Why Trump’s Hegseth Problem Exposes His Fatal Flaw: Author

Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon train wreck exposes one of Donald Trump’s most self-destructive impulses, the president’s biographer says.

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Hegseth, the 46-year-old Fox News host-turned-defense secretary, has transformed the Pentagon into a pressure cooker of leak crackdowns and culture war crusades while steering the nation deeper into Trump’s quagmire war with Iran.

“I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis fumed on X. “He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force.”

Speaking on the Inside Trump’s Headpodcast, Trump biographer Michael Wolff said, “This is not a secret.”

“Pete Hegseth is a… blithering incompetent… yes-man, a suck-up, a man who… knows nothing, and no logic would say he would know enough to run the military-industrial complex,” the author told co-host Joanna Coles.

“His primary qualification is that he was… a weekend television co-host,” he continued. “So what in the name of God would he know about running… the United States military… at a moment… in which we are in the middle of a, basically, a revolution in terms of munitions, logistics, and supply.”

Wolff, who has written four best-selling tell-alls on Trump, noted that Tillis’ characterization of Hegseth as being “intimidated by competence” ought to be “extended” to the 80-year-old president himself.

“Pete Hegseth is in this job because Donald Trump is intimidated by competence,” he said.

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“It’s not just that he doesn’t want to be bossed around by people; it’s that he can’t deal with people who know things because—for the obvious reason—because he doesn’t know things.”

Wolff pointed to Trump’s notoriously high turnover during his first term, when the president repeatedly butted heads with his own officials, including James Mattis, who resigned in 2019 after frequently clashing with Trump and amid public attacks from the president.

“Trump came to loathe him… because Mattis… had a high degree of expertise and the willingness to correct Donald Trump. No, that’s wrong, he would say,” Wolff recounted.

He argued that the insecurity that drives Trump to bristle at expertise has found a mirror in Hegseth, who was reportedly threatened by Driscoll’s presence in the Pentagon and paranoid about his own status within the administration.

The Army secretary’s departure comes soon after The Washington Post reported that several top generals have expressed concerns about continuing military action in Iran and issued “non-concurs” to Hegseth’s orders.

“This is a problem in almost any… executive capacity unless you have a temperament in which you can listen to advice, in which you appreciate advice, in which you get along with people who report to you, which neither of these guys do,” Wolff said of the commander-in-chief and his defense secretary.

When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told the Daily Beast, “After Joe Biden’s Pentagon prioritized DEI and woke ideology, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth quickly reversed course and restored a Department of War that is focused on readiness, lethality, and supporting our warfighters. The President has complete trust in Secretary Hegseth, who is doing an incredible job leading the Pentagon. The results of Operations Midnight Hammer, Absolute Resolve, Southern Spear, and Epic Fury speak for themselves.”

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.