Pete Hegseth’s Lawyer Says His Misconduct Was Due to Stress, So Let’s Make Him Secretary of Defense?

The Cabinet of Donald Trump is shaping up to be an even more frightening version of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with all of the twists and turns of that psychological horror story populated by inmates of an asylum.

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If Trump gets the Republicans in Congress to capitulate to his commands, the U.S. government will be run by incompetents and sycophantic flunkies who have little to no experience for the jobs they are tasked to perform. They include Kash Patel at the FBI, Tulsi Gabbard heading Intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, in charge of healthcare, and a madhouse of MAGA minions who have scant relationships with the lives of average Americans.

SEE THIS: Trump’s Nominees Are Largely Fox News Alum, Mar-a-Lago Patrons, and Billionaires

Featured in this cast of circus psychos is Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense. Hegseth has zero experience managing anything on the scale of the Pentagon. But he has had a presence on Fox News where Trump found and recruited him. He also has a history of managerial failure, excessive drinking, and alleged sexual assault. Which makes him an ideal candidate for a job in the Trump administration. They have so much in common.

On Friday morning Hegseth’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, was interviewed by Pamela Brown on CNN. It was a revealing discussion during which Parlatore offered up a peculiar defense of his client in the following exchange…

Parlatore: The FBI background check is really going to strip away the false allegations and focus on just what the evidence is. And the evidence is he didn’t do any of these things that he’s been accused of.
Brown: But he’s also openly admitted he’s a changed man from several years ago. So how does that square? If you’re saying he didn’t do any of it, but he’s a changed man?
Parlatore: I’m saying he didn’t commit any of the misconduct they’re alleging. The sexual assault, totally false. All of this stuff at CVA (Concerned Veterans for America) where they said that he was climbing on the stage at a strip club. Yeah that happened, but it was somebody else. […] The fact that earlier in his life when he was a young recent combat veteran who came home and dealt with the demons by drinking too much, that’s not uncommon.

In order for Parlatore’s denials to be valid, you would have to dismiss the testimony of the woman who filed the police report against him, as well as all of Hegseth’s colleagues and coworkers who witnessed his shenanigans at the strip club, and suffered through his mismanagement of organizations like the CVA, that he brought to near bankruptcy.

The core argument that Parlatore is making is that Hegseth behaved badly because of the stress he encountered during his military deployment. He goes on to say that Hegseth overcame his problems because “that which drove him to drink is not driving him anymore.” Perhaps that’s because he’s been a weekend host on a Fox “News” program for the past eight years. So the stress of combat wasn’t affecting his behavior.

However, if his duties in the military were sufficiently stressful to result in years of drunken depravity, how might the stress produced by running the entire Pentagon – with an $850 billion budget and the responsibility of millions of soldiers and civilians, none of which he has any experience with – affect his ability to cope emotionally and to refrain from the deviancy of his past? Surely there’s no stress involved in any of that, right?

Parlatore also claimed that Hegseth’s excessive drinking wasn’t a “drinking problem.” Which is reminiscent of the Tom Waits lyric “I don’t have a drinking problem. Except when I can’t get a drink.” Although he did promise to abstain if he were to be confirmed. Which suggests that he is still drinking, but is willing to stop if he’s handed the nuclear codes. That should not fill any senator with confidence that Hegseth would be up to the job. The question is: Will Republicans vote to confirm him anyway?

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