When it comes to the potential Senate confirmation problems faced by Donald Trump‘s Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, Hegseth’s rumored drinking habits, his purportedly taboo tattoos, and questions surrounding an alleged sexual assault have dominated the discussion.
Even Republicans very loyal to Trump are said to be uncomfortable with Hegseth, whose conduct has elicited concern even from his colleagues at Fox News, both past and present.
But what gets conservative critic Ann Coulter most furious — and curious — about the range of scuttlebutt surrounding Hegseth’s nomination isn’t merely his lack of qualifications or reputation for drinking and, perhaps, abuse. (“Abuser” is the word his own mother used.)
No, what drives Coulter is that nobody is talking about what isn’t a secret or in doubt: it’s that Hegseth is a “serial philander,” as she says.
For Coulter, a lawyer who became a famous pundit during the Clinton administration in part by hammering away at Bill Clinton‘s cheating scandal, this is a sign that society has lost its bearings.
“No one is even mentioning the adultery!” an incensed Coulter told her podcast audience. “I’m sorry, this is liberals winning. This is liberals changing our culture in this subtle and insidious way where the only rules that matter are the feminist rules, not the rules that have protected women for millennia, like don’t cheat on your wife.”
[Coulter’s podcast: Unsafe with Ann considered the question: Does character matter? as she evaluated Trump’s nominees.]
According to Coulter, liberals — and not the example of Hegseth’s fellow philanderer Donald Trump — are responsible for the fact that Hegseth’s cheating has received so little attention. Standards have been lowered, she laments, debased by liberals who have failed to “protect” women. (Coulter’s statement echoes a Trump campaign promise that he would “protect women whether they like it or not.”)
Reviewing a few of Trump's proposed cabinet nominees (JUST BLOCK NOEM).
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) December 2, 2024
Plus, a throw down to Vivek Ramaswamy!
Free podcast here – https://t.co/OyLcQqz9yv pic.twitter.com/QpuEMiOSuN
Coulter said that with Hegseth: “Adultery hasn’t even been mentioned. And Pete Hegseth is…on his third marriage. Gets married, gets his wife pregnant, little kids at home or kid at home. I don’t know the details. Starts having sex with his producer, dumps his first wife, married his producer, gets her pregnant. Again, she’s either pregnant or she’s home with kid or kids, and then commits adultery on her. Dumps the second wife, and now, I guess is, let’s hope, [he’s] happily married to his third wife. The fact that it was three times…sleazy, and everyone at Fox News knew about it.”
Coulter asserted that questions about whether Hegseth’s extramarital sex was consensual miss the point by a large margin — because the person who didn’t consent was the wife who was cheated on in each case and it’s her consent that matters. Coulter doesn’t want a cheater heading up the DOD, whether his mistress was on board or not.
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