By now we've all had time to settle in with the knowledge that, regardless of what the punditry may or may not think, American voters are truly fed up with Trumpism and its miserable effects. Whether it was gas prices, tariff-fueled inflation, an asinine and self-destructive new war, "Homeland Security" zooming around our streets like drug cartel hit squads, the resulting murders, the overt coverup of Jeffrey Epstein's rich accomplices, a new economy seemingly based entirely around predatory surveillance and compulsive gambling, the deep moral rot laid bare by administration and Republican vice-signaling, the flippant restrictions on the speech, privacy, and medical rights most Americans thought to be settled, or just wanting to be able to go a day without Donald Fking Trump making everything ostentatiously worseâthat is still unknown.
But that is the glory of Trumpism, or "MAGA" as his cultists would have it: Everyone can find something to hate about it. The whole of it is based on hate, after all, and a child's version of it at that. Even if you like the idea of concentration camps, you probably still hate soaring gas prices. Even if you think billionaires really ought to own the rest of us like cattle, having roving gunman in unmarked SUVs prowl the streets looking for supposed strays may clarify the implications of that in ways you hadn't thought of. And the bribes! A whole government of bribes! All the time! And proud of it!
The important part, though, is that Trumpism aka MAGAism has now been tried, robustly, and it has ended up a pathetic failure in every last niche it has touched. It turns out to be the blusterings of hateful incompetent influencers who can't even pick out their own shoes, much less run the departments and agencies they vowed to Make Great Again. It is a movement of con artists, addicts, and raging white supremacists.
Speaking of which: Pete Hegseth.
True to his word, outgoing (archconservative) Rep. Thomas Massie introduced eight articles of impeachment against Trump Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Mondayâthe impeachment articles that House Speaker Mike Johnson put the House on break over, before the elections, in order to avoid holding the required vote.
The articles are robust, with the most powerful being the indisputable evidence that Hegseth has been waging a campaign of extrajudicial murders in his targeting of "suspected" drug traffickers, his retributions against Sen. Mark Kelly for exercising constitutionally protected speech, and the operation to kidnap the head of state of another country.
The Iran-focused Articles I-III are likely to run up against the bipartisan congressional consensus that presidents should be able to wage war on their own say-so, regardless of what the Constitution has to say about that; Article VIII, on Yemen, is the same.
But the boat strikes Hegseth has presided over are unambiguously criminal, pure and simple, and no "secret" lawyering memo extruded from Trump's inner circle can or will change that. Even if we were to assert that every last one of the 243 known deaths was the death of a "drug trafficker," drug trafficking is not a capital crime, and no court anywhere has heard the alleged charges, much less granted summary executions.
Internationally, using the military to summarily execute civilians is either a war crime or a crime against humanity. Domestically, it is serial premeditated murder. No petty quibbling over legal what-ifs is necessary; this isn't a case presented to law students as a gotcha, with arguments over what if you stood in one state and shot at a person in another state, but the bullet passed through a third state before striking the victim.
No, Hegseth and known and unknown collaborators have been shooting missiles at human beings not convicted of any crime anywhere, openly asserting an imagined right to use military force against civilians on the high seas who an anonymous tribunal suspects might break American laws in the future. That's just murder, straight-up. Any admiral who attempted it on their own would be relieved from duty and spirited off to prison in short order; a civilian known mostly for dick-wagging speeches and doing pull-ups badly does not have special powers that the admiral does not.
Unless we are just going to say flat-out that the United States gets to commit war crimes now.
Which is the question the Hegseth impeachment vote and trial will, in short order, answer.
Note that Massie's impeachment articles don't even touch on what his Republican peers are likely the most unnerved about: Hegseth's now-exposed program to purge nonwhite, non-male, and insufficiently ideological officers with secret paper-only office assessments of their suspected "wokeness."
Other examples among the officers included: served as a diversity liaison officer early in their career, disciplined an officer in their command who refused to take the Covid vaccine, spoke at a National Hispanic American Heritage Month celebration aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, participated in a Minority Aviation Panel at the Naval Academy, spoke about the importance of taking Covid vaccines, participated in AFRICOMâs International Womenâs Day panel, made a statement about being a âchampion for inclusion,â participated in a discussion with the African American Employee Resource Group, took a photo with the command triad after their second Covid vaccination on the USS Carl Vinson, made statements encouraging sailors to get Covid vaccines, wrote an article about diversity in a publication and was quoted in an article talking about the importance of diversity.
