Karoun Demirjian
Appearances
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
And so as that mountain of allegations grew... there started to be more senators, including some of Trump's allies, who started to express real discomfort with having to back this guy, or at least with the fact that they were having to grapple with these allegations and, you know, calling them disturbing, calling them troublesome.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
And that's a problem for Trump because even though Senate Republicans are going to take the majority in the new year, it's a very slim majority. they cannot afford to lose more than three of their own if they actually want to get these nominees confirmed. And it becomes clear that there's really one senator who has the potential to swing things one way or another.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
It's a senator whose whole brand, basically, has been built on these issues around which Hegseth is having problems with these allegations. And that senator is Joni Ernst of Iowa.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
So when Joni Ernst runs for the Senate a decade ago, a centerpiece of her campaign is the fact that she's a combat veteran. And she's one of the first generation of female combat veterans. And she's actually becomes the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate. There have been others since, but she breaks that glass ceiling.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
That becomes a big part of her resume and a reason that people look to her on defense issues. A couple of years later, she talks about how she was a victim of sexual assault. And this becomes this very, you know, raw disclosure that she writes about in her memoir that is discussed publicly.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
And she becomes a figure, again, you know, rare in the Republican Party that a woman would step forward and start to discuss this all very personally.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
In 2019, she breaks with her party to oppose the nomination of John Hyten, who's up to become vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
He's been accused by a subordinate of sexual assault. And her whole party waves him through and she says, no, I'm not going to do that.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
Two years after that, she's joining with Kirsten Gillibrand to rally support for a bill that is trying to address how sexual assault cases in the military are adjudicated. It had been in the chain of command forever, and they were trying to take it out of the chain of command so that victims wouldn't have their cases basically muzzled if it was inconvenient to their unit.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
And she really opens the floodgates for more Republicans to say, OK, I'm on board with this.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
And so she basically built this brand where people look to her and the GOP, and Democrats consider her a partner and ally for talking about these issues of women's experience in the military, for bringing to light various sexual assault issues. And then Trump picks Hegseth, who is accused of sexually assaulting and harassing women.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
And, oh, by the way, has said publicly he doesn't believe women should serve in combat roles. And Joni Ernst is a combat veteran. So there's just a lot of tension and clashing there between her resume and what she stands for and the allegations against him and the problems that are associated with his pick.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
Well, the day that Hegseth is announced as Trump's pick, I caught her in the hallway of the basement of the Capitol and asked her what she thought. And she said he's going to have his work cut out for him. At that point, we didn't even know all these allegations against him.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
But as the allegations began to mount, she became that much more resolute of, I will talk to him, but very, very clearly not saying anything nice about him. And this all leads to a whole lot of scrutiny and focus on the first in-person meeting they have.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
Peg Seth goes to her office for a sit down and comes out and he talks to reporters, but she doesn't really say anything else except for, OK, we met.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
And then she goes on Fox News the next morning, and the host kind of has to drag it out of her, but he basically, after asking her about the meeting, he says, Okay, it doesn't sound on your answer that you've gotten to a yes. If I'm wrong about that... It doesn't sound like you got to yes yet, and she says that's right. Hmm.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
Which is a pretty big confession of uneasiness. And it just kind of confirms what everybody was sensing, which is that she's not OK with this guy.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
Correct. And what Ernst is expressing is something that a lot of people in the GOP are starting to feel and worry about. And aides start to whisper that, you know, this nomination might just be dead already. Because if Joni Ernst can't get to yes, how can other people cross her? She's been such a moral leader on these issues that are of concern to Hegseth.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
And so that's trickling up to the Trump team. And there's this general sense that if they can't get Ernst on board, then Hegseth really doesn't have a path to being confirmed.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
Right. I think everyone was pretty surprised when President-elect Trump picked a Fox News host to be his next secretary of defense. And the surprise turned into discomfort for a lot of people and shock as allegations started coming out about these fairly sordid details from his past. First, it was an accusation that he had committed sexual assault.
The Daily
Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue.
And then after that, it became this article for The New Yorker, which alleged that he was... Drinking on the job and harassing female employees and was mismanaging the veterans nonprofits that he was running. In the middle of all that, there was this email that cropped up that his mother had written him in 2018, calling him an abuser of women and telling him what a reprehensible person he was.