Rachel Maddow ripped into Pete Hegseth over his alleged “kill them all” order involving a drug boat strike, noting it was likely “impossible” the U.S. Secretary of War would survive the scandal.
The political commentator discussed Hegseth’s controversy during Tuesday’s episode of “Deadline White House,” where she told host Nicolle Wallace the situation was bad for everyone involved, not just Hegseth.
“It’s a catastrophe. I think,” Maddow said. “Pete Hegseth, it’s impossible to imagine that he survives this as Secretary of Defense. I think he must resign, and I think Republicans will ask for that ultimately once they investigate this. But this is a disaster for this generation of people serving in the United States military. And that is a tragedy more than a farce.”
Maddow also called out the greater Trump administration, stating she doesn’t understand the logic behind the targeted attacks against Venezuela.
“I’m not sure the administration has even bothered to try to come up with anything internally coherent, in terms of explaining why Trump has proclaimed that we are at war with Venezuela,” Maddow sounded off. “My sense is that they wanted to use the Alien Enemies Act to illegally arrest and deport people from this country who actually weren’t subject to deportation. They decided the Alien Enemies Act was a way to do that. They then realized the Alien Enemies Act required a war, so they declared a war. Then they needed a reason for the war, so they reverse-engineered some sort of reason for the war.”
However, Maddow denounced the Trump administration’s anti-drug defense, highlighting the president just pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was previously convicted of drug trafficking.
“So what are we doing there in the first place? Why are we blowing out of the water and killing people in boats with outboard motors, some of which aren’t even pointed towards the United States, let alone verified to have drugs on them,” she added. “Even if they did, if they were coming to the United States and they had the capacity to reach the United States, and they were filled with drugs, why isn’t it possible to just interdite them the way that we do with the Coast Guard, where you go and take the drugs and then put those people on trial and investigate and then follow the drugs to their source of origin and then take care of it.”
Per Maddow, none of the reasoning behind the boat strikes from the Department of War has made “any sense.”
“It feels like they bumbled themselves into a profoundly incoherent and illegal situation,” Maddow noted, “in which they decided the one true benefit they were getting out of all of it [was] that they were getting video game style visuals to play on Fox News and put on TikTok, and they liked that.”
Maddow’s commentary comes days after the Washington Post published a report that alleged Secretary Hegseth gave a “kill them all” order during a September strike on an alleged drug boat. Hegseth responded to the report by blasting it as “fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.”
He added: “As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’ The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people.”
Watch Maddow’s full commentary above.
