Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been a political problem for President Trump since his confirmation in the Senate early this year, which he survived thanks to a single, tiebreaking vote cast by Vice President JD Vance.
He survived the leaked Signal chat episode, even when it became clear he had copied classified battle plans and pasted them into an encrypted, but unclassified, messaging chain. He blamed the press, began kicking news organizations out of the Pentagon press room and insisted they sign a pledge never to seek news not approved by his public affairs office. Almost no one signed, not even his previous employer Fox News.
Now, the political price of Mr. Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon has increased. As investigations mount into the legality of strikes that have killed scores of people in the waters off Venezuela, his take-no-prisoners, leave-no-survivors approach has led even Republican supporters to demand answers. So far, few have been forthcoming.
With claims flying that Mr. Hegseth’s orders might have led to the commission of war crimes — if not by the secretary, then by senior commanders following his general orders — Mr. Trump sounded over the weekend like he was putting some distance between himself and his defense secretary.
On Sunday evening, Mr. Trump said he would not have been comfortable with orders to kill the survivors of the first strike on the fast-running boat. “Pete said he did not order the death of those two men,” the president said. He added, “I believe him, 100 percent.” Mr. Trump also said: “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike.”
But even as Mr. Trump was answering questions aboard Air Force One about whether his defense secretary had stepped over the legal lines with the Venezuela killings, the same defense secretary was on social media cracking jokes about the affair. Mr. Hegseth posted a meme on Sunday depicting Franklin, the turtle from a children’s book series, firing a weapon at a vessel laden with cargo from a helicopter.
“For your Christmas wish list,” Mr. Hegseth wrote on social media.
The joke fell flat, eliciting a storm of criticism, including from conservative social media users. “A civilized people respect life given by God and don’t treat lightly taking of life no matter how vile that life was used,” one user wrote replied to Mr. Hegseth’s post. “That meme was far from Christian. It was bloodlust.”
And while Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, and other senior U.S. officials said Mr. Hegseth did not specifically authorize a second strike, Mr. Hegseth did not make an explicit denial in his own public statements.
In an email to reporters, Mr. Hegseth resorted to his usual railing against “fake news,” which he said was “delivering more fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.”
Nowhere in his response did Mr. Hegseth actually say that he had not ordered that everyone aboard the vessel be killed. Rather, he said that “the declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people.”
“Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” he added in a social media post. To drive home his point, he wrote in another post, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”
His doubling down was notable, because in the three months since the lethal targeting of the fast boats began, most legal scholars have concluded that the attacks are most likely illegal: Even drug runners are civilians, and thus not appropriate targets for military forces. (Through August, even the Trump administration dealt with the boats by having the Coast Guard, backed up by the Navy, interdict the boats and arrest those aboard. If they opened fire, it was to take out the boat’s engines.)
Clearly, Mr. Hegseth is sensitive about such suggestions. When Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy pilot, and other Democratic members of Congress reminded American troops of their responsibility to ignore illegal orders — killing civilians would be a classic example — Mr. Hegseth ordered up an investigation into whether Mr. Kelly should be recalled to service and made to stand for a court martial.
Mr. Kelly reiterated his statements on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, warning service members who received illegal orders that “not only do they not have to follow them, they are legally required not to follow” such orders.
“I said something very simple and noncontroversial,” he added, “and Donald Trump said I should be hanged, executed, prosecuted. Pete Hegseth said that I should be court-martialed.”
“How ridiculous is this?” he continued. “We say, ‘Follow the law,’ and this is their response.” He added later, “Pete Hegseth is not a serious person.”
The president has, in fact, referred to those who have called for the service members to follow the law as traitors. And he has maintained that his defense secretary still has his support.
But that support has fluctuated before. Back when Mr. Hegseth was having trouble shoring up enough Republican votes in Congress, Mr. Trump told people close to him that he was considering offering the job to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, The New York Times reported. In the end, Mr. Trump threw his support behind Mr. Hegseth and he was confirmed by one vote in the Senate, with three G.O.P. senators joining the 47 members of the Democratic caucus who voted against him.
And Mr. Hegseth is getting little support from the rest of Mr. Trump’s national security team, which has winced at his constant talk of restoring “lethality” and his penchant for doing push-ups with the troops. They note, for example, that he has said comparatively little about strategies for countering China — the country the Pentagon’s own mission statements regard as the one power that can rival American military, technological and economic might — compared with the time and discussion devoted to Venezuela, which has about 125,000 troops and little ability to fight in the air or at sea.
The tenure of Mr. Hegseth has been characterized by conflict, missteps and a run of chaos that is unmatched in the recent history of the Defense Department (which he now calls the Department of War).
In February, during his first trip to Europe as defense secretary, his remarks that appeared to favor Russia in the war with Ukraine so infuriated European allies that Senator Roger Wicker, the Mississippi Republican who leads the Armed Services Committee, called his performance “a rookie mistake.”
Back in March, he invited Elon Musk to a classified briefing on the military’s secret plans for a possible war with China at the Pentagon, a move which took even the president by surprise. Mr. Musk’s planned visit was called off after The Times published its article on the visit, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
The president denied the briefing had been planned, but also made clear that he thought Mr. Musk should not have access to such war plans.
Also in March, Mr. Hegseth disclosed the classified flight sequencing for American strikes in Yemen in the Signal chat. In April, three members of the team he brought with him into the Pentagon were accused of leaking unauthorized information and escorted from the building. His top spokesman at the time accused Mr. Hegseth of disloyalty and incompetence.
By the time the Trump administration launched American airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, Mr. Hegseth was largely out of the operational picture; Mr. Trump and the White House were dealing directly with Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, then the commander of United States Central Command, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Similarly, when Mr. Trump needed someone at the Pentagon to try to restart negotiations for a possible peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, he turned last month to Daniel Driscoll, the Army secretary, instead of his defense secretary, Mr. Hegseth. Mr. Driscoll is close to Mr. Vance, and often considered a likely candidate for defense secretary should the job open.
But Mr. Hegseth has been all-in on the Venezuela killings, regularly tending to his videos on social media of alleged drug cartel boats being blown up. In his social media post on Sunday, Franklin, the turtle, stands on the landing skids of the helicopter with a grin, with American flags drawn on his arms and an artillery vest, as he fires a rocket from a shoulder-held launcher.
Meanwhile, Senators Wicker, the Mississippi Republican, and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat, said they had “directed inquiries” to the Defense Department on the Sept. 2 Venezuela strikes.
“We will be conducting vigorous oversight,” they wrote on Friday, “to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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