Secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth became the first of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks to sit for a confirmation hearing when he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
While Democrats on the committee tried to discredit the Army National Guard veteran by bringing up allegations of sexual assault, excessive drinking, and financial mismanagement that he has denied, Megyn was in the room for the hearing and said they failed to land any major blows.
To that point, Hegseth’s chances of being confirmed received an immediate boost after Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) wasted no time declaring she would be voting in his favor. Ernst, whose support was previously in question, had tough but fair questions for Hegseth, which is more than Megyn believes could be said for most of the other female senators in the hearing.
The Worst Performances
As Megyn stated in her instant analysis on Tuesday, she believes Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) gave the “most disgusting” and “despicable” performance with his baseless questions about domestic violence (get her full take here), but there were three other senators who she also took issue with.
“I stand by that Tim Kaine was the most disgusting… so this sort of the second-in-command for the worst performance yesterday,” Megyn said on Wednesday’s show. “It is tight… Is it Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)? Is it Mazie Hirono (D-HI)? Or is it sleeper candidate Elissa Slotkin (D-MI)?”
With the field narrowed down to those three candidates, Megyn gives the reasoning behind her final ranking below:
#3: Sen. Mazie Hirono
“Let’s start with Mazie Hirono. You heard Michael Knowles say yesterday that no civilized country would make this woman a senator, but we did. If you watched the hearing you know that, yes, she is a moron. But if you listen to the soundbite [in the clip above], you will see just how uninterested she was in getting any answers from Pete Hegseth. It was all performative. And Mazie, you are not a good performer.
At one point she complained that she wasn’t getting answers to her questions. Well, maybe that is because she refused to listen to the nominee who was trying to answer them – just not in a way she liked. He actually did try to give her an answer about those drunkenness reports, talking about how it was an NBC News hit job against him. It was a denial, madam, you just didn’t want to hear it.
Meanwhile, what she was really saying with her questions about Greenland and the Panama Canal was, ‘I object to Donald Trump. I hate Trump. I hate what he is saying. Will you do what I want instead of what Trump wants?’ And Pete Hegseth was not taking that bait. I know it is upsetting, madam, but you lost. You didn’t get your way, and you are working things out from your seat up there.
She wasn’t effective, she was kind of whiny, and nobody paid any attention to her. She scored no points whatsoever. As such, I am going to put Mazie Hirono in the third spot for most annoying. Since she was so pathetic, it was hard to be really annoyed as opposed to just kind of mocking her.”
#2: Sen. Tammy Duckworth
“In my number two spot is Tammy Duckworth, senator from Illinois, who was equally disrespectful to Pete Hegseth and equally uninterested in hearing his answers. She tried to land a couple of ‘gotchas’ against Pete with her memory test-type questions about audits and security agreements. It was like she was his high school history teacher and was going to see how well he could do on her little pop quiz.
And then she got into ASEAN, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. This was another test to see if he knew this abbreviation. I had no idea what she was talking about either, especially given the way she was pronouncing it (which, by the way, was apparently wrong). ASEAN is a group of 10 countries in Southeast Asia that individually don’t amount to much – economically or otherwise – but together are about the size of the U.K. and have more bargaining power. It is more of an economic deal than a political or military deal.
Amazingly, Pete hadn’t studied up on his acronyms for every single region and, I guess, flunked her little test. She and leftists on Twitter lost their minds over it, but literally nobody knew that is what this group goes by. You want to go through the names of the individual countries? I am sure he would be happy to talk to you about the individual countries and what the strategic interests of the United States are with respect to each one or together as a group. But because he didn’t know the acronym, she tried to make him look stupid and she failed.
So, she is my number two most annoying and irritating senator from yesterday.”
#1: Sen. Elissa Slotkin
“And then we get to number one, which is the sleeper candidate Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. She got under my skin more than any other mostly because, as I watched her, I knew she was smart enough to know better. You could tell she is definitely smart but so infuriating. Hirono was kind of amusing. Duckworth was very annoying and less amusing than Hirono. And then Slotkin was probably the most pernicious because she has got some gravitas in the way she approaches her messaging.
She has one of those high falutin backgrounds in education with degrees from Columbia and Cornell. She worked for the CIA under George W. Bush and under Barack Obama, and now she is a politician out of Michigan.
She started off by trying to, like, bond with Pete by bringing up her time in the CIA. I respect her service, but it is really not the same as being on the front lines and being shot at. But fine, she kind of tried to put them on par with each other with the ‘I completely get it. And trust me, I believe you that you care about the troops. Genuinely, I’m with you.’
At first, I was a little fooled by it. But as you watched her over the course of the seven minutes, she brought up rage inside because she was just so nasty, and passive aggressive, and kept slipping in little deceptive pieces of information – like when she tried to pretend that Trump said he was going to unleash the military on his ‘enemies within.’
She tried to belittle Pete as well with the ‘what are you scared of?’ Oh, because you were a big, bad CIA agent, you are tougher than Pete who served his country, not just at Gitmo but in Iraq and Afghanistan? What an absolute brat.
She was assistant secretary of defense for International Security Affairs at the Pentagon during the Obama administration, so she is bitter and she is jealous. She is never going to get this role. Sorry, sister, somebody who is your age, who actually took even greater risks than you did, is going to be recognized now and is going to be running the agency that you were just a lower part of. You are going to have to suck it up. You can’t blame it on sexism. You can’t blame it on racism. It is just that you weren’t good enough and he is.
Go ahead and vote ‘no.’ You can do your little histrionics when he comes in for his updates as the secretary of defense, but he is getting through because somebody who is not hysterical, someone who does care about women’s issues, someone who has fought her entire career to protect women in the military – Joni Ernst – is going to vote for him.”
The Antidote
While New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren did not rise to the same level as Hirono, Duckworth, and Slotkin in Megyn’s view, she said, “overall, the women at the hearing embarrassed themselves on the Dem side.”
There was, however, a woman who did not. “Thank God we had Joni Ernst up there, who was calm, cool, and collected. She represented herself very well,” Megyn concluded. “She was more of a Margaret Thatcher-type. She wasn’t hysterical and she has had first-hand experience with these issues, so she had reason to be upset if she wanted to be.”
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 983 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.