From Hastert to Hegseth

From Hastert to Hegseth January 15, 2025

I will never understand how Dennis Hastert allowed himself to become speaker of the House of Representatives.

Hastert — who became the longest-serving Republican speaker in history — was voted in by the Republican-controlled House in 1999, replacing Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was stepping down because his party’s ability to attack President Bill Clinton for his sex scandals and extramarital affairs was undermined by Gingrich’s own sex scandals and extramarital affairs.

Next in line for the speaker’s gavel was Rep. Bob Livingston, but Livingston withdrew his name because, as it turns out, he’d also had extramarital affairs (four that we know of).

And so the Republican Party turned to Dennis Hastert, a pious white evangelical — a Wheaton College graduate — with a 100% perfect score from the Christian Coalition. Party leaders double-checked with Hastert to confirm that he didn’t have any sex scandals lurking or other skeletons in the closet of the sort that derailed Gingrich and Livingston and Hastert was just, like, “Nope. None that I can think of. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just have to go mail these hush-money checks to the boys I sexually abused back when I was a high school wrestling coach.”

In their defense, most of the Republicans who voted to elect Hastert as their leader in Congress had no idea that Hastert had sexually abused a teenager or that he had been secretly paying for his victim’s silence for decades — some $1.7 million over the years. But Dennis Hastert knew this. And knowing this, he chose to step into the national spotlight anyway.

What was he thinking?

Here’s what I wrote about that back in 2015:

The astonishing thing to me about the Dennis Hastert story — the part I can’t manage to wrap my mind around — is that knowing this about himself, knowing his own secret history, he still chose to run for office and to place himself in the public eye.

… If you’re harboring the kind of dark secret for which you would be willing to pay millions of dollars to conceal or to compensate a victim, then running for public office just shouldn’t be an option you would ever consider. This isn’t the kind of thing some spinmeister can fix. Not the kind of thing that can be addressed in a press conference or a 60 Minutes interview and then laid to rest. This is the kind of career-ending debacle that will, if it comes to light, become the first sentence in your obituary — the shameful summary of your life.

So what was Dennis Hastert imagining would happen when he decided to run for office back in 1980? Maybe he thought a low-media, low-attention state legislature contest was somehow safe. But then he ran for national office in 1987, and then raised his profile even more by ascending through his party’s leadership in the House. When he put himself forward to become speaker of the House, he was following Newt Gingrich, who was then in an ethical cloud due to an extramarital affair. And he only was elected to the post after Rep. Bob Livingston was forced to withdraw because he, too, was revealed to have had an affair. So Hastert became speaker at a time when scrutiny of private lives was particularly high.

Maybe he figured he’d gotten away with it. But he had to know that others knew the truth — his victim, or, possibly, victims, if no one else. He had to know that his public life and political career were perched precariously atop a ticking time bomb back home in Yorkville, Illinois.

Hastert’s reign and eventual downfall happened in a previous era of American politics. In the Trump era, it has been said, the old rules no longer apply. Predatory crimes no longer need to be kept secret. They’re no longer disqualifying for a political career. Just look at how precisely similar Trump’s rap sheet is to Hastert’s — civil liability for rape, criminal conviction for fraud and for covering up hush money payments. Hastert spent 13 months in prison. Trump got a get-out-of-jail-free card from the justices he appointed.

One theory about the difference between Hastert and Trump is that shamelessness is a kind of superpower. If the shameless can’t be shamed, then their shameful behavior is no longer disqualifying.

Hastert’s problem, according to this theory, was not that his dark secrets were morally repugnant, but that they were secrets. If he’d just come out and said “Yeah, I did it, so what?” without any hint of remorse or repentance, then those secrets would have no power over him.

The actual substance of his actual deeds, according to this theory, is irrelevant. Shameless defiance is all that matters. Shameless defiance will convince the public that you’re a fighter, and it’s more important to be perceived as a fighter than whether or not you may have done whatever it is you were caught doing — raping a teenage boy or whatever.

I like to think this theory is wrong.

I like to think that repugnant choices and deeds and actions really do matter to public opinion and reputation.

I like to think that shame is an objective, external quality, not just an internal emotion — that the feeling of shame is an emotional acknowledgement of the actual, objective reality, a feeling that appropriately arrives as a consequence of having made shameful choices and committed shameful deeds.

But you can’t argue with success. Dennis Hastert’s reputation may now be shameful, but the superpower of shamelessness just got elected to a second term in office and it’s the animating theory driving Trump’s nominees for his cabinet secretaries.

Consider Pete Hegseth, the Fox News commentator chosen by Trump to be the next secretary of defense. Hegseth has a closet full of skeletons, but we know this because the closet door is wide open.

Hegseth is a particularly interesting case-study in the alleged superpower of shamelessness because he seems to have nothing else going for him. The former Fox News weekend host is utterly unqualified to serve as secretary of defense. He’s never run any large institution and he is both ignorant and incurious about — well, everything in the world that a secretary of defense might need to know:

Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a veteran herself … asked Hegseth to name three countries in ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), which I couldn’t do, but alas I’m not in the running to lead the U.S. military. Hegseth named three countries, none of which are in ASEAN. “I suggest you do a little homework,” Duckworth said.

Hegseth is also a spiraling alcoholic and a serial philanderer on his third rocky marriage. And he faces credible allegations of rape and sexual assault. Unlike the crimes of Denny Hastert, Hegseth’s misdeeds have been in all the newspapers. But where those secret crimes were threats to Hastert’s rise in politics, Hegseth’s public misdeeds seem to be his only qualification. He wasn’t nominated to be secretary of defense in spite of his shameful behavior, but because of it. He was chosen, and will be confirmed by Republicans in the Senate, because he is defiant and unrepentant and rejects the concept that people like him — or like them — should ever be subject to shame no matter what they do or who they do it to.

Hegseth’s confirmation may be perceived, for now, as confirmation of the new rules — as proof that the old rules that ultimately doomed Hastert no longer apply.

That may appear to be the case, for now, in the short run, but I don’t think it’s sustainable because I don’t think it’s true. The supposed superpower of shamelessness is based on the idea that people like Trump and Hastert can just refuse to accept the shamefulness of their deeds. This denial of reality just puts off what’s still coming for them. Their denial of shame is like a denial of gravity and, for now, they’re like the guy in the old joke who jumped from a 20-story building and said to those standing at a 10th-floor window “So far, so good.”

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