The Trump administration claims it is saving billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars by gutting every federal department it can, firing tens of thousands of employees and slashing essential services for Americans. Rest assured all those taxpayer savings is being spent on productive, beneficial projects for the citizenry, like a makeup studio for Secretary of Defense and former Fox News Host Pete Hegseth.
According to a Wednesday report from CBS News, Hegseth has instructed the Pentagon to refit a room near the building’s press briefing room as a makeup studio to prepare for televised appearances and press conferences. The renovation was reportedly set to cost $40,000, but was scaled back. It still cost “several thousand dollars,” according to CBS.
“Changes and upgrades to the Pentagon Briefing Room are nothing new and routinely happen during changes in an administration,” a Defense Department spokesperson told CBS. A defense official told CBS that Hegseth is doing his own makeup, and not paying for a makeup artist.
On Wednesday, Hegseth told the press that the military was done with “woke bullshit” and that he is “laser focused on our mission of warfighting.”
“No more social engineering. No more climate change worship. No more electric tanks. No more gender confusion. No more pronouns. No more excuses. No more quotas,” Hegseth said.
Because of course, how can Hegseth move the military to an elite standard of lethality without ensuring that everyone’s foundation matches their neck?
Hegseth’s so far brief tenure as Defense Secretary has been marked by a contentious confirmation process and a series of scandals involving his mishandling of sensitive DOD attack plans.
Earlier this week, Hegseth said during a TV hit on Fox News that he had shared sensitive air strike plans against Houthi rebels in Yemen in unsecured Signal group chats in part for “media coordination” purposes. The New York Times reported on Sunday that Hegseth shared the plans on a chat that included his brother and Department of Homeland Security Adviser Phil Hegseth, his personal lawyer, and his wife Jennifer Rauchet, who works for Hegseth’s former employer: Fox News. The scandal is the second instance of Hegseth sharing attack plans in a chat, the first coming when he shared the same plans with high-level members of Trump’s Cabinet — and also Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who had been inadvertently been added to the chat.
What Hegseth may lack in competence, he makes up for in television stylings that appeal to the president’s obsession with governance through public relations. As Hegseth works to shake off the weight of his own mistakes, his primary strategy is directly appealing to Trump via televised interviews. The Secretary of Defense accused the media and disgruntled former Pentagon employees of orchestrating a smear campaign against him in order to “get at President Trump,” during an interview on Fox & Friends.
Trump and the White House have insisted that Hegseth’s job is safe, but not everyone is so sure given the degree to which his recklessness, as well as the broader dysfunction that has roiled the Pentagon since he took over, has been a distraction. According to a Monday report from NPR, the White House is exploring options to replace Hegseth. The White House issued a swift denial —- but who knows if Hegseth will even last long enough to use his new primping studio.
On Tuesday night, CNN’s token conservative Scott Jennings advised Hegseth that if he wants to keep his job, he should stay out of the limelight. “If I were Secretary Hegseth, I wouldn’t do any more media interviews right now,” he said. “The best way to prove you can do the job is to do the job.”
