Pete Hegseth Wants to Bring Back “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

Pete Hegseth has repeatedly criticized the U.S. military’s decision to repeal its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy because he thinks it is part of a broader leftist, Marxist agenda.

CNN published an extensive report Thursday detailing statements made by Hegseth, the television host facing allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, in which he grieves the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a Clinton-era policy that allowed gay and lesbian service members to join the military as long as they never told anyone about their sexual orientation. The rule was repealed under the Obama administration.

When asked Thursday whether he opposed the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Hegseth said, “Oppose the repeal? No, I don’t.” He called CNN’s report “more false reporting.”

As it turns out, Hegseth has been talking about this for years. During a 2015 appearance on Fox News, Hegseth lamented the decision to allow women and people openly identifying as LGBTQ+ to serve in the military.

“What you’re seeing is a military right now that is more interested in social engineering led by this president than they are in war fighting. So, as a result, through ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and women in the military and these standards, they’re going to inevitably start to erode standards,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth argued that this kind of change was made simply so military higher-ups “can put them on a recruiting poster and feel good about themselves, and has nothing to do with national security.”

Hegseth did not go so far as to explain exactly what standards these soldiers failed to meet, or how they were specifically detrimental to military operations. This vague criticism seems to be a pattern for Hegseth, who made similar comments disparaging female soldiers, specifically saying they were unfit for combat, but didn’t deign to explain why, simply citing “historical” precedent.

Even in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth provided no real evidence for the dire consequences of these supposedly eroding standards.

He wrote that while he was initially ambivalent about the rule change, he eventually decided that it was the beginning of the end for a military that was being driven to care about social issues more than fighting because, for some reason he never bothers to describe, no organization could do both.

He changed his view, “Not because I have a newfound ax to grind with gay Americans, but because I naïvely believed that’s what ending ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was all about. Once again, our good faith was used against us,” he added.

Ahead of Trump’s election he continued to tout “don’t ask, don’t tell” as part of the efforts of “leftists and Marxists,” and said it was only the beginning of liberal “tinkering” with the military.

A spokesperson for the Trump transition told CNN that, “like President Trump, Pete wants to see the U.S. military focus on being the world’s strongest fighting force—not on cultural and social issues. Bottom line: If you can meet the standards, you can serve.

“But given the threats we face, our priorities shouldn’t be lowering standards and wasting taxpayer money to meet arbitrary social quotas—our priorities should be readiness and lethality.”

This statement seemingly leaves the door open for Hegseth and others at the Defense Department to make way for changes to policies that promote the involvement of women and people identifying as LGBTQ+.

Donald Trump won’t rule out supporting Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.

The president-elect sat with Time magazine for a lengthy interview after being named their 2024 “Person of the Year” on Thursday. He was asked directly by the Time staff, “Do you want to get a two-state deal done, outlined in your Peace to Prosperity deal that you put forward, or are you willing to let Israel annex the West Bank?”

“So what I want is a deal where there’s going to be peace and where the killing stops,” Trump replied vaguely.

The Time staff doubled down, reminding Trump that he had stopped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from annexing the West Bank in 2020. Again, he refused to answer directly:

“I’ll say it again, I want a long lasting peace. I’m not saying that’s a very likely scenario, but I want a long lasting peace, a peace where we don’t have an October 7 in another three years. And there are numerous ways you can do it. You can do it two state, but there are numerous ways it can be done. And I’d like to see, who can be happy? But I’d like to see everybody be happy. Everybody go about their lives, and people stop from dying. That includes on many different fronts. I mean, we have some tremendous world problems that we didn’t have when I was president. You know, when I left, we had, we had an Iran that was not very threatening. They had no money. They weren’t giving money to Hamas. They weren’t giving money to Hezbollah.”

Israeli politicians have considered annexing the West Bank for decades, and in the last year, the right-wing government has looked the other way as settler violence in the territory has ramped up. Annexation of the West Bank would essentially kill any possibility of a two-state solution, as the area is considered key to a potential Palestinian state. Complete annexation would be yet another massive human rights violation on Israel’s part that would result in even more suffering and displacement of the Palestinian people.

Trump’s election victory has already invigorated Israeli settlers eager to take over the West Bank. “There has never been an American president that has been more helpful in securing an understanding of the sovereignty of Israel. I fully expect that to continue,” Mike Huckabee, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, said in a November interview with Israel Army Radio. The rest of Trump’s potential Cabinet, including defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth, national security adviser pick Mike Waltz, and secretary of state pick Marco Rubio, are all pro-Israel hard-liners.

