I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”
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Today’s read: 7 minutes.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about five things I had gotten wrong about Trump in his first six months in office.
In all honesty, I’m not a huge fan of political prognostication, and I often try to avoid making predictions to focus more on my analysis and reporting. Still, predictions inevitably slip into that analysis; and my last retrospective, like many others I had written before it, was an exercise in the kind of accountable and analytical journalism we do here at Tangle. I’m a big fan of writing about when I’m wrong, or have changed my mind, or have valuable criticisms to share — I think it helps me evolve and our readers reflect on their own viewpoints, too.
But, shortly after publishing that piece, I realized that I spend a lot of time writing about all the things I get wrong, and maybe not enough time writing about when I get things right. After all, if I’m simply wrong over and over, should readers really trust me for reliable analysis? It struck me that in trying to be transparent with criticisms I may be undermining my own credibility. Indeed, a lot of readers (and my own editors!) insisted I could be doing this too much.
So today, I figured I’d flip the script, give myself some grace, and do something I had never done before: Pen an entire piece on things I’ve gotten right. Since my newsletter a few weeks ago focused exclusively on Trump, I thought I’d turn the focus to the same subject and share five things I’ve gotten right about Trump’s second term so far.
#1) Pete Hegseth was a dangerous and poor choice for Defense secretary.
When I reviewed Trump’s cabinet appointees, Pete Hegseth was probably the person I was most concerned about. Hegseth got a lot of heat during his confirmation process, because he was “the Fox News guy who got tapped to lead the armed forces.” This characterization was true, but it was also insufficient: Hegseth rose to the rank of major as an Army National Guard officer, served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, was awarded two Bronze Stars, earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard after his second deployment, led two nonprofit veterans’ advocacy groups — then worked as a Fox News host for more than a decade. Which is all to say: He had plenty more on his resume than just being a television host.
A better criticism of Hegseth, and the primary one that I leveled against him, is that dysfunction had followed him everywhere he went. I was not overly concerned that he was under-qualified compared to his predecessors, or that he was unfaithful to his wives (something Democrats spent a lot of time on during his confirmation hearing); I was concerned that he had a terrible reputation as a leader (of relatively small organizations) and was now being tasked with leading almost three million service members and DoD civilians. This is an excerpt of “My take” after Hegseth’s confirmation hearing:
As I've said in the past, we — as Americans — have been remarkably safe in the post-9/11 era from foreign threats, and we are totally unaware of how good we have it here in the U.S. Our soldiers are in about as little danger as they've ever been in my lifetime, we’re pulling back from many major conflicts, and the vast majority of the issues facing our Department of Defense involve wasteful spending, inventory issues, shaky leadership, and the fact we are falling behind on advanced military technology. I don't see any reason to believe Hegseth — who as a leader of several smaller, less complicated organizations has been followed by allegations of poor leadership, disorganization, sexual misconduct, poor financial management, and drunkenness — is the right person to solve these issues.
I also noted that Hegseth had a genuinely bad hearing. He couldn't name any international security agreements he would lead as Defense secretary, incorrectly guessed several members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), was noncommittal about using the U.S. military against U.S. civilians, and seemed to think the military has quotas for demographic groups (which it doesn’t, though diversity in the military had been a point of emphasis for the DoD during the Biden administration).
Hegseth’s track record followed him into leadership at the DoD. Hegseth was the central figure in one of the largest scandals of the administration so far, in which a journalist was inadvertently added to a Signal group chat where attack plans for a strike in Yemen were discussed in extensive detail. Just this week, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon’s independent watchdog has evidence that the information Hegseth shared in the Signal chat was indeed classified, contradicting his and the White House’s claims. We then learned that Hegseth and others in his orbit were in more Signal chats sharing privileged information; Hegseth refused to take any accountability for this and instead tried to throw several team members under the bus.
Since then, Hegseth’s department has been in complete disarray. Justin Fulcher, a top adviser, just left the Pentagon — marking the sixth major recent departure following a series of scandals and leaks. In January, former chief Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot argued unequivocally that Hegseth was the best man for the job; by late April, he was penning an op-ed for Politico arguing unequivocally that Hegseth should step down or be fired. Ullyot saw Hegseth’s leadership up close and in person as a top aide, and he came away deeply concerned about the risk it posed to the country.
So, why hasn’t Hegseth been fired? Well, I predicted that, too — writing in April that Trump would refuse to fire him for his incompetence because that’d be giving a scalp to his critics and the media, which he is always loath to do.
On all of this, my views about Hegseth were basically right on, and his term as Defense secretary has gone just as I expected.
#2) I was right about Trump and Israel.
One of the more bizarre things that happened during the 2024 election was the way the pro-Palestine movement rallied around Trump and against the Biden–Harris administration. The “uncommitted vote” in Michigan was the center of this story, with groups of pro-Palestine Arab Americans pledging to either vote for Trump or not vote for Harris.
