One of the most powerful people in the White House remained obscure to most Americans since the start of Trump’s second presidency, until Saturday night. Susie Wiles, the secretive White House chief of staff and former Trump campaign manager, gave what she called her “first and probably only” sit-down television interview to President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, on Fox News. As I wrote when Lara Trump’s weekly show was announced last month, the programming cements the network’s role as a mouthpiece for the Trump White House, and extends a clear pattern of nepotism from an administration claiming to champion merit-based hiring. The roughly 17-minute segment consisted of Wiles discussing mostly anodyne topics: her long work hours, her “easy” relationship with the president, her penchant for reading and walking, and her office decor. But at the end of the sit-down, Wiles made a curious assertion: She said she hopes her “legacy” will include strengthening the country’s education system—despite the fact that Trump recently signed an executive order seeking to abolish the Department of Education. The Trump team claims that ending the DOE is about rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools and giving power back to the states. But such a move—also attacking the authority of Congress, which established and funds the DOE—is one that experts say will harm education nationwide, particularly when it comes to under-resourced schools, poor students, and those with disabilities. “What do you hope your legacy is?” Lara Trump asked Wiles. “What do you hope people remember about your time as White House?” “That is such a hard question, because I don’t think that way,” Wiles replied. After taking a beat, she continued: “I want a world at peace. I want an America that’s strong. I want a border that’s secure. I want an education system—something we don’t talk about as much, but I’m passionate about—that will position our kids to meet the future, whatever that may be.” > Lara Trump: What do you hope your legacy will is? > > Wiles: I want an education system, something we don't talk about as much, but > I'm passionate about that we will position our kids to meet the future, > whatever that may be.. pic.twitter.com/J8rnCeQ0s1 > > — Acyn (@Acyn) March 30, 2025 As my colleague Sarah Szilagy reported, Education Secretary and former WWE Executive Linda McMahon has played a key role in Trump’s effort to close the $268 billion agency that administers federal funds to schools and enforces civil rights laws. The policy seems to be motivated in part by right-wing paranoia stoked by groups like Moms for Liberty: > Within hours of her confirmation on March 3, McMahon sent agency employees > a memo titled “Our Department’s Final Mission.” In it, she commended Trump’s > sweeping actions, including his slate of executive orders that promote school > choice programs, seek to root out so-called “gender ideology” and end “radical > indoctrination” of children through diversity, equity, and inclusion > initiatives, while also banning trans girls and women from women’s sports. After Trump signed the March 20 executive order directing McMahon to “facilitate the closure” of the agency to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law,” Robert Kim, executive director of the Education Law Center, told Szilagy, “It’s just moving the country in such a wrong direction,” adding that closing the DOE will “take us back to those generations where education was deprioritized and really only a privilege for a subset of our children.” In a statement, the National Education Association said that kneecapping the DOE “will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections.” Subsequent reductions in force to the DOE have resulted in roughly half of the agency’s employees being terminated and seven of its dozen regional offices shuttered. Wiles’ ostensible passion for boosting education nationally does not seem to come from a history of actually working in the field. As my colleague Dan Friedman wrote last November, Wiles made her name working as a lobbyist and helping to shape Florida’s Republican party: > The daughter of late NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, Wiles is a longtime GOP > operative in Florida with a history of working for rich candidates. She ran > Sen. Rick Scott’s 2010 campaign for Florida’s governorship, worked as former > Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign manager in 2012, and ran > Trump’s campaign in Florida in 2016 and 2020. She also worked for Florida Gov. > Ron DeSantis before a falling out with him. > > > > Wiles has also worked as a lobbyist, and held onto a senior lobbying position > with the Republican-leaning advocacy firm Mercury Public Affairs during the > campaign, according to the New York Times. She was registered as a lobbyist > for a tobacco company as recently as this year. In her sit-down with Lara Trump, Wiles said she had long been “an establishment Republican…and then Donald Trump came along, MAGA came along.” But despite her appearance of being fully MAGA-pilled, Wiles seemed to draw a subtle distinction between her self and her boss when it came to their ability to accept his 2020 election loss. “Do you remember the toughest thing you’ve ever had to tell him?” Lara Trump asked her. “Coming to him after the 2020 election, in ’21,” Wiles replied, “and telling him that what he thought was the circumstance, wasn’t.” > Lara Trump: Do you remember the toughest thing you've ever had to tell him? > > Wiles: The 2020 election. Coming to him after the 2020 election in 21 telling > him what he thought was the circumstance wasn't which is how I got into all > this.. pic.twitter.com/1GeaADfqri > > — Acyn (@Acyn) March 30, 2025

