President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to become secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, shows no signs of backing down. The author, speaker, Fox News television host, and former Army National Guard officer faces serious sexual assault allegations, as well as concerns that he lacks the basic expertise needed to run an organization as enormous as the Pentagon. He had to reverse himself on his statements opposing women in combat. And yet, as Hegseth told the press last week, “as long as Donald Trump wants me in this fight, I’m going to be standing right here in this fight.”
Senate Republicans appear to be turning in his favor. Intense pressure from MAGA supporters has moved crucial senators like Joni Ernst in a favorable direction. According to one of Trump’s allies granted anonymity in a Politico interview, Hegseth has become a “cause” for “the movement who is going apeshit for him.” Senator John Fetterman became the first Democratic Senator to announce that he would meet with the nominee.
Hegseth is just one of several controversial picks that Trump is sending to the Senate. Several other individuals will likely receive intense scrutiny, including vaccine opponent Robert Kennedy Jr., who might be secretary of health and human services, and Tulsi Gabbard, who is on deck to become the next director of national intelligence.
Should Hegseth make it to a Senate vote, he will test the Republican Party’s fealty to Trump 2.0. The good news for the president-elect is that the historical record is favorable to him. When a problematic nominee is not pressured to withdraw their name, the Senate has been reluctant to vote people down.
But there have been a handful of exceptions to the rule. One is especially relevant today: President George H.W. Bush’s first choice for secretary of defense in 1989, Texas Senator John Tower, who was defeated as a result of allegations of alcoholism, womanizing, and financial conflicts of interest.
Will Hegseth be the next John Tower?
Since the early 1990s, the nation has witnessed an intensification of political pressure and media scrutiny on nominees. Political polarization has ramped up the incentives to create problems with nominations as a way to weaken an incoming administration. With increasingly sophisticated FBI background searches on nominees, easily available information on the internet, and the 24-hour media cycle, it has become much more common to discover knotty information about nominees.
The period when nominees have become most vulnerable is between the announcement of a name and the Senate vote. This makes the news that Ernst is open to Hegseth’s nomination extremely significant.
A turning point was in 1993, when President Bill Clinton saw two nominees for attorney general—Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood—remove their names from consideration as a result of revelations about undocumented home workers and unpaid nanny taxes. President George W. Bush’s nominee for secretary of labor, Linda Chavez, ended her run in 2001 following reports that she had once paid an undocumented immigrant. Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle could not enjoy his nomination from President Barack Obama to be secretary of health and human services. Despite a deep background in health care policy, Daschle said he didn’t want to be a distraction when he came under scrutiny for having failed to pay taxes on gifts from a fundraiser.
Ten years after Clinton’s rough experience, the pressure for problematic nominees to remove themselves increased when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid jettisoned the filibuster for federal appointments other than those to the Supreme Court. The shift made it easier to vote down nominees should the majority party want to do so.
In 2017, President Trump’s nominee to be secretary of labor, Andrew Puzder, came under fire with claims of sexual harassment and spousal abuse, as well as complaints about the way he treated unions as the head of CKE Restaurants. Puzder was one of several nominations that didn’t work out. President Joe Biden became the sixth U.S. president in a row to suffer the withdrawal of a nominee when Neera Tanden removed her name from consideration to be the director of the office of management and budget, in large part due to certain tweets requesting political contributions in violation of the Hatch Act.
As of now, it appears as if partisanship will protect Hegseth and ensure that the Senate will hold hearings on his nomination. Republicans are rallying around the Trumpian flag and giving fewer indications that anyone will back away. Still, this brings us to the case of Senator Tower.
Just nine confirmation votes have ever been defeated. The first was President Andrew Jackson’s nomination of Roger Taney to be secretary of treasury, but the most relevant to Hegseth is Tower, because the case against him revolved around personal behavior.
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush nominated a fellow Texan, Senator Tower, as secretary of defense. Tower had been the first Republican to win a Senate seat when he won Lyndon Johnson’s vacated position in 1961. He came to the moment with substantial experience in government, having served in the Senate for 24 years as chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He had also headed a commission set up following the news of the Iran-Contra scandal, where he produced a report highly critical of the President Reagan’s management style. In addition, Tower had pushed for higher defense spending and for the modernization of the media.
Initially, many observers didn’t think that the nomination would cause that much interest. Tower seemed to be someone with immense experience who could be trusted to handle the responsibilities of the job.
His nomination, however, quickly fell apart. The problems for Tower started an FBI investigation into a number of issues, including conflict-of-interest questions involving his financial interests and defense contracts, allegations of womanizing, and problems with alcoholism. The FBI did not find evidence of illegal activity, but the alcohol abuse was well documented. Though he had slowed down his drinking since 1983, Tower was certainly not a teetotaler.
