GOP Strategist Decries Senator He Helped Get Elected For Bowing to Pete Hegseth
Veteran Republican political strategist Stuart Stevens penned a scathing column in The New Republic on Monday expressing his deep disappointment with Sen. Roger Wicker’s (R-MS) management of Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing to become President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense.
Wicker, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, helped Hegseth through a brief confirmation hearing in his committee last week, which only allowed for one round of questioning. Stuart, who helped run Mitt Romney’s 2012 bid for the presidency, has broken with the GOP and been a fierce critic of President Donald Trump.
He wrote that while opposing Trump he “was careful not to criticize any former clients for their support of Trump,” but argued that “watching Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi defend Pete Hegseth at the latter’s recent confirmation hearing was just too much for me to remain silent.”
Stevens recalled his successful work in 2008 to elect Wicker and praised his character at the time, noting that “Roger and I come from the same world. Our fathers were prominent in the Mississippi legal establishment—his dad was a larger-than-life circuit judge, and mine was a founding partner of what is now Mississippi’s largest law firm.”
“I know Roger Wicker. He’s a good and decent man who would have nothing to do with a tattooed loudmouth desperate for attention who uses alcohol as an excuse to disrespect women,” Stuart went on to write, referring to some of the many allegations against Hegseth – the former Fox News weekend morning show host.
“In both the House and the Senate, Wicker devoted much of his career to strengthening the foundations of the alliances that are critical to U.S. national security. In January 2023, he took to the Senate floor to deliver a compelling and emotional appeal for the moral and political necessity of defending Ukraine: ‘Mr. President, Ukraine can win this war. Ukraine must win this war. But we and our allies have to do our part to help them,’” Stevens added, before kicking it up a notch, writing:
The Germans have a word—of course—for feeling the embarrassment of someone else: Fremdschämen, which translates as “external shame.” Fremdschämen washes over me when I see Wicker debasing himself by hand-holding the unqualified secretary of Defense nominee of Donald Trump, who was first elected with the help of Russia’s security services and hails Vladimir Putin as a “genius.”
Stevens went on to question Wicker’s motives and notes that the 73-year-old senator was reelected this year and won’t face another election or possible primary challenge until the “end of the decade.”
“What compels a man at the peak of a career to violate fundamental principles voiced over three decades?” Stevens asks of Wicker. “Some time ago, I had a going-out-of-business sale with respect to any optimism about my old party. Witnessing the debasing spectacle of Wicker’s support for Hegseth is like watching a friend drink himself to death. The sadness and pain are only enhanced by the knowledge that there is nothing to be done to stop the self-destruction,” Stevens adds, pulling no punches on his old friend and former client. He ends by quoting William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” a poem popular on the right, and wrote:
Wicker nailed it when he quoted Yeats to describe the emergence of Trump. But now, eight years later, the poem is not only about Donald Trump, it is about Roger Wicker.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Yes, the center did not hold.
Read the full article here.