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial. Recently, I attended a conference in Washington, DC, on the all-important topic of “Innovating to Restore Trust in News.” The Semafor-sponsored event featured one-on-one interviews with such media bigshots as Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times; Emma Tucker, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal; Mark Thompson, the CEO of CNN; Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR; Bret Baier, the chief political anchor of Fox News; Mehdi Hasan, the editor-in-chief of Zeteo; Cesar Conde, chair of the NBCUniversal News Group; Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission; and Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host who’s now a podcaster. The prompt for the conversation was a Gallup poll that shows that only 31 percent of Americans have some degree of trust in newsies, a drop from about 70 percent in 1972. Yet there was not much talk of specific innovations that could restore this trust. And it wasn’t until the reception afterward—tuna tartare!—that I realized what had been absent from the hours-long discussion: any consideration of why polls record a decline in trust of the media. I’ll get to that in a moment. > Rupert Murdoch had to pay Dominion $787.5 million for knowingly broadcasting > falsehoods. Given that, what qualifies a Fox anchor to talk about trust in the > media? I’m not sure what one could expect from a lineup of media honchos who, if they had a brilliant idea, would probably not want to share it with competitors. But most of the speakers sidestepped the notion that news organizations could whip up something shiny and new to forge stronger bonds with their audiences. Kahn did speak about actions the New York Times has adopted to boost the relationship between its reporters and its readers, such as featuring them on The Daily, the paper’s daily podcast. If you know these folks, you’re more likely to trust their stories, Kahn told the crowd. (Kahn also referred to X as “a cesspool for attacks.”) His remarks came closest to hitting the target Semafor had set up. Thompson proclaimed that he himself didn’t trust the media and commented, “I’d rather have a questioning audience than a compliant audience that is deferential to media.” He touted CNN’s future, noting its growth will not occur on its cable television platform but on the internet. Baier basically defended his daily show as a straight-news operation. Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith did not grill him on the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit that revealed that Fox had pushed Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and that showed the world this network is more a propaganda-for-profit shop than a news outlet. Rupert Murdoch had to pay Dominion $787.5 million for knowingly broadcasting falsehoods that catered to its audience’s paranoia and bias. Given that, what qualifies a Fox anchor to talk about trust in the media? Conde boasted that NBC News is the largest news organization in the nation and hailed its local news operations as means for enhancing trust in the media. (Local reporters often score well on the trust-o-meter.) Maher sought to slay the shibboleth that NPR is too liberal and said one way the network engenders trust is to “show our work” to the audience. Hasan was pressed by Semafor’s Max Tani on why he hasn’t disclosed the investors in Zeteo, the media startup he launched a year ago. He countered that this question has been raised by those who fear his tough coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who want to suggest he’s secretly backed by pro-Arab interests. (He said his investors were friends and relatives, many of whom do not wish to be targeted because of their support.) On the matter of trust, Hasan remarked that many news consumers are “fed up” with the “coziness” they see when mainstream news people conduct interviews with prominent subjects. That produces a “trust deficit,” he asserted. Tucker, when asked if Washington was freaking out too much about Trump, replied, “Maybe yes, a little bit.” I imagine that thousands of federal workers dismissed abruptly and perhaps illegally from jobs in which they provided essential services might disagree with her—as might needy people overseas who were cut off from food, clean water, and health care necessary for their survival because of the Trump-Musk blitzkrieg on government agencies. Carr called social media companies “the greatest threat [to free speech] that we have seen over the last several years.” He did not seem to have X in mind and focused instead on the conservative complaint that the Biden administration leaned on these platforms during the Covid pandemic. He also defended his decisions to investigate NPR and PBS over their advertising policies and to revive complaints into CBS, ABC, and NBC. He told the audience he would fast-track a probe of how CBS News covered the last presidential election. His remarks were more about vengeance than