The West Bank has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. Despite a blatant violation of international law, the West Bank saw 33,000 new Israeli housing units in Trump’s first term, nearly three times as many as in Obama’s second term. His murky foreign policy plans and right-wing Cabinet likely mean that trend will continue.

A highly influential figure in Donald Trump’s upcoming administration has miraculously skirted public attention.

Sergio Gor, a former Fox News booker and onetime Matt Gaetz wedding officiant, will be the next director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, a position that will have him “find, vet, and hire” some 4,000 officials, according to The Washington Post.

Gor’s job will be to “diligently” comb through thousands of options, assessing their loyalty to Trump’s cause. Per Trump’s son Donald Jr., that means understanding their political positions dating back to 2015 and assessing their fealty to Trump in the wake of January 6, 2021.

“What were they doing and saying at that time?” Don Jr. told the Post.

But inside Trumpworld, Gor is his own kind of riot. The book publisher and conservative party DJ has been described by some of the people closest to the president-elect as a “fun presence,” overwhelmingly popular, and “ruthlessly efficient.”

“He gets along with everybody in Trump’s orbit,” Charlie Kirk told the Post. “Which is very unusual. Jared, Ivanka, Don, Eric, the president. He’s an incredibly agreeable figure in Trumpworld, which will make the personnel job a great fit.”

Kirk made note of Gor’s MAGA allegiance, commenting that Gor was one of the few individuals who stuck by Trump’s side during the former president’s “exile period after 2020.”

But it’s not all about affability for Gor, who has seemingly taken the meaning of social climbing to new heights. He visited Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, in prison. He performs Phantom of the Opera songs with the MAGA leader and has been dubbed the “Mayor of Mar-a-Lago” for his near-constant presence at Trump’s Florida estate.

“I imagine he’s had dinner more in the last year with my father than I have,” Don Jr. told the publication.

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner described Gor as a “very easy personality” that people in their orbit trust.

But Gor has also cultivated a reputation for ruthlessness, cruelty, and extreme callousness. Former colleagues in Congress, where he worked as a spokesman for Senator Rand Paul, have painted the status seeker as a “sweet-talking backstabber, bent on accruing power,” who, at one point, tormented a former Paul staffer about her deceased husband, the acclaimed journalist Michael Hastings, after he discovered she had a higher salary than him, reported the Post.

It’s through this patchwork of skills, both opportunistic and cruel, that Gor has made himself an invaluable asset to Trump’s MAGA empire. His well-rounded Rolodex has ushered in a new age for the administration, which Kushner noted to the Post could “barely give away ambassadorships” in 2016, but which now has “basically 20 people competing for every job.”

“The benefit of him having a strong relationship with Donald Trump,” Kushner told the Post, “is that he knows him well enough to know what he’ll care about and what he won’t care about, so he doesn’t have to go to him with every little decision.”

Donald Trump Jr. took to Instagram Wednesday evening to celebrate his father’s selection as Time magazine’s 2024 “Person of the Year” and mock Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The president-elect’s eldest son posted a video depicting his father literally kicking Zelenskiy off the Time 2022 “Person of the Year” magazine cover. The 2022 cover featured the Ukrainian president and “the spirit of Ukraine,” with editor Edward Felsenthal writing of Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion: “In a world that had come to be defined by its divisiveness, there was a coming together around this cause.”

Time announced Thursday that Donald Trump is the magazine’s 2024 “Person of the Year.” The editor in chief said the president-elect was chosen, for the second time, because he, “for better or for worse, had the most influence on the news in 2024.” As Walter Isaacson wrote in the 1998 issue, the magazine gives the title to “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse.”

In Trump Jr.’s post, the president-elect’s foot appears to boot Zelenskiy off the 2022 cover (Taylor Swift appeared on last year’s) before Trump takes his place, doing his signature dance move to the song “Hold On I’m Coming” by soul duo Sam and Dave.

President-elect Trump recently told the New York Post that he is “formulating a concept of how to end” the war in Ukraine. On the 2024 campaign trail, he threatened to cut funding to Ukraine, calling Zelenskiy “the greatest salesman of all time” for his efforts to secure U.S. support.

Trump also vowed to end the conflict within 24 hours, even prior to his inauguration. According to his Time interview, he “acknowledged this is trickier than he let on” and, when asked if he would abandon Ukraine, said “he would use U.S. support for Ukraine as leverage against Russia in negotiating an end to the war.”

