Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may be the first member of Donald Trump's cabinet to be fired from the job, and at least one analyst thinks that was part of the plan all along.
Hegseth has had a tumultuous year as Defense Secretary. In April, he was embroiled in a scandal where he leaked a classified strike to a journalist in a Signal group chat. He also held an awkward town hall with all of America's generals, which attendees described as a "waste of time." Meanwhile, he is also busy removing the television cameras from the Department of Justice, which some say will make it harder for Hegseth to appease the president through his favorite medium.
The Daily Beast’s David Gardner and Sarah Ewall-Wice discussed the prospects of Hegseth being removed from the administration on a new episode of "The Daily Beast Podcast."
"We were told early on that Trump did not want a repeat of his first administration, where it was kind of chaos...It was a lot of unrest within the administration," Gardner said. "We were told he was going to give his leading cabinet members a year, so there wasn't this kind of constant departure thing."
"So my guess is watch out for January because I don't think he's going to last much longer than that first year," he continued.
Ewall-Wice argued that Trump's rotating cabinet seemed to be pre-planned.
"If you say your cabinet members are not going to be long-term choices from the get-go, then you put them in this competition...to basically fight it out and prove who's the most loyal to the president," she said. "That has been something that the president has valued above all else, above how they handled the job, how they handled the policy."
"Hegseth has maybe been underwater this entire time as a Defense Secretary, having little to no experience compared to other previous ones," she continued. "He's underwater in the job, but he's not underwater, in the same sense, when it comes to his fight for the president."