trust. > Pointing to the huge audience her internet show draws, Megyn Kelly brayed, > “I’m not having a trust issue.” A real head-scratcher was Kelly’s place on the list of participants. What could this ex-Foxer tell us about restoring trust in the news media? After all, she endorsed Trump last year and campaigned for him, and Trump is arguably the biggest liar in the history of American politics. No surprise, she had nothing productive to offer. She snarked at CNN (too lefty!) and MSNBC (too, too lefty!). She did a mean-girl thing about Rachel Maddow and sneered that Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos had bent the knee for Trump. (Even a broken clock…) Pointing to the huge audience her internet show draws, Kelly brayed, “I’m not having a trust issue.” The problem, she claimed, was that every establishment media institution is left-leaning—which is what you’d expect a Trump backer to say. Kelly had not much to share about how the legacy media could regain trust. Her suggestion seemed to be that these outfits ought to cover Trump’s lies as truth. Moreover, her presence at this “summit” was odd. If you want to boost trust in the media, why legitimize a right-wing journalist who became a partisan and helped elect a prodigious liar? By inviting Kelly to this shindig, Semafor indicated it believed she had something to contribute to this important conversation. She didn’t. Back to the question of why trust in media is low. At the conference, there were crickets regarding the reason for this. A casual glance at the polling provides some insight. In 1972, according to Gallup, 72 percent of Democrats had a great deal or some trust in the media; 68 percent of Republicans felt the same way. Not much of a difference. Independents back then were the least trusting at 59 percent. Then came a major split. From that point on, the numbers steadily dropped for all three groups. But the decline was sharpest for Republicans. Today, only 12 percent of them trust the media, while 54 percent of Democrats do. So the overall collapse in trust has been driven most by Republicans losing faith in the media. Trust has fallen for all three groups—though on the chart above you can see there have been times when Democratic trust has rebounded to above 70 percent. Republicans have not hit the 50 percent mark in over 20 years. Take Republicans out of the equation, and the trust-in-media problem looks much less dire. No one at the conference noted this. What also went unmentioned was that Trump, the GOP, and right-wing media (most notably Fox) have done much through the decades to degrade the national discourse with lies and disinformation, while simultaneously and purposefully encouraging profound distrust and hatred of media outlets that don’t buy their bunk. > The GOP war on the media is not the only reason for the free-falling trust > numbers. But it’s a large slice of the story. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Republicans and the right began a crusade against the mainstream media, looking to delegitimize it in the eyes of conservatives. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a hero of the ultra-right, excoriated the “liberal media,” which he despised for its coverage of the civil rights movement. Other conservatives assailed the conventional media for their critical reporting on the Vietnam War and Watergate. All of this fueled an extensive and well-planned effort on the right that aimed to discredit the media. In the 1970s, this media-bashing became a bedrock of Republican politics, and it has continued to this day. Trump turbocharged this tradition with his vituperative attacks on the press as the “enemy of the people.” So here’s a basic fact: A long time ago, the right initiated a scheme to encourage distrust and, no surprise, it worked—at least among Republicans and probably among GOP-leaning independents. The GOP war on the media is not the only reason for the free-falling trust numbers. But it’s a large slice of the story. And as the Republican Party has turned into the MAGA cult, it retains a sharp interest in undermining media that would challenge the “alternative facts,” lies, and disinformation peddled by Trump and his crew. Trump benefits from distrust in the media, and he has deliberately spurred it. He and his minions don’t want to increase trust in the media because a trusted media would pose a threat to them. During Trump’s first administration, the Washington Post chronicled more than 30,000 lies, false claims, or misrepresentations from Trump. Imagine if Republican voters accepted the newspaper’s portrayal of Trump as a con man. But thanks to the long-running right-wing project to undermine the credibility of the mainstream media, Trump and other GOP politicians are insulated from such damning truths. No one at the Semafor gabfest pondered why this dramatic decrease on the GOP side has occurred. Consequently, there was no discussion of how this distrust was, to a degree, orchestrated by the right. And if you’re not going to look at what’s driving the problem, you’re not going to be able to fix it. Perhaps Kelly was right: Throw more right-wing slop at Republicans, and they will trust the media more. But would that bring us to a better spot? Distrust of the media is not a nonpartisan issue. If media barons don’t recognize this, they will not likely concoct innovations that effectively address it.

