Putting a Fox News clown in charge of the Pentagon may be The Criminal's most destabilizing move yet

The Criminal has been busily announcing which of his pro-sedition allies he intends plop down into which administration positions, now that Americans have again given him the keys to the White House. Some are alarming; while it was expected that past Trump administration official Tom Homan would return to fulfill his apparently lifelong ambition to deport not just immigrants but their American-born children, Homan's recent interviews have underlined Homan's zealotry in that regard. Other appointments slide more into the realm of farce; putting the 2016 campaign opponent who suggested to audiences that The Criminal's genitals were of disappointing size in as The Criminal's Secretary of State is practically maudlin, but proves that The Criminal thinks Sen. Marco Rubio has now been housebroken.

The announcement of Fox News talking head Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, no really, is somehow both the most ridiculous pronouncement so far and perhaps the most dangerous. Putting Some Random Twit in as the ostensible crown prince of the Pentagon will endear you to absolutely nobody, and Trump already faces the widespread contempt of retired top-tier military officials and the implied contempt of the nonretired brass those officials leave behind. Turning on the tv and seeing that some random jagoff sitting on a Fox News couch is now their civilian overseer will not improve their mood.

Hegseth is not, however, just any random jagoff. He's a specific type of jagoff who does indeed have military service under his belt. Not much, but some, and his service was notable mostly as jumping off point for Hegseth's promotion of deeply racist and conspiracy-peppered declarations and an apparent affinity for war crimes. Hegseth is at this point most noted for three events:

His on-air declaration that he doesn't engage in handwashing.

His dismissal from his National Guard duties during Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration because officials deemed him a possible security threat:

And, most of all, his successful private lobbying to Trump on behalf of two U.S. soldiers convicted of war crimes in Afghanistan. Hegseth has been prolific in his defenses of war criminals of all stripes.

This may endear him to a great many random militia chuds who tattoo things like "Deus Vult" on their arms, but to military leaders Hegseth is the worst kind of soldier in the service. Dismissals of war crimes and oozing racism is the sort of behavior that poisons the chain of command and sabotages discipline. The Chuds might like it, but anyone with stars on their shoulders would rather drag this bleating pretender behind some Pentagon dumpsters than welcome him into their offices. And when the new Secretary of Defense's top-notch military ideas consist of sitting on a Fox & Friends couch advocating for a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea?

That's going to be ... a problem. Hegseth's nomination is Trump giving yet another middle finger to the generals who have to carry out his orders, and as Trump prepares to surround himself with pro-sedition administration zealots who, this time around, won't have a problem with issuing illegal orders to shoot American protesters or lock down American cities he has a personal grievance with, starting a new war with his own generals is not going to be good for any of us.

Trump does have a plan to deal with this, however. The Wall Street Journal reports that The Criminal's team is "considering" a "draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership."

In translation, that means that The Criminal's allies would assemble a group of conspiratorial spongebrains like the barely coherent retired Gen. Mike Flynn, and that group would be charged with weeding out any senior military commander who the group thinks might not follow upcoming illegal orders. It is an explicitly fascist move. It is an attempt to remake the military into a new service that will commit atrocities if The Criminal's scuttling minions want atrocities to be done.

While we're all quite justifiably terrified of a band of idiots collected primarily for their willingness to help a reality television star overthrow the U.S. government being put in charge of exactly the powers needed to do it, there aren't many people talking about the inherent precarious of what we're about to see: The Criminal facing off against the U.S. military, demanding they abandon their prior oaths and serve him instead. Many of these people know full well the danger Trump poses. Others are already on his side.

Nobody's talking about what the fallout of that often is, when other authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world attempt to consolidate their power. It's very, very unpleasant to consider. We've all been assuming that The Criminal will put the military under his thumb from the beginning and that's that—he'll have the immediate power to pit American soldiers against American critics. But there are a lot of other possibilities that are just as dangerous.

Rupert Murdoch's grand propaganda efforts, as well as those of other conservatives who ignored Donald Trump's sedition in favor of gaining power for themselves, have put us all in a position far more dangerous than their peabrains ever considered. And they're still not backing down; the Fox News crowd, especially, seems giddily eager for all of it. Fox News wants its fascism very, very much.