Pete Hegseth seems to have saved his nomination for defense secretary with assistance from a MAGA pressure campaign, but a Republican strategist tried to calm fears that it suggested right-wing influencers would exert outsized control over the incoming Congress.
The former Fox News host has conducted interviews on his old network to dispute allegations about excessive drinking and sexual misconduct, which seems to have impressed Donald Trump and made his nomination a rallying cause for the GOP base. Panelists on "CNN This Morning" described how outside allies have worked to keep dubious senators in line.
"What we have seen, I think, through this process of nominating the Cabinet is Donald Trump making clear to Republicans in the Senate who he wants in the Cabinet, and that he expects them to go along with his choices," said CNN senior reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere.
"And the only one of note that he's really backed off of is Matt Gaetz, and that was because Gaetz couldn't get anywhere. He is staying there with Hegseth and that that's probably enough to get there."
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for the New York Times, credited the MAGA pressure campaign for keeping Hegseth's nomination afloat through a string of damaging reports.
"It's also just an indicator of how much of a factor moving forward, as well, pressure from the president-elect and his allies, sort of MAGA world is going to be when it comes to congressional matters," Kanno-Youngs said. "You've also had ads that have been picked up and bought in a place like Joni Ernst's main district, as well, sort of pushing for this. So there's also a pressure campaign going on right now, which isn't necessarily new with some of these nominees, with some of these picks, but you are seeing once again just how much that is going to be."
Ernst (R-IA) had emerged as the leading GOP skeptic to Hegseth's nomination in the Senate, although Mar-a-Lago insiders believe she wants the Pentagon post for herself, and the president-elect's outside allies threatened to run Kari Lake against her in a Republican primary.
"In some ways, we're seeing the manifestation of, you know, Trump's victory in November," said Kate Bedingfield, former White House communication director for President Joe Biden. "People say elections have consequences this is the Trump political muscle, saying we are going to get to choose our nominee and we're going to make it almost politically unviable for you to oppose him."
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Dovere agreed, saying he expects the White House to lean hard on the slim GOP House majority and the slightly wider GOP Senate majority, but Republican strategist Brad Todd argued that this dynamic was not unusual in Washington.
"Republicans have 53 senators, and so Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who have been noted outliers on a lot of things, suddenly that math doesn't work for them, it takes it takes two more and, really, I think it takes three more," Todd said.
"I think no one wants to be alone in being that deciding vote to sink one of the nominees, and this is not a Donald Trump thing. You go back all the way to the [Bill] Clinton administration. I think there have been 70-something nominees for for Cabinet choices, and only like two of them have had opposition in their own party. Like, this is what happens, of course, the senators who support the nominees of their own party because the same voters elected them. This is normal."
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