The real problem with non-election years is that there’s nothing to bet on besides the boring old standbys of sportsbook and horseracing. But the political realities of the Golden Age of America may be about to change that.
Pete Hegseth is a survivor. The secretary of defense has managed to hang in there for 10 months, despite the turbulence: “Signalgate,” which claimed Mike Waltz’s job as national security advisor; a circular firing squad among his aids at the Pentagon, which earned him some very interesting profiles in POLITICO and New York magazine; a military parade that was just sort of a let-down for everyone involved, both those who said it would be cool and patriotic and those who said it would be terrifying and fascistic. This is impressive in a morally neutral way. Better men have already been driven to madness and unemployment by this administration’s hijinks. There’s a certain type of brute will to hold on that you can’t help but admire.
This boat business is beginning to be a stinker, though. As part of our open-ended excursion in the Caribbean that definitely isn’t aimed at regime-change in Caracas, we’ve been blowing up go-fast boats that are alleged to be involved in drug trafficking—an allegation that is credible enough at the statistical level, albeit not for the fentanyl the administration is back to telling us is coming out of Venezuela. (How many fans and supporters of the ’80s-retro administration know that this is mostly disrupting the coke supply?) The problem is that it’s all been sort of half-cocked at the pesky particular level. In October, we blew up a boat and then repatriated the survivors—not exactly the usual practice if these are the fearsome terrorists the admin is insisting they are. And now, by Washington Post reporting and (basically) the admission of the administration, it looks like in September, instead of repatriating the survivors of one of our missile strikes, we blew them up to finish the job.
Prima facie, this looks pretty bad. You’re not supposed to blow up the helpless survivors of a military engagement; that’s considered pretty naughty behavior. (Comparisons to how we deal with pirates, the old legal category of the hostis humani generis, are specious; pirates, if disarmed and captured in an engagement, still got due process, even if an extremely abbreviated form of it.) People have trotted out terms like “war crimes,” which is pretty stiff stuff if “war crimes” is a category you believe exists; others have stuck with tried-and-true, down-from-the-Mountain stuff: “murder.” The administration is acting pretty spooked; Hegseth, Admiral Frank Bradley, and other participants as yet unrevealed to the viewers at home are hopping on the blame carousel. For his part, Hegseth has alleged that he “didn’t stick around” for the second boat strike, and so can’t be held responsible for whatever he said that might have been construed as an order to attack disarmed survivors; he has also said the decision, while totally, indubitably, 100 percent correct, was nevertheless made in the “fog of war.” All right then.
Hegseth’s Pentagon has been a persistent clown show from the get-go, and now it is wandering onto the marshy ground of straightforward illegality and/or war atrocities. It is proven that the administration’s appetite for abject self-embarrassment isn’t limitless (cf. Waltz). So, in my official capacity as managing editor of The American Conservative, I am inaugurating the first-ever and probably only Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Professional Death Pool.
Rules: Only subscribers are eligible. Send me by email the date that you think it will be announced Hegseth will depart, what date you think will be Hegseth’s last day at the Department of Defense, and answers to two tie-breaker bonus questions: Will Hegseth resign or be fired? Will Hegseth get another administration job? (Finding my email on the site is the main barrier to entry. I will email a confirmation back to you after I’ve determined you’re actually a subscriber.) At time of publication, there are 1140 days left to the Trump administration; your date will be converted to a number from 1 to 1140. The score will be calculated by the following scheme: |DAYOFANNOUNCEMENT – YOURANNOUNCEDATE| + |DAYOFDEPARTURE – YOURDEPARTDATE| = SCORE. A perfect score is 0. I will personally cover a year’s subscription for the winner or winners of this professional death pool. Ties will be determined by tie-breaker questions; post-breaker ties will be honored in full. (For fun, my bet is that Slippery Pete announces February 1, 2026, and leaves March 1—that is to say, Days 57 and 85.)
It is my theory that reality can get very stupid, but perhaps not indefinitely stupid. The inaugural (and final?) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Professional Death Pool is a fun, edifying way to quantify just how stupid it can get. At least it’s something to do between now and midterms.
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