On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Wednesday evening, Vice President JD Vance held forth about what he called an “old school, very Christian concept.” > You love your family, then you love your neighbor, then you love your > community, then you love you fellow citizens in your own country, and then > after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the > far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their > own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no > way to run a society. These may sound like familiar anti-liberal talking points, but one particular corner of the internet was ecstatic about Vance’s words: the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their tributary of Reformed Protestant Christianity is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.   After Vance’s Hannity appearance, Andrew Isker, a reformed preacher and the author of the book Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations, was triumphant in a post to his 37,000 followers on X. For years, Isker wrote, people had called him  “‘racist’ for speaking about the ancient, traditional Christian idea of ordered loves.” But now, he wrote, “To see it articulated clearly by the Vice President of the United States shows that we are winning and the postwar liberal rejection of all unchosen bonds is on its last legs. Our fathers will be honored once again.” In response to a post on X that was critical of Vance’s remarks about the supposed Christian hierarchy of love, Andrew Torba, Isker’s co-author and CEO of the far-right social media platform, Gab, posted to his 469,000 followers on X. “The Vice President of the United States is talking about rightly ordered loves… and you’re blackpilling?” (In other words, he suggested, it was ridiculous to complain about such a happy turn of events.) Indeed, what is known as the Christian order of love is one of the TheoBros’ favorite topics. One key element of this doctrine for them is that it’s unchristian to love foreigners as much as you love your countrymen. Yet for many of them, this idea is more than just an expression of patriotism. Rather, it’s rooted in the concept of Kinism—a white nationalist term, popularized a few decades ago, that nations should be ethnically and racially pure and that the United States specifically is the domain for white Christians. Which was the quiet part that some of the TheoBros said out loud after Vance’s remarks.   “Any Christian who denies ‘hierarchy of loves’ has white men at the lowest level of their hierarchy of loves,” posted Stephen Wolfe, the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism. William Wolfe, no relation to Stephen, served in the previous Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He posted, “Liberal Christians really are like: ‘There is no such thing as a hierarchy of love and also all white men are the worst.’” This isn’t the first time that Vance has amplified ideas from the world of the TheoBros. As I wrote last fall, he touched on similar themes in his address last July at the Republican National Convention: > Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. > “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with > a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” > > To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, > patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right > evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a > particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. > “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right > now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it > wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are > being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, > and we can renew America once more.” > > > Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong > to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an > actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the > author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a > hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and > rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old > former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role > as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal > Christian nationalism.    Vance’s connections to the TheoBros are well-documented. Not only has he been photographed posing with them, he co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a group of powerful Republican donors, with Chris Buskirk, who serves on the board of the TheoBro magazine American Reformer. Pete Hegseth, now President Trump’s Secretary of Defense, also has connections to the TheoBros movement. The TheoBros have noticed the new vice president’s embrace of their ideas, and they’re delighted. “JD Vance and [former Fox News host] Tucker Carlson definitely have been reading reformed right wing X,” gushed one anonymous TheoBro X account to its 67,000 followers on Thursday.  “I’m convinced that J.D. Vance has an alt and reads our tweets,” posted Brian Sauvé, a TheoBro in Ogden, Utah. “And there’s nothing you can do to convince me otherwise.”

On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced former Fox News host Pete Hegseth was his pick for secretary of defense. The choice is iconoclastic to say the least. Although Hegseth served as an Army National Guard officer, he has no experience in government leadership that could inform the management of the federal government’s largest agency. What Hegseth does have, though, are connections to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to Biblical law. Last year, the magazine Nashville Christian Family ran a profile of Hegseth, in which he mentioned being a member of a “Bible and book study” that focused on the book My Life for Yours by Doug Wilson, the 71-year-old unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros. Patriarch is the right word: When I interviewed Wilson a few months ago he said that he, like many other TheoBros, believes women never should have been given the right to vote. Wilson presides over a small fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho, where he is the head pastor of the flagship church of the denomination he helped found, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). In Moscow, Wilson has also helped to establish a college, a printing press, and a classical Christian school. In addition to his Moscow ventures, Wilson is also extremely online—he blogs, he posts on social media, and he makes slickly produced YouTube videos. Once a fringe figure, famous mostly among reformed Christians, last year Wilson’s star power brightened considerably in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and a speaking slot at the National Conservatism conference alongside then Ohio senator, now vice president-elect, JD Vance.   