letting him go on purging the Pentagon of capable officers and generally setting the place on fire, is a small price to pay for retaining his personal loyalty as the cops close in.

 

As for the argument that he should want to replace Hegseth soon, before control of the Senate changes hands and gives Democrats veto power over a prospective nominee, that would make sense if he were a “normal” president who respected the legislature’s advice-and-consent power over executive nominees. He is not and does not. Trump is Trump: If he tires of Hegseth next year, he’ll simply resort to procedural chicanery by slotting in some even bigger chud as “acting” secretary of defense rather than cooperate with Democrats on a mutually agreeable choice.

 

Almost certainly, with impeachment destined to fail, that will be the only way Hegseth exits. The president will need to tire of his defense secretary, which is unlikely given his stupendous affinity for Renfields and Hegseth’s equally stupendous zealousness in that role. Only if and when the war becomes such a fiasco that the president grows desperate for a scapegoat, perhaps, will he conclude that Hegseth’s highest service to him is being dropkicked out of the Pentagon.

 

The only alternative I can see is if the new Democratic Congress opts to play hardball by issuing Trump an ultimatum: No money for the war until, among other things, Hegseth is out. I doubt the Democrats have it in them, but electoral landslides have been known to do funny things to a party’s confidence. Here’s hoping.