Transcription
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegsath appeared before the Armed Services Committee in the House of Representatives today. And it didn't take long for the co-chair Democrat from Washington, Adam Smith, to eviscerate, totally destroy all of Donald Trump and Pete Hegsath's disturbing, dumb military ideas.
If you enjoy this video, be sure to like it to help it spread. And if you're new to Reflect Politics, subscribe so that you get my future videos delivered straight to you.
So quite disturbingly within the Department of Defense and also across the federal government, the one and only criteria that is consistent is loyalty to Trump as opposed to loyalty to the law or loyalty to the Constitution. This started with one of the more shameful events in DoD history. And that's when we pulled security details from former members of the Pentagon who faced security threats. Why were those security details pulled? They weren't pulled because anything told us that they were safe. Chairman Millie is one great example. He was on the threat list because he carried out an order from President Trump and rightfully so uh to kill Salmani in the Middle East. He's now on Iran's hit list and we pulled his security detail leaving him and his family vulnerable. Why? Because he had the audacity to say something critical of President Trump. I mean that's just embarrassing. If you told me 10 years ago on this committee that something like that would have happened, I wouldn't have believed you.
And now we have a dictate from the White House saying that all federal employees will be tested for whether or not they are supportive of President Trump. New York Times had a great headline on that saying, "Why does an air traffic controller have to be a Trump supporter?" Well, I would ask, why does an acquisition professional have to be a Trump supporter? If you're focused on loyalty, you're not focused on competency. You're not focused on ability. And it is the wrong way to go.
Even within the budget, we see the influence of the president over the influence of common sense. We've all heard about the Golden Dome. Um, when I first heard about the Golden Dome, it was interesting because it reminded me of a joke I first told about 12 years ago when we were dealing with a large number of Pentagon programs that were more ambitious than practical. Future combat systems, the expeditionary fighting vehicle, you know, basically they, well, this is what we want. And we had this joke that, well, all I want is sharks with freaking laser beams attached to them. um that became the armed services thing. I actually have a little plastic shark that my staff made for me with a laser beam attached to it. Making the perfect the enemy of the good is a problem and nobody on this committee knows what Golden Dome is. And the other thing that's really important about this contained within that is one of the most important national security threats that we face. Missile defense and counter drone. We have a lot of programs that people are working on in that direction. What happens to those programs when we take $25 billion towards a project that no one can explain and no one can understand? And again, we don't have a budget. So, we're taking it on faith. That is deeply troubling.
Equally troubling is the Air Force One airplane that we got from Qatar. There's all kinds of ethics problems with that which I'll leave aside for the moment. But that airplane is going to have to be fitted to be Air Force One. It's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Again, no transparency. We're not told what that's going to cost and where it's going to go, but because President Trump wanted it, he gets it. Hundreds of million dollars goes out the window. We don't have the capacity to sort of say, "Sorry, sir. That's not a good idea."
And the last one on this list is one that frankly I had a hard time believing when I first heard it. Apparently, the president has decided that the F-35 would be a better plane if it had two engines. And to a certain degree, it's hard to argue with. I guess two engines is better than one. Except that you can't just add a second engine to the F-35. This is a program that's taken us over 25 years and we are, knock on wood, finally to the point where we're going to have the plane. And I would have thought this would have been dismissed, but I hear defense contractors, Pentagon, they're looking at this idea. It is okay to tell the boss that he's wrong. We all have dumb ideas. It's good to have people around us who have the capability and the competency to say, "No, we're not going to do that. we're walking down the wrong direction."
In terms of the global strategy, I substantially agree um with the chairman um except that I fear that, you know, America first does mean America alone. We've seen that in a number of different issues. Certainly placing tariffs on absolutely every country in the world irrespective of our relationships. Well, sorry, except for Russia. Didn't place tariffs on Russia. that alienates people. Cutting off foreign aid programs, which I realize is not the purview of the Department of Defense, but I'll remind you of something that Secretary Gates said before this committee. You know, if you're going to cut off the State Department, you better give me more ammunition. The two things are related. We stopped programs that were feeding hungry children in Africa. Literally took food out of the mouths of hungry children. Why? Apparently because there were a couple of USID programs that supported LGBTQ programs. Now, why we didn't just cut those instead of cutting the ones that were feeding hungry children in Africa, I don't know, but that really sends the wrong message to the rest of the world.
And the last one, and once we get to the Q&A, I would be curious to hear what the secretary has to say about this. Threatening to use military force to invade Greenland and Panama. I don't believe the president has actually threatened military force against Canada just yet. he's just threatened to annex it. So Denmark, Canada, Panama, three peaceful nations that we are allies with or were anyway. The message that sends to the rest of the world is one that the US is purely in it for itself and does not care about the rest of the world. And this has implications. We're trying to stop China. We are in a global competition with China. We have built up excellent partnerships across Asia over the course of the last six or seven years in Australia and Japan and India and the Philippines. Largely that was because China exercised economic coercion. They went ballistic on Australia for daring to suggest that China could be more transparent about COVID and Australia recalculated. Now we are the ones using economic coercion on our partners and allies and pushing them away.
And this filters back over to Ukraine where I am in violent agreement with the chairman about how important Ukraine is to our national security interests. And I also agree with the secretary. We need to get peace in Ukraine. The longer that war continues, the more dangerous it is for everybody. The administration made a crucial mistake at the start by showing weakness to Vladimir Putin and fundamentally misunderstood the war. actually put out quotes that bought into the notion that Ukraine was somehow responsible for the war, even though Russia was the one who invaded. And Putin saw that signal. He saw that big green light and knew if he just waited a little while, we would abandon our allies. We would abandon our partners, and we'd abandon Ukraine. The president promised to end the war in Ukraine on day one. Now, admittedly, that was a moronic thing to say, and he wasn't ever going to do it. But well over a hundred days in, the war is going stronger than ever. Putin is attacking more aggressively than he ever has because President Trump sent him the message. We're walking away. It's all yours. We need to change that message. Ukraine can defend itself and we can get to peace, but not if we don't make it clear that we're going to keep the 53 nation alliance together and that we're actually going to defend Ukraine going forward.
