The Tribune

By CHARLIE HARPER

AS THE American presidency of Donald Trump falters under an avalanche of depressingly bad news, sagging poll numbers, high-profile defections and a personal unraveling that’s transforming his presidential image from merely maliciously cantankerous to startlingly unhinged, arm chair historians are beginning to dissect his tenure in office and filter out some of the more significant aspects of this unique man’s impact on the US and on the world.

You may have your own opinions about President Donald Trump – most everyone does.  And that’s kind of the point here. It’s very difficult to make the case that he has not been truly consequential. And one place to look for his impact is the American Department of Defense, which Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have tried without much success to rename the Department of War.

Hegseth, too, has become a figure of consequence, mostly in a negative way. He’s now 46 and married to his third wife. Like a whole lot of current prominent Republicans in Washington, including many senators, he has a glittering Ivy League pedigree. A high school valedictorian and star basketball player in Minnesota, he attended Princeton University in New Jersey, where he published a prominent conservative magazine and authored articles attacking critical race theory and other elements of what came to be scornfully described as “woke” mantras. He later earned a Master’s Degree at Harvard University’s prestigious Kennedy School of Government.

While in college, Hegseth also earned a commission as a US Army National Guard infantry officer and was deployed overseas. He served honorably in both Afghanistan and Iraq in various roles as an officer, and did see some combat action, earning two Bronze Stars.

Hegseth left the military with the rank of major after he was removed from a National Guard assignment for Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration. He was flagged by a fellow service member as a potential "insider threat" due to a tattoo on his bicep associated with extremist religious and nationalistic groups.

He worked in a few Republican election campaigns and was a weekend anchor for Fox News, where he caught Trump’s eye. Hegseth had trouble getting confirmed as defense secretary in early 2025, and the president reportedly considered dumping him before the Senate eventually assented. He has remained steadfastly loyal to Trump while at the Pentagon, and has never been far from the center of the target placed on the back of the current administration by many politicians and pundits.

Like the president, Hegseth has aggressively shattered long-standing traditions associated with his office. His most consistent newsworthy activity has been his unprecedented engagement in the US military’s promotion process, especially across the senior threshold into the four general officer ranks (admiral rank in the Navy). Hegseth has intervened to halt or cancel promotions for dozens of military officers.

He has also worked diligently to ferret out admirals and generals who may have played a role in implementing policies in the Biden administration with which Hegseth disagrees. He has especially targeted senior officers involved in Joe Biden’s chaotic and impulsive withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in 2021 after 20 futile years of attempted regime change under presidents of both political parties. The US military suffered 2,500 dead and 20,070 wounded during this period.

But Hegseth has also remained fixated on his purge of senior women and minority officers.  In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth spoke out against the military's drive to increase diversity among higher-ranked officers.

"Take it to the racist bank: black troops at all levels will be promoted simply based on their race," he wrote in a section cited by The Washington Post. "Some will be qualified; some will not be."

One of the most hallowed traditions of the US military is that it remains and should always be above and distinct from domestic American politics. Trump and Hegseth have worked openly and diligently to turn that tradition on its head. But as the defense secretary has persisted in also judging senior promotions on a scale of loyalty to the president, some political consequences have emerged.

One of them appeared on Tuesday, as the result of primary elections in South Carolina.

Nancy Lacore, a Democrat and former Navy admiral who was fired by Hegseth, won the Democratic nomination for the First Congressional District of South Carolina. This coastal district had been vacated by a GOP stalwart who irked Trump and unsuccessfully ran for the Republican nomination for governor this year.

The district is traditionally red, but Lacore has attracted a lot of outside funding. One Democratic spokesman said “we look forward to supporting the Democratic candidate in South Carolina’s first congressional district.”

She also has the backing of several outside groups. VoteVets, a liberal political action committee known for supporting veterans running for office, spent about $100,000 on ads supporting Lacore during the primary election. There are indications that several well-funded groups may continue to back her in the general election.

Lacore has an unusually high profile for a political newcomer. Last August, Hegseth fired her after 35 years in the Navy. She has said she was given no cause for the firing, which came at a time when Hegseth was removing military officials who had delivered intelligence assessments that angered Trump.

Days after US military strikes hit three of Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where Lacore was assigned, issued a preliminary assessment that Iran’s nuclear program was set back only by months. Trump had boasted that the raids had “obliterated” the program, and in the days that followed, the White House and other senior intelligence officials tried to depict a much more successful operation against Iran.

Hegseth publicly lashed out at media outlets who reported on the DIA assessment.

“The firing of yet another senior national security official underscores the Trump administration’s dangerous habit of treating intelligence as a loyalty test rather than a safeguard for our country,” Virginia Democratic senator Mark Warner said in August 2025.

Lacore was among dozens of officers fired during Hegseth’s ongoing elimination from senior military roles of those considered to have crossed the Trump administration, or who do not fit the secretary’s peculiar vision for the makeup of the armed services.

Earlier this month, Hegseth removed without explanation all women and several black nominees from a navy promotion list, resulting in an all-male, overwhelmingly white slate.

He has been in charge of the largest overall organization in the American government, with annual budget of around $900 billion. It has the largest workforce (over 3 million military and civilian personnel) and consumes the largest portion of the federal budget. His imposition of political loyalty tests and targeting of women and minority officers thus has an outsized impact on policy across the US government.

For generations, federal personnel policies have essentially served as templates for not only local governments, but also mid-sized and major US corporations. The effect of such discordant federal policies is hard to exaggerate.

However, there are serious commentators who believe Hegseth is correct in attempting to weed out of the senior military command ranks women and minority officers who may have been promoted out of allegiance to the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that have been championed by liberals and vilified by Republicans as ‘woke’ and outdated.

Equal Opportunity (EEO) and DEI were first systematically introduced to US federal personnel policy about a decade after passage of landmark civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s under President Lyndon Johnson. The next Democratic president was Jimmy Carter, and his administration began an aggressive campaign to make federal workforce demographics more closely resemble broader American racial and gender balances.

The result was the infusion of women and minorities. Those policies remained largely in effect for half a century. Now, a conservative Supreme Court is taking steps that bespeak a belief that EEO/DEI has run its course and should basically be disbanded.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote last year that “I support equal opportunity, but I oppose rigid, ideology-driven insistence on equal outcomes within government hiring and contracting.”

Hegseth may, indeed, herald major sociological change.