Hegseth Acts Like A Child In Front of Congress
Bulwark Takes
The Bulwark
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2026
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
Sam Stein and Will Saletan give their takes on Pete Hegseth’s heated appearance on Capitol Hill, where questions about the $25 billion war with Iran quickly turned into personal attacks and repeated deflections. Hegseth spent much of his time avoiding accountability, focusing instead on blaming Democrats, raising questions about how he is approaching one of the most consequential national security roles in the world.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everyone. It's B. Sam Stein. I'm managing editor to Bullwork. I'm joined by Will Salatin, |
| 0:03.5 | and we're here to talk about Pete Hegseth and his hearing on the Hill today. |
| 0:09.0 | A few moments where he kind of crashed out. A few moments where he did classic, you know, |
| 0:14.1 | patriotism attacks. Some questionable math. |
| 0:18.7 | You know, honestly, Will, I thought it was a little bit, I thought it lacked fireworks. I came and thought it was going to be a lot hotter. I don't know about you. Well, I guess if you wanted a Pam Bondi experience. I did. I did, yes. I mean, the standards have been raised in this administration for fireworks. Actually, that does raise a question. Is the Dow at 50,000 right now? You talk. I'm going to go look at it. It was. It was before we started this. The Dow is not 50,000 right now. So he could not get up there and admonish everyone for criticizing Donald Trump. Yeah, the Dow is down. But the bonding standard is like, did you shout at the lawmakers with every answer? |
| 0:57.1 | Did you try to talk over them? |
| 0:59.0 | And Hegs had didn't do that. |
| 1:00.6 | So like he's a notch down from Pam Bondi. |
| 1:03.0 | I thought I was still pretty explosive myself. |
| 1:05.7 | All right. |
| 1:05.9 | What was your main takeaway then? |
| 1:07.9 | My main takeaway is, okay, this guy is supposed to be the Secretary of Defense. He calls |
| 1:12.7 | himself the Secretary of War. But the point is, like, you're supposed to like, we're all in this |
| 1:17.2 | together, Democrats, Republicans, we have an enemy here, Iran, you want to get everybody behind the |
| 1:21.1 | war. He spent so much time in this hearing, Sam, going after the Democrats, Democrats on the committee, Democrats generally, Joe Biden. |
| 1:31.9 | I swear to God. |
| 1:33.8 | Sam, I counted just my own count, 10 times that he like talked about Joe Biden, dumb, bad, you know, ignorant asleep at the same. |
| 1:42.4 | Yeah, Autopan. |
| 1:43.3 | He brought up the auto pen. |
| 1:44.5 | He did that. |
| 1:44.6 | He did bring up the other pen. |
| 1:45.7 | How do you do that at a hearing about the defense department, about a war? How do you do that? And you just got to be crafty. You can basically bring in the auto pen for anything if you really try hard enough. And he, and, you know, he tried hard. Top line takeaways were he said, this was, first of all, it's for a request for $1.5 trillion for $1.5 trillion defense budget. |
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