Pete Hegseth, standing next to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, in front of a room full of Pentagon correspondents, asserted what MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell called “the stupidest public lie ever told by a secretary of defense.”
Maybe.
It was certainly amongst the most absurd.
Said Hegseth:
President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history, and it was a resounding success…
For the record, here are the particulars on the military operation code named “Overlord” that Eisenhower and the joint staff planned before the computer era: during the first 24 hours, 18,000 paratroopers fell from the sky, while 7,000 ships delivered 160,000 men to the beaches under the cover of thousands of aircraft.
What happened next was even more absurd and shocking.
Jennifer Griffin, one of the few ethical correspondents at Fox News, asked a simple and direct question. Pete Hegseth melted down on live television:
He lost his composure, bearing and touch with reality in a revelatory moment that demonstrated forevermore that he is precisely the clown that has been so thoroughly depicted and exposed over the last 153 days.
A more adroit press corps would have managed to ask an obvious follow-up question to Chairman Caine—after the biggest meltdown on camera by a military official since Humphrey Bogart testified as Captain Queeg:
Here’s the question:
General, at a personal level, were you just embarrassed by Secretary Hegseth, or do you agree that the job of this press corps is to wave the flag for an attack that was bigger than D-Day?
What the world witnessed was a real-life Dr. Strangelove moment that demonstrated how brittle, unstable, broken and sycophantic Pete Hegseth truly is. It was an ugly sight and an unnerving one.
Donald Trump is surrounded by a phalanx of dregs, wrapped in a layer of sycophants, sprinkled with a topping of corrupt extremists, who have risen from the bottom to the top. They are filled with rage and anger at all of the sleights that they have ever endured.
Now, it’s payback time. We are witnesses to the unsteadiness of the disordered, as they spit venom as the strategy to avoid answering for idiocy and nonsense.
It isn’t working.
The American people see clearly what is happening. We don’t like it.
The American people will not abide the growing abuses.
There will be many more meltdowns ahead over the summer of 2025.
They change nothing.
Donald Trump is failing, and chaos is growing.
The repudiation of this madness is coming.
Steve Schmidt
Steve Schmidt is a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He served as a political strategist for George W. Bush and the John McCain presidential campaign. Schmidt is a founder of The Lincoln Project, a group founded to campaign against former President Trump. It became the most financially successful Super-PAC in American history, raising almost $100 million to campaign against Trump's failed 2020 re-election bid. He left the group in 2021.
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