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Overboard! Whiskey Pete Hegseth Tries to Fire His Way Out of Being a Loser
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This is a story about how Whiskey Pete Hegseth has utterly betrayed service members and done so because he cannot face up to being a loser. It is a story about how every Republican who has let him do that has similarly betrayed service members.This is a story about DOD’s decision to discipline a sailor who tried to commit suicide after being pushed to the brink in an eight month deployment aboard the USS Lincoln.
Before I get there, though, I want to review all the recent insanity of Whiskey Pete’s reign.
Start with Kid Rock.
Back in March, two Army Apache helicopters buzzed Kid Rock’s house in Tennessee. Doing so exhibited a collapse of military discipline. It created safety problems.
You know? Safety problems, like those that building a new helicopter pad for Marine Force One without adequate planning — an NTSB review of a near collision earlier this month confirmed yesterday — might lead to a communication breakdown that could get people killed. Those kinds of safety problems.
That’s why you don’t let people buzz a celebrity’s house, even if he is a far right celebrity.
But Whiskey Pete does. After the Army grounded the pilots involved in the March incident, the Fox News host running DOD reversed that decision.
By tweet, Trump fashion.
Because life is all just one big troll for Whiskey Pete Hegseth.
Turns out, though, someone did get disciplined — or rather fired. WaPo has a story this week suggesting that one precipitating reason Whiskey Pete fired Army Chief of Staff Randy George is because George believed the Army must maintain discipline and protocol and so had to investigate the Kid Rock incident.
Days before the Army’s top officer was abruptly fired earlier this year, he was advised by a fellow general now vying to replace him to stop the military’s investigation into an unauthorized helicopter flyby of musician Kid Rock’s Tennessee estate, three people familiar with the matter said.
Gen. Randy George, whom Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed as the Army chief of staff without explanation, felt it was important to follow typical protocol and determine whether any safety regulations had been violated during the March 28 flyby, these people said. Like some others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the episode.
Gen. Chris LaNeve, the Army’s No. 2 officer, told George that Hegseth did not want the investigation to proceed, one person said. The two others said that George later confided in colleagues about the encounter with LaNeve and seemed troubled by it. George told them that LaNeve suggested it would be best if the review was scuttled, those people said.
The revelation, which has not previously been reported, adds a new layer of understanding to Hegseth’s potential motivations for firing George on April 2. Kid Rock, whose legal name is Robert Ritchie, is a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump and avowed critic of many Democratic politicians and causes.
Now, most members of Congress, including Republicans, were pretty furious about the way Whiskey Pete fired General George, not least because George is considered exceedingly competent and had been focused on shifting the service to adapt to new ways of warfare. And also because Hegseth was two months into losing a war in humiliating fashion.
It’s never a good idea to fire competent Generals in the middle of a war you’re losing.
And now we learn that Hegseth did so because he thought it more important to protect those pilots who buzzed Kid Rock than to sustain military discipline during a war you’re losing.
NYT has a story that describes the result: a rudderless military unable to adjust to new developments (rudderless is their word, not mine — we’ll get back to the Navy and that guy who tried to kill himself in a bit).
A series of firings and feuds initiated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has left the Army essentially rudderless as it struggles to deal with the threat posed by cheap, deadly drones and missiles that have pounded U.S. bases in the Middle East.
The Army has not had a chief of staff, the service’s top officer, since Mr. Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George without explanation in April, and there are no signs that he is close to filling the position, said current and former officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.
Mr. Hegseth has forced out at least three senior officers who had been viewed as potential successors to General George.
Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, the service’s top civilian leader, is also expected to leave the administration in the next few months and has already moved out of the large family house that he was renting in Fort Myer, outside Washington, officials said.
[snip]
The most glaring Army vacancy, though, has been the absence at the very top following General George’s dismissal four months ago. As Army chief, General George was responsible for training and equipping Army units around the world. His responsibilities included accelerating the purchase of critical munitions such as Patriot interceptors, ATACMS artillery systems and other ground-based weaponry, which are in short supply.
This NYT story about the rudderless military came out two days before the Kid Rock story, and it reads differently if, after you finish each paragraph, you say, “Kid Rock” to yourself.
