New York Times reporter and CNN contributor Maggie Haberman said Friday that Donald Trump doubled down on Pete Hegseth as his nominee for Secretary of Defense because no one in his orbit supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as his replacement.
Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault, mismanaging two veterans organizations, abusing alcohol, infidelity and called a serial “abuser of women” by his own mother.
Amid the, scandals, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was considering withdrawing Hegseth’s nomination and picking DeSantis, who challenged him for the 2024 GOP nomination for president.
In an interview on CNN’s AC360, Haberman said that while Trump “was tired of negative stories” about Hegseth developments behind the scenes halted his decision to replace the Fox News host with DeSantis.
“What changed was a couple of things. One was… Trump could not find a single person in his orbit, or even really outside of it, who liked this idea of making Ron DeSantis — the governor of Florida — the Defense secretary choice,” Haberman said in a clip highlighted by Mediaite.
“And it was not, you know, ‘We’re going to drop Hegseth, and we’re going to look for a bunch of other people.’ It was Hegseth or DeSantis at that point,” she continued. “And so, Trump was persuaded also after a call from Pete Hegseth to let Hegseth go out and see if he could fight his way past some of these stories.”
Haberman added that even though members of Trump’s orbit are still concerned about Hegseth’s chances of getting confirmed, “they are feeling vastly better about it today than they did a week ago.”