Wilson is also the founder of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a national network of private K-12 schools that focus on religious education and the Western canon. (I wrote about the classical education movement here.) As it turns out, this is another point of intersection. Hegseth, who did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones, has strong connections to the Association of Classical Christian Schools. He told Nashville Christian Family that his family decided to move to Tennessee so that his children could attend the Jonathan Edwards Classical Academy, a school in that network he describes as “a small, country, blue-collar classical Christian school.” During a recent appearance on insurance executive Patrick Bet-David’s podcast, Hegseth said he’d never send his kids to Harvard, but he would send them to New Saint Andrews, the college the Wilson helped found in Idaho. Hegseth’s involvement with Wilson’s schools goes beyond his own children’s education. In 2022, he co-authored Battle for the American Mind, with the group’s president, David Goodwin. In the book, they argue that Americans have “ceded our kids’ minds to the left for far too long” and promise to give “patriotic parents the ammunition to join an insurgency that gives America a fighting chance.” In a thread on X this week, Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, noted that Hegseth has been a guest on “Reformation Red Pill,” a podcast hosted by pastors at the Doug Wilson-affiliated Tennessee church that Hegseth attends. Hegseth has also appeared on Veritas Vox, a podcast produced by a Pennsylvania-based publisher called Veritas, which is also connected to Wilson’s network of churches. Veritas was the publisher of Hegseth and Goodwin’s book on education. Then there are his tattoos. First is the prominent Jerusalem cross tattoo that Taylor noted is a nod to the Christian crusades, and an important symbol for TheoBros. (Looked at closely, part of the logo of the real estate and investment firm New Founding, owned and operated by several TheoBros, has a kind of a riff on it.) Reconstructionists believe that Christians are called to expand the territory they control—along the lines of the Crusades of the Middle Ages. “It is about building the kingdom of God on earth and in a way that you can actually draw borders and boundaries around it,” Taylor told me. Hegseth also has a tattoo of the words “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” in Latin); which, writes Taylor, has come to signify the idea for TheoBros the idea that “God mandated Crusaders’ violence.” Because of the extremist nature of his tattoos, Hegseth wasn’t allowed to participate as a guard in Biden’s inauguration. In 2020, Hegseth turned his obsession with the Christian Crusades into a book, American Crusade. In a piece this week, Media Matters noted that one of its central themes is the destruction of Muslim holy sites in order to reclaim them for Christianity. Hegseth also rails against Muslims’ “well-documented aversion to assimilation.” Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religious studies professor who has studied the Reconstructionist tradition that the TheoBros are part of, told me she finds Hegseth’s fixation on the Crusades “really troubling—but also it’s completely consistent with the Christian Reconstructionists. That’s particularly troubling for someone who might have the biggest military in the world under his control.” Taylor, too, said he was concerned about the idea of Hegseth controlling the military. He pointed to Hegseth’s urging Trump to pardon Edward Gallagher, the US Navy SEAL who was accused of killing an Iraqi prisoner and posing for pictures with his dead body. Taylor noted that the US military has recently struggled to control the radicalization of its members. He told me he worried Hegseth’s appointment “will only allow this far-right radicalization in the military to fester and grow unregulated, if not even encouraged.” Hegseth’s latest book, The War on the Warriors, decries what he sees as the infiltration of the military by the “radical left.” Troops, he complains, are “being harassed by obligatory training…grounded in Critical Race Theory, radical sex theories, gender policy, and ‘domestic extremism’ that are designed to neuter our fighting forces.” As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer has noted, that focus on culture war issues is likely part of what prompted Trump and his advisers to choose him—he’s well-suited to advance the anti-woke agenda laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. When Trump announced Hegseth as his pick for defense secretary, the X account of the podcast CrossPolitics, cohosted by a lead pastor at Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho, church, posted, “HUGE WIN! @PeteHegseth is a godly Christian man. He is a member at a CREC church and classically educates his kids. He’ll get the wokeness out of the military which will unfathomably bless our nation.” Trump has called Hegseth “tough, smart, and a true believer in America First.” As the AP reported, Trump praised Hegseth’s book about the military at a rally in June. He promised the crowd that if he was reelected, “The woke stuff will be gone within a period of 24 hours. I can tell you.”

