Hegseth’s Enraging Purges Shock but Don’t Surprise

The secretary of defense will only hurt troop morale with his vile behavior.

By Shalise Manza Young

For at least his entire adult life, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has done little to hide the fact that he’s a gutter racist and rank misogynist. What we’ve seen from him during his tenure as probably the single most unqualified person in his position — and perhaps any Cabinet-level position — in history shouldn’t really be a surprise.

Yet for all the damage he’s done so far, recent reporting from the New York Times and NBC News will only further diminish morale among military members.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a March 31 briefing on the war in Iran. (C-SPAN 2)

Citing numerous sources, the outlets reported that Hegseth removed or stalled over a dozen candidates to become one-star generals or admirals from consideration, all of them Black and/or women. It isn’t clear if Hegseth has the legal right to make such a decision.

(As much as it pains us, we should note that there were a few women and Black men who were not struck from the promotion list — yet.)

Are Hegseth’s actions enraging? Yes. Vile? Yes. Dripping with the insecurity of a man who knows that even on his best day he could never be as accomplished and respected as someone like Gen. Lloyd Austin, the Black man who preceded him as secretary, or as resilient as Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as chief of naval operations and thus the first woman on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who also is a cancer survivor? Also yes.

During his confirmation hearings, Hegseth prattled on about the need for “merit” in the military, rich for someone who was a preening — and according to co-workers, frequently hungover — weekend Fox News host when he was nominated to one of the 10 most consequential roles on the planet, who had already run one veterans’ group into the ground and got sacked from another, and whose tattoos favored by white nationalists so alarmed a fellow National Guard member that he flagged Hegseth as a possible “insider threat.”

Becoming a one-star in the United States military seems to be as merit-based as a promotion could be. Individuals, always with over 20 years of service, are nominated based on their record; a board is convened to discuss whether contenders are worthy of the rise in rank, any questions about discipline or behavior are investigated, the Defense secretary signs off, and then the list goes to the Senate, where all individuals on a submitted list are usually approved at once.

Hegseth is so committed to bigotry that he forced the secretary of the Army, Gen. Randy George, to retire in the middle of the Trump regime’s bloodthirsty bombing campaign in Iran, reportedly because George pushed back on his decision to eliminate people from promotion consideration. Hegseth also fired Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., a Black man who was the chief of chaplains, the first time anyone in that position has been ousted.

The Times further reported that Hegseth’s chief of staff, Ricky Buria, had a heated argument with Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll over Maj. Gen. Antoinette Gant, who had been selected to take command of the Military District of Washington; Buria reportedly said Trump would not want to stand next to a Black woman during military ceremonies. Gant was promoted after Hegseth backed off.

Hegseth barely had the resume or temperament to be a small-town councilor, and yet 50 senators plus Vice President JD Vance (whose only constitutional role other than standing by is breaking ties in the Senate) confirmed him as the leader of a massive department with a nearly $1 trillion budget whose decisions can have grave consequences for millions of people here and around the world.

Before he publicly prayed that his God give troops the power to commit “overwhelming violence” in Iran, Hegseth had already acted like a segregationist seemingly intent on taking the military back to 1948, before President Harry Truman integrated the service branches.

He ended the Army’s practice of recruiting at the Black Engineer of the Year Awards, got rid of “no-shaving chits,” the waiver that allowed men with pseudofolliculitis barbae, a dermatologic condition that causes bumps, painful irritation, and scarring from frequent shaving and overwhelmingly affects Black men, and spent millions to re-institute the names of slavery-defending Confederate traitors to military bases.

In addition to Franchetti, he has removed numerous other women from higher-level jobs and has repeatedly said he does not believe women should be allowed in combat roles.

Last year, he pressured transgender people to resign from the military and forcibly removed thousands from the service earlier this year.

After Hegseth’s firings and force-outs, the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all five service chiefs and all but one of the military’s 11 combatant commanders are white men.

Expecting logical reasoning people who behave like gutter racists, as Hegseth does, is futile, but he has also made it clear through word and action that he believes women aren’t just incapable of holding leadership roles and, perhaps more abhorrent, they don’t deserve even basic respect.

This is a man who admitted to five affairs while married to his first wife, impregnated one of his Fox producers while married to his second wife, and reached a settlement with a woman who accused him of sexual assault. He’s such a schmuck that his own mother, in an email after his second divorce in 2018, called him an “abuser of women” and a man who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” (Within days of the New York Times publishing the email in 2024, Penelope Hegseth appeared on Fox to defend her son, saying she had written to him “in haste.”)

It is almost breathtaking to consider someone so consumed with hatred that he would turn away anyone willing to put her life on the line for this country. Alas, Hegseth proves it’s possible.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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