Meanwhile, NYT has another story not just reminding how omnipresent Jennifer Hegseth is in all of Whiskey Pete’s meetings — revisiting these details that WSJ reported just months into Hegseth’s tenure:
Jennifer Hegseth also attended a meeting last month at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels where allied defense officials discussed their support for Ukraine, according to two people who attended the meeting. Hegseth’s brother Philip Hegseth has also been traveling with him on official visits, the Pentagon said.
The Brussels meeting, which took place on the sidelines of a February conference of NATO defense ministers, was a gathering of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a U.S.-led forum of some 50 nations that periodically meets to coordinate on production and delivery of weapons and other support for Ukraine. At the closed-door discussions, national representatives routinely present confidential information, such as donations to Ukraine that they don’t want to be made public, according to officials.
Some foreign attendees at the meetings didn’t know who Jennifer Hegseth was, according to people familiar with both gatherings. Others were surprised by her presence, but proceeded without raising objections, the people said. It isn’t clear whether her presence affected what was discussed at either session.
NYT revisited that role and how bonkers it all is:
“It’s bonkers that a defense secretary would involve his wife in his sensitive official duties, including sharing details of an impending military operation, and face zero consequences,” said John Ullyot, who left the Pentagon as chief spokesman after three months working under Mr. Hegseth and has been critical of his leadership. “Any president deserves better judgment from his national security leaders.”
“This is not normal,” Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last year on MSNBC during the uproar over Mrs. Hegseth’s inclusion in the chat and high-level meetings. “Secretary Hegseth has one of the highest levels of classification access. He can’t just hand that to his wife and say, ‘Here, honey, hold my beer, and hold my classified information.’”
But it also explains why the Fox News host turned cabinet secretary does it: to keep him from getting drunk and fucking other ladies.
One person familiar with Mr. Hegseth’s thinking said that the defense secretary likes his wife to travel with him to keep him out of trouble. Mr. Hegseth, who has a history of heavy drinking, has himself made clear he needs his wife at his side. He often credits his “two J’s” — Jennifer and Jesus — with transforming his life.
The Secretary of Defense brings his spouse everywhere — invokes his authority to be able to do something unprecedented and creepy — because he needs a babysitter. His own personal challenges are simply too much to manage without his wife with him all the time.
Keep that in mind as you consider DOD’s decision to discipline a guy who tried to kill himself after more than eight months of being at sea.
But first, let’s revisit some details about it.
Remember, when the story first broke in the Military Times and Stars and Stripes that multiple sailors had tried to throw themselves overboard — had tried to commit suicide in hostile waters because they had literally not stepped on land for over eight months — Donald Trump lied. He attacked CNN’s Kristen Holmes, who asked him about it; Trump called it Fake News.
At the White House on Monday, the president berated Kristen Holmes, a CNN reporter, at a press availability, insisting that she “be quiet” and describing the reporting as fake news.
“The Lincoln has been out there for a period of time – a good period of time – but over the years, we’ve had them out there much longer,” Trump said, describing an exchange with a veteran, whom he did not name, over the weekend.
“He happened to be an admiral, retired. He said, ‘I’ve been on ships that are out there much longer than that, sir. And I know people on the Lincoln, they say it’s beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of.’ And other people went out and they found out that to be true,” said Trump. “It was fake news reporting from CNN.”
Shortly after that Fake News claim, as part of a larger story about Trump’s lies, David Rohde revealed that one reason why the USS Lincoln is in such poor shape is because Iran destroyed the Naval Command in Bahrain, which Whiskey Pete has tried to coverup.
As NYT explained, after Iran destroyed the base in Bahrain, the Navy started using Diego Garcia as a resupply hub.
The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln’s supply problems began soon after the first day of the war, as Iranian missiles and attack drones fell on a Navy base in Bahrain.
The Iranian attack, retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran, destroyed much of the base. And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades.
The Navy needed a Plan B to continue feeding the sailors working around the clock to keep warplanes flying strike missions, and later to maintain a blockade of Iran’s ports.
With the threat of Iranian attacks at other ports in the region, the Pentagon looked to a base under British command on the island of Diego Garcia as its supply hub, which is south of the Maldives and roughly 2,200 miles from where two aircraft carrier strike groups have been operating in the Gulf of Oman.
The loss of the hub in Bahrain has contributed to a host of reported problems on carriers supporting operations against Iran, as Democratic senators raise concerns about the Lincoln’s 5,000 sailors and their nearly nine-month deployment.
