MS Now Star Rips Pentagon Pete for Treating Soldiers Like ‘Trash’
Eric Lee / REUTERS MS Now’s Joe Scarborough has skewered Pete Hegseth’s priorities as the Secretary of Defense.
The Morning Joe host is slamming Hegseth for obsessing over DEI while American sailors are starving on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East—a failure he says should have already gotten him canned.
“This was abysmal planning, and any other Secretary of Defense would have been fired by now,” he said in a fiery tirade on Thursday.
“I’m not sure why he’s still there.” Trump, 79, has stuck by Hegseth even amid reports that the military is running dangerously low on defensive munitions needed to fend off Iranian strikes and as conditions have become so dire on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier that troops are reportedly trying to jump overboard .
Scarborough, a former Republican representative who served on the Armed Services Committee, was particularly incensed that Hegseth is still pushing his “warrior ethos” and traveling to photo ops while service members actively serving in a war zone are treated like “trash.” . @SECWAR “For everybody here—and for our friends in the press—what you see behind me is what the WARRIOR ETHOS looks like.
It’s what reestablishing it looks like.
IT DOESN’T HAPPEN IN THE HALLS OF THE PENTAGON.
IT DOESN’T HAPPEN IN THE HALLS OF CONGRESS.
IT HAPPENS IN TRAINING… pic.twitter.com/bvpGomhXzW — DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse) August 13, 2026 “This is what happens when you have a defense secretary that’s obsessed about the color of people’s skin, whether somebody is a man or a woman, testosterone levels, this obsession over DEI, and and and that’s all we ever hear about,” he said.
“And what we’re not hearing about is, well, the basics.
The basics always start with readiness.” He continued, “Readiness is men and women of the United States military militarily ready to go into combat if called upon.
And this is the exact opposite of what you do to make sure that they are prepared and ready to go, and this doesn’t have anything to do with toughness or this or that or the other.” The Lincoln, filled with 5,000 sailors and Marines , has entered its ninth month at sea with supplies running thin.
Loved ones of sailors have sounded the alarm about toilet problems, closed laundries, and shockingly poor rations.
Conditions are so dire that some military spouses have told the Military Times that sailors are attempting to take their own lives.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.thedailybeast.com — the content belongs to The Daily Beast.