Some of the nation’s legendary “great men”—leaders like George Marshall and Clark Clifford—have served the country as defense secretary. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped a Fox News host for the job. Pete Hegseth is a veteran of wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but he stands out as being uniquely unqualified among his predecessors to oversee an agency with nearly 3 million employees. If you understand what Trump wants him to do, however, he’s probably the perfect man for the job. Several former Trump administration officials, in conjunction with the conservative Heritage Foundation, created a blueprint for a second Trump term known as Project 2025. Much of the new defense secretary’s likely agenda is spelled out in it. And while it makes a few nods to transparency, calls for better contracting procedures, and, of course, big budget increases, much of the document is simply a roadmap for a culture war. Christopher Miller, who served 72 days as acting defense secretary during the first Trump administration, is the author of the Project 2025 section on the Defense Department. He starts by suggesting that the Pentagon has emphasized “leftist politics” over military readiness. To combat this problem, Miller lays out a host of priorities for a new Trump administration. Among those are ridding the active military of transgender people and their health care, along with ending abortion access. As Miller explains: > “Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical > treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) > should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from > military service. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of > military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to > facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.” Miller seems to believe that the military is full of “Marxists” looking to carry out social justice experiments while indoctrinating the ranks. He urges the next defense secretary to make sure senior military officers “understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda.” To that end, he calls for axing diversity and equality programs and rooting out Marxist professors in the military academies—where tenure should be abolished. In addition, the new administration should audit the curriculum and health policies of schools on military bases so that they can be cleansed of “inappropriate” content. Everything on this conservative wish list dovetails nicely with Hegseth’s rhetoric on Fox News. He has railed against “woke” policies that he claims have hurt military recruitment and has decried the Pentagon’s “social justice” messages. “The Pentagon likes to say ‘our diversity is our strength.’ What a bunch of garbage,” he said on Fox. “In the military, our diversity is not our strength, our unity is our strength.” On a podcast hosted by conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, Hegseth once said, “There are not enough lesbians in San Francisco, Hugh, to man the 82nd Airborne. You’re going to need to go to guys in Kentucky and Colorado and Ohio, who love the country.” > “There are not enough lesbians in San Francisco, Hugh, to man the 82nd > Airborne. You’re going to need to go to guys in Kentucky and Colorado and > Ohio, who love the country.” Hegseth’s televised attacks on “wokism” in the military helped kill a Pentagon initiative to crack down on extensive white supremacism and extremism within the armed forces. In 2021, Hegseth devoted a segment on Fox News Primetime to attacking a Black combat veteran named Bishop Garrison, whom Biden had tapped to oversee a new Countering Extremism Working Group. The working group was tasked with figuring out how to identify people like Jack Teixera, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman with a history of violent, racist behavior who leaked a trove of classified documents on Discord in 2021. This week, Teixera was sentenced to 15 years in prison. But Hegseth reframed the anti-extremism effort as just another liberal attempt to impose woke policies on the federal government.  He described Garrison’s assignment as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists.” Biden’s appointment of Garrison, he told viewers, was “the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, in charge of vetting the entire US military, past, present, and future.” His attack ultimately generated enough political pressure from Republicans that the working group disappeared in less than a year without having had much of an impact. During the last Trump administration, there were no fewer than six defense secretaries—seven if you count Mark Esper’s two separate stints in the job. (By comparison, there has been just one during the Biden administration, Lloyd Austin.) Only two of Trump’s defense secretaries were ever confirmed by the Senate. Given that track record, the odds are high that Hegseth will be back at Fox News soon enough. But even a short tenure could give him enough time to check off some items on Project 2025’s to-do list.

The idea that women might vote differently from their husbands made Fox News star Jesse Watters’ brain melt live on air this week. Referring to his current wife, Watters, with his trademark smirk, told his colleagues on The Five, “If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair.” This, from a man who admitted to his employer in 2017 that he was in a relationship with a colleague 14 years his junior—something that reportedly led to his divorce from his first wife. “What else is she keeping from me?” Jesse mused, prompting guffaws from his fellow panelists. Beyond hypocrisy, Mother Jones creator Kat Abughazaleh argues that Watters’ reaction reveals the fierce undercurrent of sexist resentment coursing through this year’s campaign, typified by Donald Trump, who just this week ominously vowed to protect women, “whether the women like it or not.” Video DEAR JESSE WATTERS: WHY WOULD YOUR WIFE BE AFRAID TO TELL YOU WHAT SHE REALLY THINKS?  It’s an issue that Democrats and their anti-Trump allies have been eager to highlight, including former congresswoman and top Harris campaigner Liz Cheney, who told CBS’ Face the Nation on Wednesday, “I think you’re going to have, frankly, a lot of men and women who will go into the voting booth and will vote their conscience, will vote for Vice President Harris.” “They may not ever say anything publicly,” she added, “but the results will speak for themselves.” Michelle Obama also seized on this dynamic. “Just remember that your vote is a private matter,” she told a Michigan rally last weekend. Soon, that private decision could have very public ramifications—for the entire country.