That’s why life has sucked for the sailors stuck on a floating city without shore leave for months and months; because Iran did grave damage in the first days of the war, grave damage Whiskey Pete doesn’t want to acknowledge.
In an effort to cover up how terribly he is failing, former Fox News host Whiskey Pete is cracking down on free speech.
In a lawsuit filed yesterday, two journalists and the editor for Stars and Stripes whom Whiskey Pete fired claim they were fired partly because of the reporting on the USS Lincoln, which was basically a report about a public meeting with distraught family members in San Diego.
In direct contravention of those First Amendment principles, Defendants are attempting to fire Plaintiffs for speaking up as private citizens in support of the press’s freedom to cover military operations, its need to reach all servicepersons, and in retaliation for their publication of a news report on deteriorating conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during its extended tour of duty in the Mid-East. This action seeks to prevent the blatant violation of the First Amendment rights of these journalists and challenges the U.S. Department of Defense’s (“DoD”) extraordinary censorship efforts in violation of both the First Amendment and DoD regulations and policies.1
[snip]
7. The spark that moved Defendants to act was a news report published by Stripes on August 11, 2026. The article broke a major story about deteriorating conditions aboard the
U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. It reported that the aircraft carrier’s 5,000 Sailors have endured food and water shortages, disrupted mail service, long workdays, and little time off for months on end, and that the long deployment and physical hardships were impacting Sailors’ physical and mental health (hereafter referred to as “the Lincoln Story”). See Alison Bath, USS Abraham Lincoln families press Navy leaders over sailors’ mental health, Stars & Stripes (Aug. 11, 2026), https://perma.cc/GV6R-XES2.
8. The very next day, August 12, 2026, Defendants ordered Plaintiff Max Lederer, Stripes’ Publisher, to present Notices of Separation to Mr. Slavin and Ms. Korte. The notices charged them with Insubordination for the statements they made five and one-half weeks earlier on CBS Sunday Morning.
Whiskey Pete apparently believes he can avoid the reality in which he is failing, badly, simply by firing everyone who mentions it.
Which brings us, finally, to the guy that DOD has decided to discipline because he tried to commit suicide more than eight months into a shitty deployment in an illegal war.
He’s 19.
A 19-year old sailor with a 19-year old wife at home who had a baby — their second — while he was away.
I’ve lived in San Diego, which is a big city where many things revolve around the military. I had a family friend who got knocked up young, married the father, and moved with him to San Diego. It’s a hard life. The pay sucks and you’re left as a single parent for what — back then — was a month or two at a time.
And this guy, still a teenager, was 255 days into a deployment in an illegal war where his ship was being poorly supplied because Iran blew up the base that would normally supply it.
And he jumped overboard.
So DOD, which is led by a guy who takes his wife everywhere because he can’t cope without her, has accused this 19-year old sailor of faking an illness because the Navy can’t accept that anyone who hasn’t touched land for eight and a half months would be nuts, especially a 19-year old who had never seen his newborn daughter.
The charging documents, which were reviewed by MS NOW, show that the sailor has been accused of violating Article 83 for “malingering,” which is defined as a service member “intentionally faking an illness or hurting themselves to avoid work, duty or service,” and Article 86 for “absence without leave,” which means a service member failed to be at their required place of duty without proper authority.
“I think they’re insane for doing this to people who need mental help,” the wife told MS NOW. “Instead of giving them help, this is just another huge stressor.”
The couple, who are both 19, share a 3½-year-old son and welcomed a daughter in February while the sailor was deployed. His wife said he has repeatedly requested paternity leave and been denied each time.
Her husband jumped overboard on Aug. 3, she said, and was medically evacuated and returned to San Diego on Aug. 13, where he then spent five days at Naval Medical Center San Diego, known as Balboa. During that stay, she said medical staff monitored his vital signs, but he did not see a psychiatrist or a therapist. He was told to report back to work immediately after his release. His first therapy appointment came on Aug. 26, nearly two weeks after he arrived back in San Diego.
Fake news. Fake illness.
Every scrap of reality that demonstrates what a loser Whiskey Pete Hegseth is — it must be fake. It must be disciplined or fired or censored.
And we’re left with Kid Rock and teenagers jumping overboard.
The post Overboard! Whiskey Pete Hegseth Tries to Fire His Way Out of Being a Loser appeared first on emptywheel.