The other part of this that is deeply disturbing is apparently if policy isn't going well, the solution to it is to just act like it is. In the Middle East, you hear the president, you know, peace through strength is back, everything's fine, we're all doing well. But just like in Ukraine, when the president took office, there was a ceasefire in Gaza. Now, that war is going stronger than ever. The humanitarian crisis is growing. Israel is continuing to attack in Lebanon and Syria. Yemen is still a problem. Yes, for the moment they have stopped attacking US ships, but President Biden went through that as well. Attacked Yemen from time to time. They stood down and they stood back up and now we are dangerously close to that conflict spreading to Iran. Do not misunderstand me. I do not blame President Trump for that. All right. But to stand up and say it's all solved because I'm president. And to not be engaged and figure out how to solve it, just to imagine that you can create the factual world that you want just with your words is an incredibly incredibly dangerous thing.
The last issue that I want to talk about is the issue around DEI because I am deeply disturbed about what the Pentagon is doing in this direction. And keep in mind, I say that as someone, I didn't love the excesses that the DEI programs have put in place. I live with them out in the Seattle King County area. I think there were a lot of mistakes behind that. But instead of addressing that in a sensible way, we've decided to go at it and with a right-wing cultural war, with a a sort of right-wing cultural revolution that frankly would make Chairman Mao proud. We are banning books. We are pulling images down off of the website leading to some just sort of ridiculous things. There was of course the instance when all reference to the anola gay disappeared for a few days. um now that's kind of funny because in that context gay means something different. But why do we care if the the word gay that means homosexual is printed somewhere? Why is that threatening to us? Why are we spending time on that instead of I don't know giving us a budget that that might have been more productive? And they were pulling books off the shelves which led to one really amusing outcome where someone said in in one particular you know library within the Pentagon. You could not find a copy of Jackie Robinson's biography that had been pulled but you could find two copies of mine comp. So it's interesting I guess well got to have two because if one's checked out somebody needs something to do. Why are we doing that? And now we've got the changes to the names and this changing the names of ships going back to the original names of the Confederacy for all of our military bases. A lot of different things can be said about this, but I just want to close by drawing one particular contrast and that's about Megar Evers who is actually a personal hero of mine. I read his wife's book when I was a freshman in college and it inspired me. My son's middle name is Evers. We are talking about pulling Megar's and Evers name off of a ship. witness, a man who served in the military, but also he stood up to Jim Crow, white supremacy, and racism in the South. And I know we're we're focused on the warrior ethos. If you don't think that it took a warrior ethos to do that in Mississippi in the 1950s and the 1960s, then you're just not paying attention, why are we having this conversation?
And and and Mr. Secretary, your summary of the problem where you said that basically de the problem with DEI is there just aren't enough from Brooklyn or lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne. Not only do the and lesbians not join, but those very same ads turn off the young patriotic Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks. We can go after the extremes of DEI without denigrating and insulting people and by the way leaving out the Jews apparently why we're putting that group in there because the thing is the insulting you know belittling language aside. You're right there. There aren't enough trainee in Brooklyn or lesbians in San Francisco to fill the military. There also aren't enough what's the word here? young patriotic Christian men who remind us of John Wayne to fill the military either. We are a diverse nation. We need to be inclusive and we need to not actively insult people who don't happen to fit our preconceived notion of what a member of the military should look like. So we're at a situation now where the military is denigrating Medgar Evers who died standing up for the values that I think are central to our country. One of the things I love about the military is service above self. I mean, it is such an important message that everyone who serves here says that. No one I can think of personifies that more than Medvers. Instead, we're going to go back to renaming the bases after the Confederates. Now, I know apparently you spent a lot of time finding other names that applied to people who actually did serve this country honorably. um, but President Trump just was it yesterday, two days ago now down at Fort Bragg when he blatantly politicized the United States military. Sort of, as they like to say, said the quiet part out loud that those bases are being renamed for the Confederates. So, we honor white supremacist slaveowning insurrectionists who lost, by the way, they're losers instead of Medgar Evers. Can we please just stop and get back to the business of treating everybody equally and with respect? A a you know, a fear of a left-wing cultural revolution is not solved by launching a right-wing cultural revolution. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Adam Smith there doing a fantastic job at very clearly and decisively picking apart all of Donald Trump's stupid ideas and trying to get the message through to Pete Hegsth that it's okay to say no which clearly isn't the case here with Donald Trump because of course that guy is so insecure he begs loyalty from everyone around him because actually that's how most authoritarians behave because they're in so insecure were because they know they're on the wrong side of history.
Now, I do have a bone to pick with what uh Smith said at the end here. His line, fear of a left-wing cultural revolution is not solved by launching a right-wing cultural revolution. There's no left-wing cultural revolution. It's just common decency. It's respecting minorities and uh minority opinions and diversity and diverse opinions. That is left-wing politics. Right-wing politics is just cruelty, plain and simple. And that's what we've seen time and time again. Also, stupidity. And that's what uh was really the message here. They're cruel, they're stupid, and they're isolating the United States of America.
But I want to know what your reflections are down in the comments below. Uh be sure to share your opinions and share this video so that we can bring more perspectives into the fold. Thanks for watching. My name is Brendan Plank with Reflect Politics. See you in the next video.