It takes a lot to get a man’s mother to declare him an “abuser of women”. Mothers, as a rule, are not known for their ungenerous assessments of their sons’ behavior. But Penelope Hegseth, the mother of the Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense, once did just that in an email to her son.
“I have no respect for a man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego,” Hegseth’s mother wrote to him. “You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains and embarrasses me to say that, but it’s the sad, sad truth.” The email – which Hegseth’s mother later disavowed – appears to have come around the time of the dissolution of Hegseth’s second marriage; during Hegseth’s first marriage, according to a new report by Vanity Fair, he confessed to no fewer than five affairs.
The April 2018 email from Hegseth’s mother came just months after an October 2017 incident in which a woman alleges that Hegseth raped her at a Republican women’s conference in the seaside town of Monterey, California. In a police report, the woman said that while she was intoxicated at the time of the incident and believed she may have been drugged, she “remembered saying no a lot” and claimed that Hegseth had blocked her from a hotel room door with his body when she had tried to leave. The woman subsequently went to the hospital; Hegseth later paid her a settlement, and she signed a non-disclosure agreement. Hegseth denies any misconduct and has not been charged with a crime.
That 2017 incident, in which heavy drinking at a work event allegedly culminated in Hegseth committing sexual assault, is in line with another slew of allegations against the defense secretary nominee published last Sunday by the New Yorker, in which whistleblowers at not one, but two of Hegseth’s former employers compiled allegations of his drinking, financial mismanagement, and disrespectful, lewd and abusive behavior towards women, going so far as to risk their own careers in order to report Hegseth to management.
During his three-year tenure as the president of the conservative group Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), Hegseth was repeatedly so intoxicated at work events that he had to be carried out, according to a report compiled by multiple former CVA employees that was sent to management in February 2015. That report also claims Hegseth took employees to a strip club in Louisiana as part of a work event and was almost thrown out of the venue by security when he tried to climb on stage with the dancers. A separate letter sent to CVA management – there seem to have been many letters about him sent to management – claims that when Hegseth was at an Ohio bar in May 2015, he drunkenly chanted: “Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!”
According to the New Yorker, Hegseth’s alleged misbehavior at the CVA was consistent with drunken impropriety that Hegseth is alleged to have engaged in as the head of another conservative non-profit, Vets for Freedom, which was dissolved after Hegseth’s leadership drove it to insolvency amid many work parties that were described by one insider as “trysts”.
Hegseth was pushed out as president of CVA in 2016, and landed his Fox News gig shortly thereafter. But his heavy drinking appears to have continued. NBC News interviewed 10 current and former employees of Fox News who reported that Hegseth smelled of alcohol at work and complained of being hungover before going on the air. One of them said they had smelled alcohol on him at work as recently as last month.
Together, the allegations paint a picture of a drunken, incompetent and sexually entitled man, prone to over-indulgence and short on self-discipline, who abuses alcohol, is habitually unprofessional, mismanages other people’s money and treats women as one might a Kleenex. He comes off as ineffectual, disrespectful, wasteful and unworthy of respect. Trump wants to put him in charge of 3 million civilian and military employees, one of the largest budgets of any government agency in human history and the nation’s security and military readiness.
Incompetence has never been a disqualifying quality in Trump’s orbit, and abuse of women, at times, has seemed like it counts, in Trump world, almost as a virtue. Trump’s is a masculinity of domination and swagger, in which women’s bodies are a theater on which men prove their own strength; respect or kindness towards others is a sign of weakness; and good governance is for nerds and losers who simply don’t have the balls for self-dealing.
By that metric, allegations that Hegseth sexually abused women, cheated former employers out of money and was habitually drunk may not even be seen as negatives. They may be interpreted, in Maga world, as signs of a man with the kind of baseless self-assurance, disregard for others and determination to dominate that the Trump administration has always prized most highly, not least of all in Trump himself.
But there are signs that some Republicans, at least, remain capable of something like embarrassment. NBC News reported on Tuesday that as many as six Republican senators are cooling on the prospect of voting to confirm Hegseth; in the narrowly divided Senate that will convene next year, he can afford to lose only three.
Perhaps the senators are put off by the allegations of Hegseth’s alcohol abuse in a way they were not by his allegations of sexual abuse. But ultimately, the senators will only withhold their votes from a Trump nominee if they feel they can politically afford to do so. Like many of Hegseth’s alleged encounters with women, the vote will come down to an exercise in domination – and that is the kind of contest that Trump has always aimed to win.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
