Cracks are beginning to show in the relationship between Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
The pair cannot find common ground following the recent spike in Immigrant and Customs Enforcement activity, according to a report Monday. While the president appears to be quietly walking back ICE in Minneapolis and softening his rhetoric around the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Hegseth has not.
Writing in The Atlantic, Missy Ryan suggested Trump and Hegseth were at odds with what the best course of action on ICE activity would be. She wrote, "The importance of projecting strength and toughness is a deeply held belief for Hegseth, one of the people who know him told me.
"At the same time, Hegseth takes his cues from Trump, whose support is key to him keeping his role. In recent days, the president has distanced himself from his subordinates’ hot-blooded response to Pretti’s death, and his 'border czar' has promised to wind down the federal immigration surge in Minnesota. In this case, Hegseth may be out of step with what his boss now wants."
Further differences in rhetoric were highlighted by Ryan, who suggested the attitude Hegseth has to public speaking is very different to other department heads in the Trump administration.
She wrote, "Pentagon leaders have almost always publicly couched the military’s use of violence in decorous euphemisms designed to show the solemnity of lethality. Insurgents are 'eliminated' or 'taken off the battlefield.' Public gloating, in an institution as storied and upright as the U.S. military, is viewed as unseemly.
"Not so for Hegseth. His tone and vocabulary regarding the use of force is gleeful, juvenile, and crude. He has posted doctored children’s-book covers that show a turtle named Franklin hanging out of a helicopter, shooting at drug boats.
"He embraced a phrase that the White House is now touting as Trump’s doctrine for the use of force: f**k around and find out. And he has celebrated lethal strikes on suspected drug traffickers in small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
"After the initial strike in September, he told reporters, 'I’d say we smoked a drug boat and there’s 11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean—and when other people try to do that, they’re gonna meet the same fate.'
"In November, hours after The Washington Post reported that commanders had killed two survivors of that strike, Hegseth posted, 'We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.' Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing by the military and has not announced any internal investigations or reviews."