“The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men.” —Samuel Adams (1775)

As Donald Trump configures his cabinet-level nominees, it is clear he has the same end-result objectives he had in 2016. However, he has significantly refined and amplified his strategy in order to achieve those objectives.

As context for Trump’s cabinet and administrative goals, allow me to repeat what he did so well in 2016. As I noted then: “The day he arrived in DC, he dropped a bomb on the Beltway status quo in Congress and its special interests. He dropped a bomb on the regulatory behemoths and their bureaucratic bottlenecks. He dropped a bomb on the trade and national security institutions and alliances that had failed miserably over the previous eight years. And he dropped a bomb on all the pundits and mainstream media outlets.”

Those bombs created a level of chaos in their target zones like never seen before. For the record, Trump is at his best when managing chaos. Unfortunately, his communications too often undermined his success, but notably, since the first assassination attempt on his life in July, the tenor and tempo of his communications have moderated.

Ben Domenech, cofounder of The Federalist and the RedState group and now Editor at Large of The Spectator World and a brilliant contributor with Fox News, offered an interesting perspective on what Trump is doing differently this time around.

Under the title, “Trump 47 is transforming what a cabinet means,” Domenech notes:

Cabinets and top officials are most often drawn from a pool of experienced politicians with lengthy résumés, earned from decades of service in varied capacities and concentration in their particular area. … The cabinet Donald Trump has assembled has a wealth of experience doing battle on a different front: through a rapidly changing media and communications environment which proved so key to Trump’s own success in 2024. … Look across the range of nominees and it’s obvious what nearly all of them have in common: they are communicators, not administrators. … A pattern is emerging in all of this: pair a figure from central casting, loyal to Trump but perhaps lacking in subject matter experience, with solid deputies expected to do the tough behind the scenes work of upending the administrative state. The latter will have the tougher task, given the fact that much as the “resistance” effort is muted this time around, it still exists and thrives within the bureaucracies opposed to the president-elect’s dramatic promises of reform and redirection.

For the record, I think Trump’s revised cabinet criterion is brilliant, and thousands of the nominees ready to fill those deputy- and lower-level administrative positions to push Trump’s agenda have already been thoroughly vetted by The Heritage Foundation’s grossly defamed Project 2025. Despite Trump’s disingenuous attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 after the Demos’ Leftmedia publicists cast it as a fascist playbook, let’s hope those folks make it through the appointment process.

The success of Trump’s second-term agenda will ultimately be measured by his ability to dismantle the administrative state by first exposing and dismantling the biggest obstacles to that agenda — all the pockets of deep state activists who are the most strident advocates for statist power.

Among the government bureaucracies most infused with such activists would be the Department of Justice, that infusion also being the most consequential threat to Rule of Law and, by extension, American Liberty. That is precisely why it was critical for Trump to choose the right person as his attorney general. Fortunately, after the unforced error of floating former Rep. Matt Gaetz, he has nominated Pam Bondi.

She received the immediate, however unintentional, endorsement of an MSNBC talkinghead: “Pam Bondi is what I said we should fear because she is competent. … She is a dangerous and effective pick.”

Despite broader objections by some Beltway media outlets that just don’t understand Trump’s bomb-dropping calculus, other than Gaetz, only one other nominee has given me cause for pause, and that is Pete Hegseth.

The Department of Defense is the largest bureaucracy on the planet, and Hegseth has the right ideas about top-down eradication of all the failed DoD “leadership” under the woefully inept commander-in-chief Joe Biden. There needs to be a reckoning, ridding DoD of all those responsible for the flood of bloodshed worldwide as a direct result of their collective ineptitude.

However, I do not think he is the most qualified bomb-dropper Trump could have chosen. As with Gaetz, Trump has some serious blind spots regarding Hegseth’s capabilities and character.

Yes, Hegseth is a smart and shrewd “disruptor,” and those who attempt to cast him as just a celebrity “Fox News personality” are badly mistaken.

Regarding the resistance to his nomination, Hegseth claims: “I’m doing this for the warfighters, not the warmongers. The Left is afraid of disrupters and change agents. They are afraid of [Donald Trump] — and me. So they smear w/ fake, anonymous sources & BS stories. They don’t want truth. Our warriors never back down, and neither will I.”

