The War Architect Wants a Senate Seat

The architect of the Iran war is being run out of town by both parties, and his exit plan includes a lifetime appointment to the United States Senate.

"Dead man walking."

— Pentagon official, on Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, to The Intercept

The man who built the case for the war that American voters just rejected is now building his way out of it. Tuesday's landslide, the biggest congressional rout in three decades, was a referendum on the war that began February 28, when Operation "Epic Fury" launched what the Army called "the largest and first long-range precision fires campaign in the history of the United States Army." By the time the votes were counted, the Pentagon's official tally stood at at least 19 service members killed, 880 more wounded or dead, and Iranian missiles and drones having struck more than 15 American bases across the Middle East. The acting Navy secretary's assessment of the strike on the logistics hub at Manama, Bahrain: "blew the hell out of Bahrain."

And the man who pushed for that war, was given the job of running it, and called the reporting on its casualties "DISGUSTING and FAKE" when pressed about the body count is, in the words of one Pentagon official, a dead man walking.

The pressure campaign started on both sides of the aisle. CNN reported a "knives-out campaign" after the election, from Republicans alarmed by the wipeout who argue behind the scenes that Hegseth "played a chief role in convincing Trump to attack Iran with no exit strategy" and no plan for the political fallout. The incoming House speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, had promised at a campaign rally that "one of the first things we're going to do in the majority, we're going to run Pete Hegseth out of town." Asked Wednesday about the war secretary, Jeffries replied: "Is Pete Hegseth still around?" Rep. Rosa DeLauro, in line to chair Appropriations, announced: "We're going to go after Hegseth." The incoming Oversight chairman posted two words: "LAWYER UP."

Delivering the ultimatum is Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who lost the most expensive House primary in history and drafted eight articles of impeachment covering extrajudicial killings, waging war without congressional authorization, and the Venezuela operation that ended with the capture of a sovereign foreign head of state. "There is one contingency in which I won't reintroduce the articles of impeachment," Massie wrote Wednesday. "Hegseth resigns."

The numbers explain why. A Quinnipiac poll in September found Hegseth at 32 percent approval and 57 percent disapproval, the worst numbers in that polling's history for a defense secretary. Sixty-four percent of active-duty service members, veterans, and military families disapprove of him. Among the Democrats who just won everything, 63 percent said they would back impeachment.

Translation: the most unpopular defense secretary in modern memory has exactly one known loyal defender left, and NBC reports that defender has told allies he is "considering replacing" him.

The charge sheet, such as it is, reads like a catalog. In December, the Pentagon's own inspector general concluded that Hegseth "violated security protocols and endangered U.S. troops and objectives" by sharing sensitive operational details on Signal, the unclassified text thread that put war plans in a Fox News host's pocket. He then spent two years purging the people who would not pledge fealty. The casualties include the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of naval operations, the Air Force chief of staff, the Coast Guard commandant, and at least half a dozen other generals and admirals, including Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, a former Navy Reserve chief who was fired and is now a member of Congress. The tools: polygraph tests for senior officials and a leak hunt that ended with the message, "We're very much looking for leakers." One former field-grade officer, in the blunt terms of the building: "You're strangling initiative and creating a culture of yes men and yes women."

Then there is the war itself. The strike on an elementary school in Minab killed more than 150 civilians, most of them children, and Congress has never received a report on it. The double-tap strikes on "drug boats" killed survivors of the first hit who no longer had boats. The 2025 campaign against the Houthis, code-named Operation Rough Rider, left at least 153 civilians dead and nearly 250 wounded by the Pentagon's own lowball count. The department gutted the center that existed to prevent exactly that kind of killing. Hegseth openly advocated offering enemies "no quarter," a war crime, and pushed to livestream the firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter, an idea that even Trump blocked. "This obsession with performative violence is a hallmark of fascist dictatorships," said Wes Bryant, the former senior Pentagon targeting adviser who was pushed out for his concerns.

In September, addressing more than 500 junior officers, the war secretary defined the new force: "No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals. ... You are the real 1 percent." The Pentagon's own staff have their nicknames for him: "Whiskey Pete," "No Tab Pete," "Dumb McNamara."

The impeachment math is the strangest part. In 250 years, the House has impeached exactly two Cabinet secretaries: William Belknap, a secretary of war, in 1876, and Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024. Neither was ever convicted by the Senate. Massie's eight articles may well pass the lame-duck House. A senior Hill staffer put it plainly: "This reckoning is coming whether we want it or not. So why not?" But in the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune has no incentive to bring a trial, and the measure will most likely die there, as the other two did.

So the vote is a record, not a removal. The real weapon is the subpoena. Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on Armed Services, has already named his first two witnesses: Hegseth and Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg. "We haven't gotten a report back from the Minab girls' school strike," Smith said. "How come we haven't gotten clarity on the strike in Kuwait that killed six service members? How come they haven't told us what the true cost is that's been absorbed by all of our bases that have been destroyed in the Middle East?"

The House vote is a formality waiting to happen. The Senate trial is a formality that never will. The subpoenas are the part that actually hurts.

So of course the war secretary is doing what war secretaries do when the ground gives way: he made a video. A slick, five-minute, taxpayer-produced appeal, first reported by CNN and picked up by The Daily Beast, in which the war secretary flatters the boss who appointed him. "He literally took a bullet for this nation," Hegseth says of Trump. "A disgruntled, defeated congressman, along with all his Democrat allies, has also dropped sham articles of impeachment against yours truly, just like they tried against President Trump twice." The coordinated social media push from his deputies ran under the slogan "STAND. FIGHT. DEFEND THE REPUBLIC." One of those deputies sent a reporter a clip from The Wolf of Wall Street in which Leonardo DiCaprio's character declares, "They're gonna need a fuckin' wrecking ball to take me outta here!"

Meanwhile the Pentagon is already writing the personnel ending. Ron DeSantis is at the top of the replacement lists, with Mike Waltz, the disgraced former national security adviser at the center of Signalgate, now the U.N. ambassador, also in play. Joni Ernst, Mike Rogers, and Mike Pompeo get mentions depending on whom you ask. A defense official on the list set the bar: "Anything is better than Hegseth."

And then there is the seat. According to Puck, as the impeachment articles were being drafted, Hegseth was angling for the Tennessee Senate seat that Marsha Blackburn will vacate after her victory in Tuesday's governor's race. The seat opens in January. A Hegseth spokesperson denied the report.

Think about that for a moment. The man who told the troops they are "the real 1 percent" is trying to buy his way into the permanent one: a lifetime of no more questions, no more subpoenas, no more answering for the 19 funerals, the 880 wounded, the dead in Minab, the six service members in Kuwait. The man who wanted to livestream a firing squad is trying to make sure his own execution never gets televised.

The vote is coming next week. The trial will never happen. And if the seat comes with the package, the war architect gets to spend the rest of his political life doing what he has done best for two years: standing at a microphone, wrapped in the machinery of the American military, telling the country that the people who died in his war were a rounding error.

A dead man walking, it turns out, still needs somewhere to stand.