The way that Hegsethâs office intervened may have also broken the law, said the three senior officials. Cody Harnish, military defense attorney and former Army judge advocate general, said the way that officers were pulled from the promotion list after being selected âis illegal.â
Not only is it a white supremacist project, it's also profoundly stupid, in the jittering drunken dipshit sense of the word, and has amounted to a very successful decapitation campaign targeting the U.S. military's upper ranks. No terrorist could have managed it; a purge of countless decades of top-level operational experience on a know-nothing blusterer's testosterone-premised whim.
And that is what the impeachment articles conspicuously do not cover. Hegseth is not just a criminal who has injected criminality into the operations he has administered: He's also so egregiously incompetent that he has single-handedly savaged U.S. military morale, professionalism, readiness, and capabilities.
The Iran war has been run so incompetently that the military is now running out of the weapons needed to sustain it; the Venezuela raid and Iran surprise attack both erased whatever moral authority the U.S. might have had to condemn attempted foreign military assassinations of our own civilian leaders; the U.S. has now effectively lost every military base in the Persian Gulf region, having proved itself incapable of protecting them; we are now used to top military commanders being swapped out under dubious pretenses on the eve of some new possibly criminal but definitely stupidly premised military act that we can surmise they refused to assent to.
Conservative hawks have more reason to demand the removal of Pete Hegseth, incompetent extraordinaire, than anyone else: He's wrecked neoconservatism and supposed Republican authority on military matters in less than two years, but quite possibly permanently.
The sole reason not to boot the smug boasting shit is fealty to Donald Trump, the smug boasting shit who put him there. And that is the real test Congress is now facing, and every last person in the building knows it.
Support the actual military, or support Trump? Remove the buffoonish architect of a historic U.S. military failure, or support Trump? Confirm the very basic premise of government is not allowed to murder foreign civilians secretly accused of pre-crimes, or once again kiss the behind of the man and movement now has voters even in the reddest of states revolting against the Republican Party itself?
What happens to Pete is anyone's guess. The smart money is on Hegseth resigning rather than face the humiliation of an impeachment vote or trial, but what the smart money fails to recognize is that Hegseth is stupid, not just a little stupid but professionally stupid, almost certainly the most stupid secretary of defense the nation has ever seen. Hegseth was appointed to the role to be belligerent and pigheaded, not because anyone thought he could think through what happens after he's done that.
So Hegseth assembled a (very rare) Pentagon press conference to announce he was staying put and that his detractors just didn't understand how to be warfighters, swagger swagger burp, and we can only wait and see whether he retains that level of confidence as Mike Johnson begins to count votes.
Hegseth has few allies left. Secretary of Various Things Marco Rubio may well like to see Hegseth gone, since the Iran war has gone very badly and jeopardized Rubio's own goals of somehow recolonizing Cuba. New White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller may well want to see him gone, since the White House needs a scapegoat for $9 diesel and a new Forever War and it's sure as hell not going to be Stephen Miller. There are precious few people in Washington, D.C., that do not want to see Hegseth made the scapegoat for everyone else's delusions about nation building through air power, and Hegseth's remaining fans are mostly just like-minded alcoholic nationalists who think Iran could have been won by now if we'd have just agreed to do war crimes already.
House Speaker Johnson sent the House home early rather than vote on Massie's articles before the midterms, which is indication enough that Hegseth was in real jeopardy of losing that vote. Now that the elections have come and gone and about 1/3rd of the Republican caucus has learned they'll have to clear out their desks come January, their desire for revenge against Hegseth has no doubt only intensified. Donald Trump's threats against their careers, in the meantime, have become far less intimidating.
So yes, Hegseth's impeachment by the House now seems all but certain if Trump doesn't remove him first. And even if it fails, when Democrats take control of the body in January they can simply reintroduce the impeachment charges and breeze through the same vote with no particular effort. Hegseth will be impeached.
Presuming Pete still has nobody in his life who can convince him to cut his losses, it then goes to the Senate. Conviction in the Senate requires a 2/3rds majority vote, and the conventional wisdom is that Republican senators will rally to Hegseth's defense. The thinking goes: It doesn't matter if he's wrecked the military. It doesn't matter if he's ordering commanders to do things that are quite obviously criminal and which will put them on wanted lists worldwide. Donald Trump is Republicanism's big special boy, and whatever the architect of our historic midterm bloodbath wants, he gets.
