Pete Hegseth’s name landed on the Washington firing list before the election night confetti got swept up.
Anonymous insiders are whispering, and Democrats are already pacing off his office.
But back in the spring, Hakeem Jeffries let slip what this whole crusade is really about.
The Knives Came Out Before the Last Race Got Called
Democrats walked away from the midterms with both chambers of Congress, and the hunt for a Republican fall guy started almost immediately.
Plenty of fingers pointed at War Secretary Pete Hegseth.
A White House official told Fox News Digital that the results “would have looked very different without the Iran War” and predicted President Trump would eventually hold Hegseth accountable. “That will play out in the lame duck,” the official said.
A former White House staffer went a step further. “Hegseth is on the chopping block,” the staffer told the outlet.
And another administration official pointed to “signs” of an ouster while admitting that “Trump can turn on a dime.”
Notice what every one of those voices has in common. Not one of them attached a name.
But Trump attached his. When reporters asked whether he planned to replace his Pentagon chief, the President didn’t hedge.
“I think he’s doing a very good job,” Trump said.
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told Fox that Hegseth intends to serve through the end of Trump’s term, and he took a swipe at Democrats for threatening what he called “sham witch hunts.”
What Jeffries Told Al Sharpton’s Crowd
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) spent the campaign promising to “run Pete Hegseth out of town” once Democrats grab the gavel.
The press treats that vow as a reaction to the war with Iran. The record tells a different story.
Jeffries demanded Hegseth’s firing in March 2025 over the Signal chat flap, long before the Iran campaign began. He’s been chasing this scalp for the better part of two years.
And when Jeffries took the stage at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention in New York in the spring of 2026, he spelled out the grudge in plain English.
“Kristi Noem is gone. Pam Bondi is gone. And Pete Hegseth is next up,” Jeffries told the crowd, according to Mediaite.
He then launched into a long defense of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and he left no doubt about which Cabinet member he blamed for gutting them.
“Just look at who they put in charge of the attack on DEI,” Jeffries said, before naming Hegseth.
He mentioned the Middle East in passing. He spent far more breath on DEI.
That tells you the order of operations. The war hands Democrats a respectable-sounding excuse, but the DEI rollback is the wound they actually want to heal.
Hegseth banned transgender service members, scrapped the Pentagon’s DEI bureaucracy, and put men and women under the same combat fitness standards. Jeffries also went after him over book removals at the US Naval Academy and vowed to keep up the pressure until Trump fires him.
For a party that treats DEI like a sacred text, that list reads like heresy.
The Lame-Duck Ransom Note
The Iran war cost Republicans, and voters made that plain. Hegseth cheered the campaign louder than most, declaring back in March that the US was carrying out “our retribution” against Tehran.
But the war had a lot of fathers. The neoconservative hawks who spent years agitating for a showdown with Iran from cable sets and Senate hearing rooms won’t lose a single paycheck over it.
Firing Hegseth wouldn’t touch the people who sold the war to begin with. It would simply hand Democrats the trophy they wanted before anybody fired a shot.
And Democrats already slapped a price tag on it. Senate Democrats have suggested Hegseth’s exit will be the cost of their cooperation on must-pass defense legislation during the lame-duck session, according to The National News Desk.
That’s a ransom note with a subpoena calendar stapled to the back.
US Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) wants in on the action too. Massie lost his 2026 primary to a Trump-backed challenger and won’t be back next term, but he has vowed to force a vote on his impeachment articles before he goes.
“Trump should fire Hegseth to avoid Hegseth’s impeachment. It’s the honorable thing to do,” Massie wrote on X.
His eight articles cover just about everything, from war powers to strikes on drug-smuggling boats to the seizure of Nicolas Maduro. House Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the whole effort as “a stunt.”
US Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), a familiar thorn in the President’s side, has also urged Trump to make a change. Funny how the outgoing and the disgruntled always seem to find each other.
Rumsfeld’s Exit Bought Bush Nothing
The Beltway crowd loves to cite 2006 in moments like this, and the comparison deserves a closer look than it usually gets.
George W. Bush told reporters shortly before that year’s midterms that Donald Rumsfeld would stay with him to the end of his presidency. The day after Republicans lost the House, Bush announced Rumsfeld’s resignation and said: “The timing is right for new leadership at the Pentagon.”
So what did the sacrifice buy him?
Democrats kept pounding the Iraq War anyway. Republicans lost even more ground in 2008, and Barack Obama rode the backlash straight into the White House.
Bush handed his enemies a trophy and got nothing back. Not a truce, not a softer committee chairman, not one ounce of goodwill.
Trump knows that history better than most. Swapping out Pentagon leadership in the middle of unresolved tensions with Tehran would also create real uncertainty, a point Fox’s own reporting raised. If the war is the political anchor, the fix runs through Trump’s diplomacy and a deal that keeps American troops out of another forever war, not through a firing staged to please Jeffries.
And does anybody seriously believe Jeffries stops at Hegseth? He already ticked off Noem and Bondi like notches on a belt. In a separate interview, he promised Democrats would make sure “Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel are on their way out the door.”
Maybe Trump eventually decides to make a change. He has every right to, and nobody outside the Oval Office knows what he’ll do.
But if that day comes, it ought to arrive on Trump’s terms and for Trump’s reasons. A Democrat leader’s convention speech shouldn’t set the President’s personnel calendar.
Jeffries wrote Hegseth’s name on that firing list in 2025, long before anybody dropped a bomb on Iran. Nobody should pretend the war put it there.
Sources:
Fox News Digital, “Hegseth’s future draws ominous predictions from insiders after GOP losses, but Trump isn’t budging yet”
Mediaite, “Hakeem Jeffries Takes Victory Lap After Noem and Bondi’s Ouster, Predicts Who Will Be Next”
Mediaite, “‘So-Called Secretary of Defense’: Dem Leader Hakeem Jeffries Rips Pete Hegseth as ‘Dumb Effing Individual’”
Axios, “Hakeem Jeffries calls for Pete Hegseth to be fired” (2025)
The National News Desk, “Massie says he will reintroduce impeachment articles against Hegseth after midterms”
Grabien, “Hakeem Jeffries: ‘We’re Going to Make Sure that Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel Are on Their Way out the Door’”
CNN, “Rumsfeld quitting as defense secretary” (2006)
NPR, “Bush Shows He Heard the Nation’s Message” (2006)
