The Briefing with Jen Psaki
Bad Signal: Can Secretary Hegseth be Trusted at the Pentagon?
30 Mar 2025
Amid the fallout from the Trump’s administration’s self-induced security breach, Jen Psaki breaks down why the looming questions about Pete Hegseth’s judgement and character have only grown in the last week. Senator Amy Klobuchar addresses Hegseth’s competence and reacts to the latest in the Signalgate scandal, and Representative Pat Ryan joins to discuss the various ways the administration has attempted to spin their wrongdoing. Journalist Kara Swisher joins Jen to discuss Elon Musk’s aggressive campaigning for Republican control of the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin. Jen breaks down the various state and local races that seem to be breaking more favorably toward Democrats and Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow joins to talk about organizing at the grassroots level. Check out our social pages below:https://twitter.com/InsideWithPsakihttps://www.instagram.com/InsideWithPsaki/https://www.tiktok.com/@insidewithpsakihttps://www.msnbc.com/jen-psakihttps://bsky.app/profile/insidewithpsaki.msnbc.com
Full Episode
Well, today Donald Trump did what he often does when he is trying to change the subject. He picked up the phone and called a reporter and said a lot of things. This morning, the reporter on the other end of the phone was NBC's Kristen Walker.
And during that call, Trump said he's pissed off at Vladimir Putin, okay, and that he might impose 25 percent tariffs on Russian oil if they can't reach a deal with Ukraine. What does that deal look like? That's the whole question. He also threatened to bomb Iran if they don't agree to a nuclear deal. And again, Donald Trump says a lot of things. We've all been following this for a decade now.
He likes to sound tough. He likes to put threats out there. And right now, he definitely wants us to be talking about anything other than the scandal that engulfed his administration all week long.
Trump also told Kristen, with a two-word, I do, that he still has confidence in his national security team, even after they included a reporter on a group chat that, more importantly, was about imminent war plans. He said the signal controversy was a witch hunt, his favorite go-to phrase. Nothing to see here, of course.
The thing is, he's definitely in the minority on that one, because in a brand-new poll I bet you he may have seen from CBS News out this morning, a full 75 percent of Americans said this issue is serious. Of course it is. It is serious. But here's the thing I keep coming back to. Should we really be surprised about all of this?
Because even before he accidentally texted war plans to a reporter, it's safe to say there were some serious, real, legit red flags about Pete Hegseth in particular. I mean, before running the U.S. military, he was a weekend morning show host on Fox News for a decade. No shape to cable weekend news hosts, obviously. Even ones who get a little crazy on New Year's Eve, as you can see there.
But it's not exactly a job that prepares you to run the Pentagon as your next step. There were also the countless allegations of Hegseth drinking on the job, both at veterans organizations and at Fox News. The New Yorker reported he once got so drunk that he had to be restrained from getting on a stage at a Louisiana strip club.
And that he once drunkenly chanted, kill all Muslims, while he was on an official tour for a nonprofit he was in charge of. And then there were the allegations that he ran those two relatively small veterans organizations, much smaller than the Pentagon, into the ground. And, of course, these were the allegations. Of course, there were the big, big concerning allegations about his abuse of women.
Now, he denies all of it. But, yeah, fair to say there were some serious red flags about this guy's judgment and about his character, which is why he barely squeaked by in the Senate. J.D. Vance had to cast a tie-breaking vote to get him confirmed.
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