That's a horribly depressing thought, and that pundits are now simply presuming that Republicanism stands for whatever crimes Donald Trump wants to do, to hell with the consequences for the rest of us, is alarming all on its own. It may not be wrong, as an estimation, but it should speak to how hollow an institution the "Republican Party" now is.
It's now simply conventional wisdom that elected Republicans will wreck anything in the country if the incompetent but wealthy rapist, seditionist, and felon announces that he would like to wreck it; nobody in the top echelons of punditry or political strategy presumes the Republican Party has any ideology at all other than whatever Dear Leader wants.
Wreck the economy, first with unilateral but ever-fluctuating tariffs and then with a new war?
Wreck the military, first by transforming it into a tool of international crime and then by, quite literally, using up all the missiles?
Corruption on such a grandiose scale that Republican House committees couldn't conceive of it in their fevered imaginations? It's all fine now.
No, it's good, actually. As long as Donald is doing it. Or a political subsidiary of Donald. Whatever, it's all good.
So that is the environment in which the Senate would be debating on whether to remove Pete Hegseth and replace him with literally anyone else; an environment in which Republicanism is understood to be fealty to a single vicious blowhard, devoid of any ideology or even conscious thought.
Given that even the new Democratic-controlled Senate will not have 67 Democratic votes, requiring significant defections inside Republican ranks to boot Hegseth, the outcome seems obvious?
I don't know that it is, though. It probably is. But after Dear Leader wrecked the Republican Party in the midterm elections, a rout on the order of the post-Watergate rebuke and one that could very well launch the long-term reshaping of Deep South political fortunes in particular, this is one of those times when, if Republican elected officials have any remaining instinct for self-preservation whatsoever, fealty to Trump may no longer apply.
Trump is a lame duck. That much is certain; even if he had his heart set on sedition and revolution, the man is 80 years old, transparently unwell, increasingly incoherent, and motivated near-entirely by rage. There is no obvious successor, in this movement that rewards chuddism over all else; Americans elected a pro wrestler heel twice, thinking it would be funny both times, only to learn that a Trumpism stripped of all the Republicans that could not countenance violent attempted coup is a movement of nasty, brutish idiots.
Americans are, to be sure, very slow learners. But they do seem to have internalized the lesson that their votes have consequences that can come back to bite them. Many of the slowest learners have told newspaper reporters that they are now unlikely to vote at allâwhich is a damn fine thing and the best we can hope for.
What's clear to everyone, though, is that there is no "Republican Party" apart from Trump. It no longer exists. There is no platform, no planks, no morals. Republicanism is the party of putting child abusers on television to chastise their grown children. Republicanism is the party of ignoring laws for no reason better than "because we want to." There is no lower bound of corruption that they will not countenance, there is no horrible dipshit underling that will not be left to fester.
Nobody gives a damn about the deficit, and nobody gives a damn if America's place in the international order crumbles into farce, its allies retreating as fast as they are able, and nobody gives a damn if America faces new terrorist threats or if several different gargantuan industries have now grifted so much from so many that preventative healthcare is an impossible dream for many millions.
So long as Donald Trump is personally able to wave his little hands and boast of imaginary victories, the Republican Party is devoted solely to making that happen.
So what happens after he's gone? Does the party just curl up and die?
As it stands now: Yep. Anyone with morals or ideological preferences stronger than their fealty to this particular brigade of idiots has already been purged, and in primaries this year Republican voters chose the greatest idiot available to them in every race where an idiot was available, purging even Trump loyalists who were not seen as bootlicking enough
... only to have those extremists get rejected with malice when placed before election day voters.
It's not sustainable. That is a path to becoming a rump party of no particular influence, a regional party of regional hatreds that sucks in every variety of malevolence and becomes the object of wider ridicule. That would be the precursor either to a party split or a new second party, since our Constitution inadvertently baked in a winner-take-all system in which "two" is the only plausible number of major parties.
A Senate vote to remove or retain Pete Hegseth would be wildly informative, because it would be our first post-midterm test of whether remaining Republican Party stalwarts foresee any party future beyond Trumpâor if they don't.
There is no reasonable case to be made for not removing Hegseth. He is an incompetent leader, and one who continues to violate laws in the service of a witch hunt launched from inside the confines of his own head. The man's indifference to securing Persian Gulf assets before launching an incompetently premised war would have already gotten him tossed by any non-idiot president of either party.