“I want to reach an agreement,” he told Time finally, after being pressed three times on the matter, “and the only way you’re going to reach an agreement is not to abandon.”

This is not the first time that Trump Jr. has antagonized Zelenskiy on social media. Last month, he posted a meme to his Instagram story saying the Ukrainian leader would soon be “losing [his] allowance” once his father assumed the presidency.

Meta donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, marking CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s descent from the president-elect’s target to the backer of his party-planning committee.

Ahead of the presidential election, Trump issued direct warnings to Zuckerberg, while chastising him for Meta’s efforts to prevent the spread of his own misinformation.

“We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison—as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote in his book Save America, which was published in August.

That wasn’t even the first time that Trump had made this kind of threat against the social media mogul. The president-elect called out dear old “ZUCKERBUCKS” in a July post on Truth Social, promising to “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time.”

Zuckerberg responded to Trump’s comments in July by fawning over his “badass” response to his attempted assassination, because when someone threatens you, you should immediately start sucking up to them as much as possible. Trump claimed in September that after the attempted shooting, Zuckerberg privately told him that he would “never vote for the people running against” Trump. Publicly, Zuckerberg issued neither an endorsement nor an explicit denial.

Now that Trump has been elected, Zuckerberg seems to be following this instinct with his wallet. And so, Meta, which Trump once called “the Enemy of the People,” (he says this so much it loses all meaning), has now poured $1 million into a fund for a spate of massive events to celebrate his victory.

Donald Trump knows that he won the presidency because grocery prices are high. What he doesn’t know is how to actually get those prices to come down.

In a lengthy interview with Time magazine published Thursday, Trump had changed up his tune when asked if his presidency would be a failure if he couldn’t deliver his promise to lower the price of groceries.

“I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will,” Trump said.

“I think that energy is going to bring them down. I think a better supply chain is going to bring them down. You know, the supply chain is still broken. It’s broken. You see it. You go out to the docks and you see all these containers,” Trump said. He proceeded to describe a port in California that held over a dozen full shipping containers as evidence for a “broken” supply chain.

It seems Trump is already trying to manage expectations after making more than a few lofty promises about bringing grocery prices down, a goal that is not reflected in his disastrous proposed economic policies. Trump’s plan to implement 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico will likely increase the price of everyday consumer products, like groceries. In 2022, Mexico accounted for a whopping 69 percent of U.S. vegetable imports and 51 percent of fresh fruit imports.

On Meet the Press Sunday, Trump claimed that he’d won the election on solely the issue of groceries. “Very simple word, groceries. Like almost—you know, who uses the word? I started using the word—the groceries. When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time, and I won an election based on that.”

Mitch McConnell is still throwing jabs at Donald Trump.

“We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War II,” the longtime Republican Senate leader told the Financial Times. “Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.”

McConnell went on to throw stones at Trump’s isolationist tendencies, comparing them to the “raging” President Howard Taft’s. He also said he believes that the “America First” wing of the Republican Party will do irreversible damage to the U.S. standing on the global stage.

“To most American voters, I think the simple answer is, ‘Let’s stay out of it.’ That was the argument made in the ’30s and that just won’t work,” McConnell said. “Thanks to Reagan, we know what does work—not just saying peace through strength, but demonstrating it.”

The longest-serving Senate leader also pushed back against Trump’s “enemy within” rhetoric, noting that Russia and China are bigger threats than citizens on American soil.

This is another installment in a long-standing feud between McConnell and Trump, as the latter upended the norms and ideals of his party in just a few years. According to a recent biography of him, McConnell privately called Trump “stupid” and a “despicable human being” after the 2020 election. He also stated that Trump was “practically and morally” to blame for the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

That being said, McConnell has fallen in line every time it matters, including when he opposed Trump’s impeachment. He voted for Trump and, in the same FT interview, called his victory a “remarkable comeback.”

President Joe Biden on Thursday commuted 1,500 sentences and granted 39 pardons, the largest single-day clemency act in history.

“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” a White House statement from Biden read. “That is why, today, I am pardoning 39 people who have shown successful rehabilitation and have shown commitment to making their communities stronger and safer. I am also commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people who are serving long prison sentences—many of whom would receive lower sentences if charged under today’s laws, policies, and practices. These commutation recipients, who were placed on home confinement during the COVID pandemic, have successfully reintegrated into their families and communities and have shown that they deserve a second chance.”

