Congressman Don Bacon (R-NE) still remains the only GOP lawmaker who called for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to be ousted from his position — and it could be costing him support, according to a Washington Post report.
“He went off the deep end,” Tom Widhalm, an Air Force veteran, told the outlet. “He doesn’t back the military like he should.”
And colleagues in his party have warned him to "be careful," the Post reported.
Bacon, a retired Air Force general, has split his constituents with his stance — though he stands firmly outside of his party's line on Hegseth.
His former deputy chief of staff, Felix Ungerman, said current and former military personnel are “kind of split down the middle" on the Defense Secretary.
“You’ve got people who really don’t like this administration and what they’re doing,” Ungerman told the Post. “But then you’ve also got another view that ‘this is a long time coming’” — that the disruption ordered by Trump and executed by Hegseth “has been needed for some time.”
Bacon is an Air Force veteran who has previously said his lack of support for Hegseth “had nothing to do with anything political … It’s just what’s right.”
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His calls to remove Hegseth began after the secretary used an unclassified messaging app to share “highly sensitive details of a planned U.S. assault on Yemeni militants.” The chat included a journalist and later became known as “Signalgate.”
“I could have forgiven it if he had said, ‘I was wrong and I won’t do it again,’” Bacon said. “People make mistakes.” But instead, Hegseth “tried to deny it was a problem,” and he sought to shift the blame to the journalist, he said.
Bacon has said Hegseth's behavior “does not garner credibility in the armed forces.” He later added that if he had done the same thing “as a lieutenant, captain, major, lieutenant colonel, colonel, you name it, I would have been fired.”
A spokesman for Hegseth did not respond to the Washington Post's request for comment.