Trump, Hegseth and the triumph of turpitude and incompetence

It is hard to know which is the more impressive dubious achievement of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

The moral turpitude?

Or gross incompetence?

Each can make a strong claim for priority.

On balance, though, we must give the edge to moral turpitude.

Trump and his intellectually and ethically challenged Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have managed to work themselves and the country they’re supposed to serve into a predicament.

The source of that predicament is the attacks they launched on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean. The president and his pet secretary have asserted that the boats were engaged in drug trafficking, but they have provided no evidence to support their assertions.

Worse, in one of the attacks, U.S. forces—quite possibly on Hegseth’s orders—killed two survivors who clung to debris in the water after the bombing.

Hegseth’s story about his role in this has changed about as often as a kaleidoscope changes color.

Initially, he was boastful about the killings, as if ending the lives of two people bobbing helplessly in the sea were an act of real machismo. He asserted that—in keeping with the Trump administration’s dim-bulb decision to try to rename the Defense Department the “War Department”—the days when the U.S. military would be anything less than bloodthirsty in battle were over.

Hegseth’s chest-thumping decelerated quite a bit, though, when concerned Democrats and Republicans pointed out that killing people who can no longer pose a threat, even in a combat situation, violates the rules of war and international law. Their concerns prompted bipartisan investigations into the incident in both houses of Congress.

Hegseth tried to backpedal by blaming, in turn, the “fog of war” and then a subordinate for the decision.

The problem with the secretary’s first attempted evasion is that there has been no declaration of war. If a war were to result from this, a strong—in fact, an almost irrefutable—case could be made that the United States was the aggressor in the conflict.

Even if there were a war, what the United States did on Hegseth’s watch would be a problem. Part of the reason that we Americans have abided by both rules of war and international law—which, by the way, we helped fashion—is that doing so protects our citizens around the world and serves as justification for the use of our military might in the event that our citizens are assaulted or killed.

It will be hard for this president to invoke those rules and that law if, through him and his incoherent secretary of defense, we say that we do not feel bound by those same rules and law.

This tough-guy-by-proxy posturing by Trump and Hegseth only serves to make Americans traveling around the globe less safe.

Worse, other nations may not accept the Trump administration’s contention that it can unilaterally dispense with rules and laws that have been developed and agreed upon over centuries.

Those other nations may decide that—in the most charitable interpretation—the United States committed a war crime.

A less charitable interpretation—given that we aren’t at war—is that we committed murder.

That’s why Hegseth, following his boss’s example, has tried to find a scapegoat, an underling he can blame for the transgression.

But there’s a problem there, too.

Trump and Hegseth have—loudly, stridently, angrily—been asserting that U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, and five other Democratic members of Congress who are veterans themselves are guilty of sedition by saying that U.S. military personnel don’t have to obey illegal orders.

Trump’s and Hegseth’s contention has been that members of our armed forces have to obey all orders, legal or illegal, constitutional or unconstitutional.

If so, that relieves subordinates of any legal responsibility for their actions and kicks it all upstairs. If soldiers don’t have the legal right to refuse an illegal order—and, to be clear, both the oaths they take and the Uniform Code of Military Justice say they do have that right—then the sole responsibility for any unlawful act by the military lies at the top.

Hegseth and Trump indict themselves with their own half-fast attacks on Kelly and other veterans.

So, where could this leave them?

Well, in the worst-case scenario, their defense against murder charges will be that they’re really just war criminals.

Yes, we’ve got to give moral turpitude the win.