SerpApi.Org
A veteran political correspondent said he believes President Donald Trump will eventually need a “fall guy” for his war with Iran—and he may already have a choice in mind.
MS NOW host Jonathan Lemire said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could be made to answer for the Trump administration’s Middle East conflict, even though he’s in the president’s good graces for now.
Lemire revealed that insiders have told him Hegseth could soon take the fall if the war rages on.
“He still, I am told, is liked by the president. He does not have that many fans in the administration otherwise. That’s been the case from the very beginning,” Lemire said. “But at least right now, Trump is still on board.”
“But I am told that if this continues to bog down, if this—whether it’s a low-level conflict or a high-intensity resumption of war for months—Trump will eventually look for a fall guy, and it’s hard to imagine it being anyone other than Pete Hegseth,” he continued.
The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lemire said the commander-in-chief is in “a bind of his own making” as he struggles to find a way out of the war he launched nearly five months ago, leading to the deaths of several U.S. service members and sending prices soaring.
“This was a war that President Trump thought could be over in, whether it’s days or a handful of weeks at most. And now it has dragged along, and we’ve seen the real economic impact of it. He is someone who has been casting about desperately for months now to get out of this,” Lemire said on Tuesday’s Morning Joe.
Trump faced a fresh humiliation in his Iran war after The New York Times reported that Hegseth’s Pentagon withheld dozens of U.S. military injuries in Iran.
According to The Times, Iran launched three strikes against U.S forces in Jordan in the week before an attack that killed two soldiers and left another missing. But the Pentagon did not disclose those earlier strikes nor the casualties and damage they inflicted, the outlet reported.
The report sent Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell into a tailspin, branding the accusations “baseless and malicious” from “partisan hacks.”
“This is the most transparent Department of War in history,” Parnell said in a fuming statement, challenging “so-called journalists” to “stop the smears against the finest warfighting force on earth.”
“There’s a real lack of trust there, this sort of belligerence and hostility, open hostility from the Secretary of Defense and his spokespeople toward reporters at a time of war,” Lemire said.
