Change is Required at the Defense Department: Mick Mulroy

Mick Mulroy, co-founder of the Lobo Institute, joins to discuss turmoil at the Defense Department. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been courting controversy, including sharing sensitive details about an impending US attack on Houthi militants on an unsecured commercial chat platform and purging some of his handpicked staff. Despite calls for Hegseth to be fired, President Donald Trump remains supportive, attributing the controversies to "disgruntled employees" and saying Hegseth is "doing a great job." He speaks with Bloomberg's Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has done most everything so far that President Donald Trump hoped he would — purging the military of its purported “woke” ideology, expanding its role in immigration enforcement and vowing an “America First” approach toward allies.

At least until now, that’s been enough to keep Trump on Hegseth’s side, even as the veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and former Fox News host keeps courting controversy.

First there was the sharing of sensitive details about an impending US attack on Houthi militants on Signal, an unsecured commercial chat platform, with other administration officials and a reporter who was inadvertently added to the group.

Then there was the discovery that Hegseth shared the details of the attack on the Houthis in Yemen with a second Signal group that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer. And there’s the purge of some of Hegseth’s handpicked staff, whom he’s now accusing of committing leaks worthy of a Justice Department investigation.

Those moves have prompted calls for Hegseth to be fired. But that chorus doesn’t include Trump. That reflects a departure from Trump’s first term, when the president fired his first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, less than a month after the inauguration and later dismissed his second and third as well. Trump also churned through two confirmed secretaries of defense and two others who served in an acting capacity.

Trump later said he felt Flynn had been treated unfairly, and eventually pardoned him after Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Now, Trump, his family and some of his most ardent supporters have held the line on Hegseth.

“The D.C. foreign policy establishment is getting desperate,” Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday in a post on X that was quoted and endorsed by Donald Trump Jr. Suggesting that unnamed Washington figures had attempted to “take out” Hegseth twice, Schmitt said it wouldn’t work.

In remarks Wednesday to students at the Army War College in Pennsylvania, Hegseth dismissed reports of upheaval at the Pentagon, saying, “It’s a lot of change very quickly. Now, as you may have noticed, the media likes to call it chaos. We call it overdue.”

Trump’s public vows of support for Hegseth remain intact, with the president attributing the controversies to “disgruntled employees” and saying his Pentagon chief is “doing a great job.”

“Let me reiterate — the president stands strongly behind Secretary Hegseth and the change that he is bringing to the Pentagon, and the results that he’s achieved thus far speak for themselves,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday.

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