Hegseth has a lot of support from frontline warriors, and he is right about his objections to anonymously sourced claims that Demos and their Leftmedia platforms use as fodder for smear tactics. They have mastered what former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called a “wrap-up smear.”

The loudest of the wrap-up smear allegations Hegseth is rebutting concern sexual misconduct, alcohol abuse, and mismanaging a nonprofit veterans organization.

It will be difficult for him to shake the allegations regarding sexual assault because, the facts notwithstanding, the context for those allegations reveal a disgraceful side of Hegseth’s character, which his former Fox News colleague Megyn Kelly detailed.

He claims that behavior is in his past.

When those allegations broke, Trump wavered in his support for his nominee, saying Hegseth should have disclosed the controversy beforehand. This implies that Trump’s team did not sufficiently vet Hegseth, and I do not believe that.

Still, there are legitimate questions conservatives should ask about Hegseth without knee-jerk condemnations from his most vociferous supporters, like Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

Among two prominent claims his supporters cite as fitness in terms of professional ability and personal character are that he is a combat veteran who was awarded two Bronze Stars and he is a father of seven.

Regarding those Bronze Stars, last week, some leading Leftmedia outlets, most notably The Washington Post, suggested that Hegseth’s Bronze Stars are nothing more than “participation trophies.” That is a gross mischaracterization and anyone asserting that either is a leftist political hack or has never served in a combat theater.

To be clear, the Army issues two classifications of Bronze Stars, though most people don’t understand the distinction and associate the medal with “heroic action in combat.”

Bronze Stars issued with a “V” indicate the recipient is being recognized for an act of valor in combat — heroic action. In the many Profiles of Valor that I have written, I always note that distinction when referencing Bronze Star recipients with “V.” The vast majority of valor recipients are enlisted warfighters.

The second category of Bronze Stars is those issued for “meritorious service” in a combat theater. Most of these go to officers, and both of Hegseth’s Bronze Stars fall into this category.

While the distinction is important, Pete Hegseth has never embellished any claims about the Bronze Stars he received for his National Guard service in Iraq and Afghanistan, unlike the stolen valor claims of Kamala Harris’s former National Guard running mate, Tim Walz.

Fact is, Hegseth served honorably in combat, as evidenced by his Combat Infantryman Badge.

That second claim about being a “father of seven,” as if he is a model husband and father, falls far short of the reality. During the time he was married to the first of his three wives, he admitted to five affairs. He had three children with his second wife but had an affair and a child with a mistress during that marriage. After divorcing her, he married the Fox News producer with whom he had that child, and she has three young children from her first marriage. Thus, “father of seven.”

Again, Hegseth says he is now a changed man of faith.

Regarding alcohol abuse, while he has denied that he mismanaged funds due to that abuse, he has pledged to stop drinking if he is confirmed. I would recommend he stop now.

There have been other leftist objections about Hegseth, including absurd claims about his Christian tattoo “Deus Vult” — meaning “God wills it,” a Latin phrase associated with the Crusades.

Please. By the way, his Jerusalem cross tattoo is not a NAZI iron cross either, as some adolescent influencer chatterheads insist.

As National Review’s Jim Geraghty concludes, tattoos are not a reason to oppose Hegseth. But is he qualified to run what Geraghty notes is “the Department of Defense, America’s largest employer with 1.3 million active-duty service members, 750,000 civilian personnel, and more than 811,000 National Guard and Reserve service members”?

Geraghty adds, “The task of streamlining the byzantine and sclerotic bureaucracy and its obscure and disorganized finances — seven consecutive failed audits and counting! — is gargantuan, and there’s not a lot of time for on-the-job training. That task has bedeviled many more-experienced figures who preceded Hegseth.”

Aside from Hegseth’s character issues, Trump did not choose him to police DoD dating and drinking standards for enlisted men and women. He chose him to drop a bomb on the woke DoD establishment that the Biden/Harris regime has cultivated over the last four years.

However, as I noted above, Hegseth is not the most qualified bomb-dropper Trump could have chosen, despite his fitting the “communicator” criterion. Frankly, I am surprised that, like Gaetz, who had similar character flaws and qualification shortfalls, Hegseth has not withdrawn as the DoD nominee.

But if he makes it through the nomination process, I suspect that he will have a strong deputy- and lower-level administrative team to manage the DoD, gain rank-and-file support, and get some much-needed cleanup done.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

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