Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seemed to forget that he’s no longer a Fox News host while justifying his and President Donald Trump’s decision to send troops into Los Angeles to put an end to protests over ICE immigration raids.
The secretary of defense went on a rant about the “thugs” and the “looters”—a beloved narrative of his old network—in the streets of LA, during a congressional hearing on Tuesday.
“We want to ensure that those rioters, looters, and thugs on the other side, assaulting our police officers, know that we’re not going anywhere,” Hegseth said in a video reposted to X, explaining that the deployment of thousands of National Guard members and 700 Marines is slated to last 60 days.
And while California Gov. Gavin Newsom has called Trump’s deployment “illegal,” Hegseth scrambled in front of the microphone Tuesday to justify any reason for sending thousands of military members to the West Coast.
California Rep. Pete Aguilar brought up Title 10 USC 12406 for the former broadcaster to mull over, asking Hegseth which of the three given reasons Trump was using to deploy active military members.
Out of the three, the first reason for deployment is in response to a foreign invasion. The second is because the U.S. government is in danger of a rebellion. And, thirdly, deployment would be because the president is unable to use regular law enforcement to execute law.
For Hegseth, he suggested that it “sounds like all three to me.”
“You’ve got millions of illegals and you don’t know where they’re coming from,” he said in a separate video posted to X. “They’re waving flags from foreign countries and assaulting police officers and law enforcement officers, that’s a problem.”
While the National Guard and the Marines have been deployed to parts of downtown LA, at the moment these men and women are limited in what they are able to do. Without declaring the Insurrection Act, the military members are meant only to support other federal workers, ICE agents, and protect federal property.
However, as Trump leans into aggressive language and calls the protesters “rioters” and “insurrectionists,” it is unclear if he intends to invoke the act or not. According to the Hill, Trump is certainly not against it.
“If there’s an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it. We’ll see,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “But I can tell you, last night was terrible. The night before that was terrible.”
Should he do so, active military members would have the ability to engage more with protesters by making arrests and making judicial decisions.
Unsurprisingly, his administration seems to be more concerned about which country’s flags people are waving and how much a burning self-driving Waymo vehicle costs than the $134 million it will cost just to send in the thousands of military members.