What did Donald Trump do today?
He defended his cronies as only he can.
Thomas Massie, a New York Republican member of Congress and a persistent Trump critic, introduced articles of impeachment today against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The eight articles deal with Hegseth's conduct of the war in Iran, the extrajudicial killing of boat crews in the Caribbean and Pacific, his attempts to retaliate against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for reminding servicemembers they had a duty to disobey illegal orders, his suborning of war crimes in the targeting of civilians in Iran, and conduct related to campaigns in Yemen and Venezuela.
Normally, impeachments of officials who have not yet been convicted of crimes are defeated on a partisan basis. But there is growing bipartisan support for impeaching and removing Hegseth, a former mid-level officer who was fired from two civilian jobs for alcohol-related incidents, and who has been accused (including by his own mother) of domestic abuse. Hegseth has virtually no support in the actual military either, particularly after a much-mocked stunt in which he summoned every American flag officer from posts around the world for what amounted to a pep talk.
Asked for comment, Trump insisted that Hegseth couldn't be impeached because other defense secretaries hadn't been either.
TRUMP: What about impeaching — the — gentleman from Biden, his — person that — disappeared for two weeks and nobody had any idea where he — was, what about impeaching the people that ran the Vietnam War?
Lloyd Austin is the Secretary of Defense under President Biden that Trump was struggling to recall. He was not impeached because it's not generally considered a high crime or misdemeanor to have prostate cancer, although he was criticized for not disclosing his hospitalization sooner. (Trump has several times concealed unusual and unscheduled visits to Walter Reed Hospital.)
As for Vietnam, a war Trump dodged with the help of a falsified doctor's note from one of his father's tenants, he's correct that the defense secretary most closely associated with it, Robert McNamara, was never impeached by the same Congresses that repeatedly voted to reauthorize the war. Hegseth (and Trump) have carried out most of the actions cited in Massie's charges without even a pretense of legal authorization.
That said, there is a connection between the hyperaggressive yet quantitatively-minded strategist McNamara and Hegseth: the nickname that Hegseth's own subordinates have given him, "Dumb McNamara."
That wasn't Trump's only statement today in which he tried to shield the people running his administration from responsibility for their actions. He also issued a new defense of Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO who had an affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy and may have compromised US national security as a result.
Yesterday, Trump said that he hadn't heard that Huang had done anything wrong, which is a lie: he was informed by intelligence officials in May and took no action, even allowing Huang to take part in talks with Chinese leaders on an official state trip. Trump also approved the sale of normally restricted Nvidia chips to China after Huang made a "donation" to his ballroom fund.
Today, he had a new explanation: Huang was blameless, Trump insisted, because he didn't realize the person he was giving information to was a spy.
Trump says he spoke to Jensen Huang today and "he said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy. And I really believe him."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) November 9, 2026 at 4:04 PM
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Why does this matter?
- The President of the United States should be able to understand the basic concept of what a "spy" is.
- Nobody is above the law and the Constitution, including Donald Trump or the cabinet secretaries carrying out his orders.