Word around the social-media campfire is Pete Hegseth is finished. The Times reported that the US secretary of defense was involved in yet another Signal group chat, only this time he set it up himself. In Politico, a former Pentagon official said other shoes are ready to drop. “It’s hard to see [him] remaining in his role for much longer,” he said.

I don’t think it’s that hard, but first, the details. 

The Times said the second Signal chat featured “essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.” But unlike that chat, the newly revealed one included his wife, his brother and his personal attorney. Hegseth also used a private phone, not a government phone.

Hegseth was sharing government secrets and war planning over an unsecured messaging platform with a “dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circles” whose role is unclear to anyone who knows something about classified military operations. 

This was the second time. Apparently, more revelations are coming.

And that’s on top of the “total chaos” of his leadership. 

Former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot said the last month has been lousy with “dysfunction, backstabbing and continuous missteps at the highest levels of the department,” per Politico. “From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president — who deserves better from his senior leadership,” Ullyot said in a piece that ran after the Times report did.

Some have put it all together to say that it looks like Hegseth’s goose is cooked. They say the longer he sticks around, the worse things will be for Donald Trump. They say every revelation will be a reminder that a former TV personality was a terrible Pentagon pick, every iteration of grotesque irresponsibility a reminder of the president’s lawlessness. 

But I think this is wrong. 

Trump isn’t getting rid of Hegseth. 

As I said after the first Signalgate story, there are no political scandals under autocratic rulers, because there are no standards to which an autocratic ruler feels he must subordinate himself. The only thing that matters to Trump is whether Hegseth is loyal, and the greatest sign of that loyalty is his incompetence, negligence, arrogance and stupidity. Trump can trust Hegseth to screw up. And Trump can trust that he will be the only thing standing between Hegseth and the penitentiary. 

Naturally, the press corps will keep bird-dogging Signalgate. If this were a normal president who respected the constitutional role of the media, as Joe Biden did, Hegseth might be gone by now. But this is Trump we’re talking about. He has united his party against reporters so that virtually anything they say can and will be used against them. 

Yesterday, during a White House holiday event, the president said: “It’s just fake news. They just bring up stories. It sounds like disgruntled employees. He was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people and that’s what he’s doing. You don’t always have friends when you do that.”

For his part, Hegseth told NBC News: “What a big surprise that a bunch of leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out. This is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations. Not going to work with me.”

In this regard, Politico Playbook nailed it for once. “It’s very hard to see [Trump] firing Hegseth over these latest revelations, given how much he hates being seen to bend to media pressure (as he would see it) and given the latitude already offered to Hegseth for previous transgressions,” it reported today. “But it’ll be a nervous wait for the defense secretary before that all-important first Truth Social post.”

Odds are, this latest story will sink as fast as the original did, after the Trump regime lies with enough force and ruthlessness that the press drops it. Yes, the truth is in plain sight. The US has rarely seen such a massive breach of security and such dereliction of duty by the people responsible for it. But all things being equal, none of that will matter to Donald Trump. He’s getting what he wants out of Pete Hegseth.

None of this is to say the president is impervious, but it is to say that we accept his bad faith, even after all this time. I think that’s what we’re doing when we say that these clowns, idiots and buffoons are going to make life hard for him, that he’s going to get rid of them, as if he were a normal president. We still believe he believes what he says about himself: that he’s a businessman whose success has come from expecting results and holding people accountable for their failures.

That would require a respect for excellence and merit as well as contempt for foolishness and mediocrity. Merit, however, stands in the way of what Trump wants. Foolishness opens the way toward it. People who think for themselves are a liability. People who don’t are an asset. There are no standards an autocrat is obliged to respect, not when the superseding standard is whether something, or someone, pleases him.

As I’m writing, NPR is reporting that the White House “has begun the process of looking for a new secretary of defense,” according to an unnamed source, who also confirmed the Times’ reporting. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called NPR’s story “fake news.”

So I could be wrong. 

I don’t think I am, though.

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