Biden pardoned people who were in prison for nonviolent crimes like marijuana possession or violating the military’s antiquated laws banning gay sex. A commutation allows the verdict to remain while lessening punishment, while a pardon completely nullifies a conviction.

This comes just days after Biden’s controversial pardon of his son Hunter Biden for federal tax and gun convictions. The president pardoned his embattled son after saying again and again that he would never do such a thing. While criticized for hypocrisy and dishonesty, many also pointed out that there were many potentially more deserving people who could use a pardon.

Thursday’s pardons have already been met with calls for more pardons, including for people like Native American activist Leonard Peltier, environmental lawyer Steven Dozinger, and the 40 people still on federal death row. Biden noted that he will continue to consider clemency petitions as the week goes on.

The U.S. Justice Department sent a message Wednesday to those hoping for a pardon over their participation in the deadly riot on January 6, 2021: They will have to admit their guilt to receive one.

Prosecutors filed a motion responding to a request from the attorney for one rioter, Dova Winegeart, which would have delayed her judgment and report date in the hopes of receiving a presidential pardon when Donald Trump is sworn in next month. The 51-year-old woman was sentenced Monday to four months in prison for violently swinging a pole outside the U.S. Capitol as it was being ransacked by MAGA fanatics nearly four years ago.  

Prosecutors opposed Winegeart’s motion and issued their own warning to any rioters hoping Trump might save them from jail time, according to Politico. 

“The defendant hopes to avoid that harm by receiving a presidential pardon from a future executive. But the defendant’s personal motivation to avoid public disclosure of her judgment of conviction is no reason to delay entry of judgment and deviate from the regular order of criminal procedure,” the motion stated. 

“And, even if the defendant were to receive a pardon at some unspecified date in the future—which is purely speculative at this juncture—that pardon would not unring the bell of conviction,” the prosecutors wrote. “In fact, quite the opposite. The defendant would first have to accept the pardon, which necessitates a confession of guilt.”

Prosecutors wrote that a pardon would not undo the fact of the crime, only prevent punishment for that crime. If anything, a pardon would be to admit to the crime. 

Trump has long promised to pardon the nearly 1,600 people facing charges over their involvement in the riot. Many have attempted to have their judgments delayed until after Trump takes office. 

Prosecutors took sharp issue with the suggestion that they obey in advance of Trump’s orders. 

“The criminal justice system cannot operate on such uncertainty. Indeed, it is neither the court’s role or function to speculate about any president’s pardon decisions, nor is it appropriate for the Court to halt the normal functioning of criminal procedure based solely on that speculation,” the prosecutors wrote. 

“If a future Executive cannot, today, grant a pardon, this Court cannot expand the temporal grace that Executive may or may not extend in the future to … affect the present,” they added.

The Trump Organization on Wednesday announced a new project in Saudi Arabia: Trump Tower Jeddah.

Eric Trump announced the move in a post on X, writing, “Incredibly proud to officially launch a project that has been underway for many months, Trump Tower - Jeddah!” He thanked the project’s partner, Dar Global, a real estate developer headquartered in Dubai but under the umbrella of Dar Al Arkan, the largest developer in Saudi Arabia.

Trump added that the tower will be the company’s fifth project with Dar Global. The two companies have spent about $532 million on this residential apartment site, which is expected to be completed in four years. The Trump Organization relies a lot on Saudi Arabia, as the company’s real estate deals in the United States have fallen off since Donald Trump’s first presidential term ended amid a backlash over the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots.

The tower is a long-stalled project for the Trumps, as they had planned to build one of their signature towers in the Middle East before Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. After that, the Trump family pledged not to sign new international deals while he was president. But now, after being elected a second time, the elder Trump doesn’t seem to care about the appearance of a conflict of interest, raising questions of corruption.

The president-elect has a long business relationship with Saudi Arabia and claimed in a deposition that he could sell his properties to buyers in the country for any amount he wants. Trump has hosted Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournaments at his clubs, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s investment fund accepted $2 billion from Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund but has yet to turn a profit itself.

Kushner and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have spoken several times in the last four years, continuing a close relationship that began when Kushner advised his father-in-law on the Middle East during Trump’s first term.

At the moment, Kushner has not accepted a formal job in Trump’s new administration, but his business interests still don’t look good for the president-elect. Coupled with the Trump Organization’s Saudi deals, it seems that Trump isn’t worried about being accused of corruption, or being beholden to a foreign state.