President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to serve as secretary of the U.S. Department of Defense is “not a serious selection,” a retired U.S. Air Force major general from Oxford said Thursday.
Jon “Tracer” Treacy, who briefly ran for U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 2019, said Trump’s choice for defense secretary, former television news host Pete Hegseth, lacks the character, experience and integrity to serve in such a crucial role in the government.
Worse, Treacy said, the president-elect’s proposed appointments to a host of top-level government jobs are “nothing more than a cavalcade of buffoons and clowns.”
The U.S. Senate is weighing whether to give its approval to the team Trump has proposed to oversee the federal government, with Hegseth among the most controversial nominees.
Hegseth, a combat veteran, has been bombarded with allegations that he drinks too much, abuses women and doesn’t have the background to oversee the nation’s huge military establishment.
Hegseth as defense secretary would be “an absolute affront” to active-duty military personnel and their predecessors who have preserved the nation’s freedom, Treacy said.
“It’s abominable,” he added.
Hegseth told senators this week he would bring “a warrior ethos” to the job and refocus the Pentagon on its primary mission: to defend the United States.
Vice President-elect JD Vance said on social media recently that “for too long, the Pentagon has been led by people who lose wars. Pete Hegseth is a man who fought in those wars. We’ve got his back.”
That message appeared to resonate with may Republican senators who hold his fate in their hands.
U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, told Hegseth at Tuesday’s hearing on his nomination that “I just want to say for all the talk of experience and not coming from the same cocktail parties that permanent Washington is used to, you are a breath of fresh air.”
Neither of Maine’s senators, Republican Susan Collins and independent Angus King, has said how they plan to vote on Hegseth.
‘Red flags’
Treacy, a former commander of a joint task force assigned to localities and states during national emergencies, said he is worried about the nation’s future after seeing so many Trump nominees who don’t have sufficient backgrounds to carry out the responsibilities attached to their proposed posts.
“There are a lot of red flags waving here,” Treacy said.

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to be Defense secretary, appears Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee for his confirmation hearing at the Capitol in Washington. Associated Press
He said that by the time Trump reluctantly left office in 2021 after losing the election to Democrat Joe Biden, he had been “told no” more often in his single term in office than he’d experienced in his entire previous life.
Now, Treacy said, “He is going to do everything in his power to try to make ‘no’ go away.”
If Trump can assemble a Cabinet of inept loyalists, the retired general said, it would allow him to “do anything he wants” after he takes the oath of office on Monday.
That is a particular concern for a position as critical as the secretary of defense, said Treacy, a pilot who flew in combat operations in Libya and Iraq and ordered other fighter pilots during the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, to shoot down civilian airliners if they appeared to be under the control of terrorists.
Treacy said he is concerned that Hegseth, if tapped for the job, will move quickly to oust many top-level military leaders who refuse to show “sufficient loyalty” to Trump rather than to the Constitution.
That’s especially dangerous for the military, Treacy, but applies to the rest of the federal government as well.
He said Trump has “a clear strategy” to undermine the credibility of nearly every federal agency and department to the point where they wind up “incapable of doing their job.”
Treacy said ransacking the existing federal government must be part of a plan to “refashion government” more to the liking of the “very wealthy people” Trump surrounds himself with.
It’s not exactly an uplifting picture, he admits. “What I’m saying is a Debby Downer.”
But, Treacy said, he also sees reason to hope that people across the land will resist efforts to weaken the nation and strip away constitutional certitudes.
He said they need to seek out factual information, demand free and fair elections, and press political leaders to stand up for the country, not Trump.
In short, Treacy said, Americans “should do the right thing” and reject Hegseth and other nominees he sees as unqualified.
“What we do now is massively important,” Treacy said. “It’s critical.”
Asked why anyone should listen to him, Treacy recounted a lifetime of service to “protect our democracy” and the principles that undergird it.
He joined the military during the Cold War and served as the Soviet Union collapsed and America wound up in a fuzzier war against terror. All the while, he said, he stood with his fellow service members for freedom.
“I just have a deep and abiding respect for what it took to get us” through the nearly 250 years since Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, he said.
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