In an administration full of colorful characters, War Secretary Pete Hegseth has a penchant for stealing headlines.
But this week his talent for drawing ink was a function not just of his unorthodox approach to the job, but of a condemnable attempt at undermining the authority of President Donald Trump’s duly elected government.
And the legacy media’s breathless coverage of Hegseth’s every move bears no resemblance to the muted — and far less numerous — reports on Barack Obama’s embrace of drone attacks that killed non-combatants and even American citizens.
Not to mention Joe Biden’s murder of 10 civilians in Kabul during a failed attempt to avenge the Abbey Gate bombing.
On Friday, scrutiny of lethal military strikes on alleged drug runners in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean reached fever pitch when The Washington Post claimed Hegseth had executed a “double tap” — a second strike on survivors clinging to wreckage — during one operation in September.
Per the WaPo: “Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody,’ one of them said.”
The New York Times, though, later clarified that Hegseth had not ordered his commanders to conduct the second strike, or made any written or “oral directive” at all regarding what ought to be done about potential survivors.
In any case, one need not endorse the “double tap,” or even the strikes more generally, to balk at the Washington Post’s convenient, cartoonishly evil portrayal of the Pentagon chief.
Or to see it as part and parcel of a dangerous, long-running effort at delegitimizing Trump’s authority over the executive branch — and especially the military.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) accused Hegseth of acting like “a 12-year-old playing army” after the initial report’s publication.
But Kelly has already proven himself to be a grossly irresponsible actor.
The Navy veteran and former astronaut was among the six Democratic lawmakers to release a preemptive video urging members of the military and intelligence community to “refuse illegal orders” from Trump.
“This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens,” insisted Kelly and his colleagues. “Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.”
Yet those responsible for the video have sputtered on being asked what illegal orders, precisely, the administration has issued to soldiers.
“To my knowledge, I am not aware of things that are illegal,” admitted Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) in an embarrassing ABC interview.
Ah.
So the Democrats who claimed that soldiers’ civilian leaders were making them complicit in criminality and the abuse of their countrymen had no evidence to support such an implication.
They just wanted to recklessly prime those soldiers to view Trump, and his orders, with suspicion.
And, as a bonus, to enflame public mistrust of the National Guard members Trump has deployed to various cities.
We saw what that wrought last week, in the horrific attack that killed Spc. Sarah Beckstrom and left another guardsman grievously wounded.
One need not be wearing a MAGA hat to see the problem with Kelly & Co.’s baseless assertion.
On CNN, Army Maj.-Gen. James Marks called their message “inappropriate,” not only because it suggested that “you can disobey your bosses,” but because it betrayed a mistrust of the military itself.
But the Democrats’ delegitimization effort stretches back much further.
Most famously, of course, there was the failed attempt at tying Trump and his 2016 election victory to the Russian government.
Then as now, Democrats, self-righteous Deep State bureaucrats and opportunistic left-wing journalists all worked hand-in-hand to suggest that the sitting president and his team had forfeited their right to power.
Recall that Ben Smith, then at Buzzfeed, published the largely fictitious Steele Dossier in all its pee-tape-smear-laden glory.
Recall that Jonathan Chait, then of New York magazine, published a story suggesting that Trump might have been working for the Russians since 1987, and that a forthcoming summit with Vladimir Putin might be “a meeting between a Russian intelligence asset and his handler.”
Smith’s reward was a New York Times columnist job, which he later left to found his own media company.
Chait’s was a call up to the big leagues at The Atlantic.
Russiagate’s chief proponent in the House, meanwhile, now goes by the title of Senator Adam Schiff.
There is a robust, even much-needed debate to be had about the wisdom of Trump’s tactics on the high seas.
But by trotting out this old playbook — sloppy stories, fueled by opaque sources, amplified by politicians with questionable motivations, working backward from the assumption that Trump’s power is illegitimate — the left is only corrupting that debate.
Isaac Schorr is a senior editor at Mediaite.
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