During the closed-door committee hearings on Jan. 31, a conservative activist named Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, pushed the debate toward a tipping point when he admitted seeing Tower over the years drunk and with women to whom he was not married. “I have encountered the senator in a condition lacking sobriety as well as with women he was not married to,” Weyrich said. “The encounters occurred frequently enough to make an impression.” Weyrich claimed that the administration had been flooded with letters disapproving the nomination, with specific allegations of Tower’s poor behavior, though the White House counsel Boyden Gray denied that this was true.
For many Democrats in the 1980s, Weyrich’s pointing out these character problems was the last straw. His erratic behavior already posed a potential national security threat should he be the cabinet official in charge of the entire military. They also had a chance to go after a Republican based on the types of moral claims that the Republican Party had made integral to their own culture wars, thereby exposing the hypocrisy they saw within the conservative movement. Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, a moderate Democrat, announced, “I can’t in good conscience vote for him. We’re not looking for people who can sober up and go to work at 8 in the morning.”
Loyal to the core, Bush did not abandon Tower. As biographer Jon Meacham wrote in Destiny and Power, Bush insisted that he was “going to stand with him and support him. … We cannot show weakness.”
Tower did not deny the drinking, though he would continue to insist that he had the problem under control. “Have I ever drunk to excess? Yes,” he explained to the New York Times in 1990. “Am I alcohol-dependent? No. Have I always been a good boy? Of course not. But I’ve never done anything disqualifying. That’s the point.” His wife since 1986, Texas socialite Dorothy Heyser, stood by his side throughout.
The chairman of Armed Services, Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, changed his position as the hearings unfolded. After delaying the vote several times as new information emerged, Nunn, a Democratic centrist and hawk on foreign affairs, decided that he could no longer support the selection. The breaking point took place in late February, when his committee received information that the defense industry had donated to Tower’s campaign and that he had earned more than a million dollars during that time to work with defense contracting companies.
On March 9, the Senate voted against Tower, 53 to 47, largely on party lines. Standing before reporters in a pin-striped suit inside the Pentagon, Tower held back tears as he read a statement insisting that he had never violated any “legal and ethical standards” and that he had never been “derelict in my duty.” Bush said that his friend had been forced to suffer a “cruel ordeal,” but he respected the Senate’s decision.
President Bush proceeded to nominate Wyoming Republican Richard Cheney, who had authored the minority report on the Iran-Contra investigation, to be secretary of defense instead. Cheney’s nomination sailed through.
The apparent calm that followed the decision masked, according to the New York Times, “one of the fiercest and most unpleasant confrontations in recent history. …” Many Republicans felt that this was the second underhanded attack by Democrats during the confirmation process, the first having been the rejection of Ronald Reagan’s nomination of conservative jurist Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. Wyoming Republican Alan Simpson attacked the FBI report as the “most extraordinary adventure in voyeurism, innuendo, crudeness and savagery, very unbecoming, and very disgusting.” In Tower’s estimation, “They’re pretty straightforward what they do in Beirut. They hurl a grenade at someone or shoot a machine gun. Up here, it’s a little more subtle, but just as ruthless, just as brutal. They kill you in a different way.”
To be sure, the intense partisanship that protects Trump and his nominees can quickly turn against them. This happened with former Congressman Matt Gaetz, who proved too toxic within the Republican Party after sexual allegations were lodged against him in his run for attorney general. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who still holds sway with his party and has not been happy about the isolationism growing in the GOP, has reportedly indicated serious concerns with the nominee.
Yet other factors mitigate against a repeat of the Tower affair, even if the revelations around Hegseth or the other nominees worsen. Besides the historic inclination of senators to vote in favor of nominees, intense party discipline within the Republican Party has the capacity to maintain a firewall around the nominees, regardless of what the news media reports.
Moreover, the nation’s tolerance for scandal has changed since 1989. The popularity of President Bill Clinton only increased after impeachments in 1998 and 1999. During the 2016 election and Trump’s first term, the dam seemed break as endless revelations about the president—including the notorious Access Hollywood tape—seemed to have had little detrimental effect on how supporters thought about the viability of politicians. We have shifted from nanny taxes to sexual assault, yet nominees might be safer in 2025 than they were in the 1990s. As long as shame and fear don’t force people to step down in the middle of a frenzy, they often come out on the other side without much political harm done.
Finally, Trump won’t buckle easily since he revels in controversy. Previous presidents, including George H.W. Bush, were desperate to avoid confirmation problems and worked hard to prevent picking individuals who presented them. Trump tends to deploy the chaos to his advantage.
If Hegseth makes it to a vote, he will provide a further window into how much American’s definition of what a disqualifying scandal has transmuted since the days when booze and womanizing, along with some financial conflicts of interest, were enough to bring down Senator Tower.On the other hand, Hegseth gives the Senate Republicans another opportunity to demonstrate that there still exists some will within at least part of the GOP to take on the Trumpian vision that most of their colleagues have embraced.
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