Lost wars come with an old arithmetic. The voters give their verdict, and then somebody has to carry it, and the man at the very top almost never does. On Tuesday Americans gave the Republican Party a crushing midterm defeat, and the Democrats took both the House and the Senate. By Wednesday, as Al Jazeera reported, calls for accountability were coming from the administration’s critics and from inside the administration too, and they were settling on one office at the Pentagon: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s.
The grievance had a name: the US-Israel war on Iran.
The war on the ballot
Vice President JD Vance was blunt about it. “The reason we lost is the war,” he said, adding: “Any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.” He did not say whose war it was. Many Republicans will not blame President Donald Trump directly, so they blame the man who is seen as having pushed him into it. Hegseth’s critics, some Republicans among them, say he urged the attack on Iran with no exit strategy. He is accused of making the affordability crisis worse and of burning through expensive munitions. Republican sources speaking anonymously to CNN said he overstated America’s power to overwhelm Iran and kept pressing for escalation after it was plain that force would not bring Tehran to surrender.
“You can already see the knives out for Secretary Hegseth,” said Paul Musgrave of Georgetown University in Qatar.
A reflection, offered only as one: in a court, the minister exists partly so that the sovereign never has to be wrong. When the harvest fails, the steward is dismissed and the throne stays where it is.
The congressman with nothing left to lose
The first knife was drawn before the election. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican, filed eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth in September. On Wednesday he called on the secretary to resign, and he told CNN he means to force a vote when Congress returns next week. CNN cited several Republican sources who expect it to pass. Massie lost his May primary to a challenger Trump backed, so this session is the only time he has left.
His charges go further than Iran. Hegseth’s “constitutional violations extend beyond the illegal war in Iran,” Massie said, accusing him of “abusing the power of his office to ignore congressional war powers resolutions”. The articles also cite the kidnapping of foreign leaders and retaliation against critics for their speech. In January the United States seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, and flew them to New York to face charges that include drug trafficking. They deny the charges. Venezuela, Al Jazeera notes, has since functioned in effect as a US protectorate. Massie is a familiar dissenter: he has opposed military aid to Israel, pushed for the release of the Epstein files and voted against Trump’s tax bill.
Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina speaks with the bitterness of a man who once helped. He called his January 2025 vote to confirm Hegseth the “biggest regret of my career.” Last month he urged Trump to fire the secretary over “inept management of the brave men.” Now he says Hegseth faces “a reckoning” in the lame-duck Congress, and that Trump may not get Pentagon funding while Hegseth stays. That Congress has 60 days left to live.
The arithmetic of the Capitol
Impeachment in the House needs only a simple majority. In the outgoing chamber the Democrats hold 214 seats and need a handful of Republicans to reach 218. Massie’s vote is meant to win them over. In the House that sits in January the Democrats have 240 seats confirmed so far, their largest majority since at least 2008, and they would need no Republicans at all.
The Senate is a different matter. Conviction takes two-thirds, or 67 votes. The Democrats will hold at most 56 seats in the new Congress, so they would need at least 11 Republicans. That threshold is why Trump was acquitted twice. Only two cabinet secretaries have ever been impeached, William Belknap in 1876 and Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024, and the Senate acquitted both.
The Democrats have been preparing for this. Before the vote, Semafor reported that the party was reluctant to impeach Trump but had come together around Hegseth, and that House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries wanted the secretary fired and said Democrats “haven’t ruled anything out.” Representative Yassamin Ansari of Arizona has filed her own articles. Representative Mike Levin told Foreign Policy that “Hegseth took us into this war without asking and kept it going with no vote or no consideration of the votes to end it.” Some in the party want to weigh impeachment against cost-of-living concerns such as healthcare, and the gavels they have just won also bring the subpoenas they had been preparing.
The palace
The White House is not sending one message. Trump has called Hegseth a champion of the Iran war and said he is not thinking of replacing him: “I think he’s doing a very good job.” But CBS News, citing sources, reported that the president has been asking advisers whether Hegseth should stay, while other sources said he has not decided to replace him. The Pentagon, according to Military.com, says Hegseth “won’t back down.” Yet the Washington Times reported that he has made few friends in the building and has often alienated senior commanders, which could leave him with few defenders if the articles move.
Only five weeks before the vote, Hegseth ordered the military to defend the midterms. The midterms have now judged him instead.
Richard Johnson of Queen Mary University of London expects ambitious Republicans to present themselves as “more MAGA than Trump.” He thinks they may argue that the president’s circle gave way to the “deep state” on Iran, “betraying the promise of no new wars”, and that the party may now turn to anti-establishment candidates. In that version of events the war was never the movement’s idea. It was something done to the movement by insiders, and one of those insiders has a desk at the Pentagon.
Massie’s vote is expected next week. After that, the outgoing Congress has 60 days left.