The illegal military strikes against civilian boats, though, that's the capper. To vote against his removal despite that requires being a willing co-conspirator in every future crime, and any senators who plan international travel after their retirementsâlooking at you, Susan Collinsâwill have to know the extradition rules in every airport concourse between them and their eventual destination.
That is a hell of a thing to sign up for just for the sake of avoiding an impotent tantrum from One Particular Assholeâespecially so after the asshole has been given a resounding condemnation by voters.
What became clear, after Trump's attempted coup, is how many Republican lawmakers acted not from their own convictions but from a real and overwhelming fear of what Trump's most obsessed followers would do to them if they opposed "MAGA," the movement. The fear of death threats, of being actually assassinated for going against Dear Leader, was by that reporting quite real. It was widely understood that the MAGA fringe was unstoppable, mostly because Trump himself liked it that way and would later give pardons to prove it. MAGA was, by this thinking, not an opposable force.
Fast forward to 2026 and the incompetent wreck of every MAGA action aside from racism and bribe-taking, and then fast forward again to the midterm elections: Oh look. They were opposed.
If you, a sitting senator, cannot muster the same opposition to criminality that voters came out to hand-deliver one ballot at a time, that no longer looks like caution. Sit the fk down; you are a coward who came for the pomp and froze the moment things became difficult. Sit down. Shut up. Go away, and leave your insufferable speeches about other people's values in the dumpster out back.
There is no mass uprising of support for Pete Effing Hegseth. There is barely a person in America who even likes the man, after being exposed to him only this much. Trump cannot do a thing to Republicans who vote for his ousterâat least, nothing of enough consequence that it doesn't make you sound like a gutless, useless coward for fretting overâand "MAGA", whatever it is, is considerably more pissed about gas prices than it is about the Department of Fecklessness' grunting influencer. It's a freebie.
That means the only reason to protect Hegseth is to send the message that international murder campaigns are, in fact, how America should be operating, and that the military should continue to follow orders that make them subject to international criminal prosecution, and everything is hunky-dory and nothing needs rethinking even after the Watergate-level thumping of the party of crime.
There's ... not really any identifiable middle ground there? There might be, in other cases with other administration officials, but Pete is not the hard case. It's an international boat murders vs not vote. Nobody's going to be able to Susan Collins their way into a lawyerly third stance that condemns the military murder campaign but gives a thumbs-up to its continuance. Not even the cleverest of pundits are quite that stupid.
So the way I see it, at least, is that the Hegseth impeachment will be our first real affirmation of whether there is any Republicanism left in the Republican Party or whether it has genuinely become a soon-to-be-leaderless cult. The party has been routed at voting booths; it has been condemned, wildly, for its actions of the past two years. Dear Leader's power to pick electoral winners and losers is now well and truly over, and it seems obvious that Trump will not moderate and will assuredly be even more toxic two years from now than today.
That's especially true after the real congressional investigations begin and the rank criminality of DOGE actions, ICE actions, Jared Kushner's payments, administration vendettas, and Epstein cover-ups are exposed one by one.
What the Hegseth impeachment will tell us is whether the Republican officials that remain have any plan whatsoever for the post-Trump era. Whether they will try to claw their way back to an ideology, even an odious one, that is not only "what Dear Leader wants, we want."
That, in turn, will quickly tell us whether the 2028 elections will see a Republican Party with a credible case to make or a hollowed-out, brainless husk still attempting to vibe its way into government with hate campaigns, conspiracy theories and billion dollar bribes.
I expect the answer to be: No. No, the party is well and truly dead. It may kick for a while, as the muscles stiffen, but I don't see any way to reassemble the "MAGA" insistence that crimes are good and vengeance must be all-consuming with the version of Republicanism that exists now only in disgruntled punditry.
Either MAGA splits from Republicanism to form a (doomed) third party, or non-MAGA Republicans split from Republicans to form the first consequential new party of this modern era. I don't see how you can reassemble that corpse after Trumpism has cut it into pieces.
Whether Hegseth gets pushed out before being impeached will tell us whether the White House feels it needs a scapegoat. Whether Congress impeaches him and the Senate removes him will tell us whether the recently defenestrated Republican Party intends to reconcile with American votersâor whether they, even after that spectacular midterms crash-out, have lost interest in trying.
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