When President Donald Trump chose Pete Hegseth for Defense secretary, incoming officials knew they’d need to surround the inexperienced Fox News host with accomplished staff who could handle the nation’s largest bureaucracy. Hegseth would be the show horse, they figured, and others at the top would keep the Pentagon on track.
What happened was the opposite. Hegseth surrounded himself with advisers who quickly turned into vicious rivals for power — whose bitter brawl has now unraveled into revenge power plays, surprise firings, accusations of leaking, and embarrassing headlines that are blowing up the Pentagon, distracting from Trump’s agenda, and possibly jeopardizing Hegseth’s job.
The Rivalry’s Roots
Many administration feuds are driven by ideological or factional differences, splitting old-school conservatives from MAGA headliners and “America First” activists. That does not appear to be the case here: This one is all about personality conflict, according to interviews with nine current and former Defense Department officials as well as others close to the feud, granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive political issue. Hegseth’s closest advisers privately jockeyed for influence, creating festering distrust and gamesmanship that has rocked the world’s premier defense agency.
Unveiling the Feud
The extent of the feud, which has been previously unreported, helps explain the chaos that has eclipsed the Defense Department in recent weeks. And it affirms skeptics’ concerns that Hegseth lacked the management experience to run a large organization.
“There’s just a lot of tension, there’s a lot of bad blood,” said a person with knowledge of the feud. “And there’s a lot of people trying to assert dominance in an area where it’s very hard to do without cutting somebody else.”
The infighting became so ugly that Hegseth suspected the recent leaks to the media were an orchestrated attempt by his senior staff to make their rivals look bad, according to someone close to him, efforts that cast the secretary and his department in a negative light.
Clash of Titans
At the center was Joe Kasper, Hegseth’s departing chief of staff, who people familiar with the matter said created a toxic workplace culture and played an instrumental role last week in pushing out three top Pentagon officials. Those firings, they said, were an attempt to consolidate power. Kasper denied inappropriate behavior or having anything to do with the dismissals.
On the other side were the fired employees, trusted Hegseth allies. Those staffers — senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to the deputy Defense secretary — were considered Hegseth’s closest advisers and maintain their innocence.
Escalating Tensions
“We had people who had personal vendettas against us,” Caldwell told Tucker Carlson in an interview Monday night. “They weaponized the investigation against us.”
Kasper argued in an interview that he was doing what he was ordered to do by Hegseth: start an investigation into recent leaks.
The Pentagon denied a clash of personalities but otherwise declined to comment.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted the fired officials leaked to the media and that there was a “smear campaign” within the Defense Department to harm Hegseth’s reputation.
“It’s been clear since day one of this administration that we are not going to tolerate individuals who leaked to the mainstream media, particularly when it comes to sensitive information,” she said Tuesday at a press briefing.
Carroll, Caldwell, and Selnick declined to comment.
Leadership Under Scrutiny
Hegseth called Kasper a “great American” on Tuesday and affirmed his support for him. “He’s certainly not fired,” he said on Fox & Friends. “You make changes over time.”
The eruption of infighting at the Defense Department adds to a slew of brutal headlines for the Pentagon chief. Hegseth is still facing fallout for sending sensitive details about military strikes in Yemen to national security leaders in a Signal chat that accidentally included a journalist, a report this week that he also sent them to his own family, and several other high-profile gaffes.
Concerns about Kasper running the Pentagon started almost immediately.
Questionable Leadership
A longtime aide and friend of indicted Rep. Duncan Hunter, Kasper was helping oversee his office when a series of scandals roiled the California Republican’s office. These included allegations that Hunter regularly drank heavily while serving in Congress. Investigators also inquired about relations he had with a young woman working in his office. He was eventually sentenced to 11 years in prison for misusing taxpayers’ funds. (He was pardoned by Trump in 2020.)
Kasper would later work at the Department of Homeland Security, the Navy, and the Air Force in the first Trump administration and as a lobbyist. But critics say he quickly ran into trouble with his new job at the Pentagon.
He was often late to meetings and developed a reputation for dropping the ball on critical tasks with little follow-up, according to three people who witnessed his behavior. Another person familiar with his management said he “lacked the focus and organizational skills needed to get things done.”
While some who know him say he was fun and charming, three of the people said he frequently berated officials in meetings and repeatedly referred to military officials by a lower rank.
And at times, Kasper’s detractors say his leadership seemed almost juvenile. He graphically described his bowel movements to colleagues in one high-level meeting, according to two people who were in the meetings.
During that meeting, “he turned [and] he goes, ‘Can I just tell everyone around this table that I just took an enormous bowel movement right before coming in here?’” according to two people who were present.
“People were like, ‘what? Like, this is a business meeting,’” the official said.
Kasper said the story was taken out of context, and that he instead joked that the team was “in major bowel-con,” a play on words suggesting they were in trouble.
Selnick was brought on as deputy chief of staff in March to deal with perceived problems in Kasper’s leadership, according to three people familiar with the matter. These people thought Selnick, a MAGA loyalist who worked with Hegseth years ago when he ran a nonprofit group, Concerned Veterans for America, could run the front office in case things with Kasper went sideways.
Hegseth also began to lean more heavily on Caldwell, who also worked with him at the nonprofit and had a reputation as a no-nonsense, type-A executor.
The leadership change created tension between Kasper and the others, according to three people serving in the Pentagon around that time.
“Kasper did not like that those guys had the secretary’s ear,” said a person familiar with the dynamic. “He did not like that they had walk-in and hanging-out privileges in the office. He wanted them out. It was a knife fight.”
Kasper denied that he had any issues with the other senior advisers.
Tensions between the group only further spiked last month amid a series of leaks that set everyone at the Pentagon — but especially Hegseth — on edge. Kasper’s critics say he used the chaos to settle scores with other Hegseth advisers, pushing for an investigation into the leaks and pointing the finger at his colleagues.
“When Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick took on many of his responsibilities at Hegseth’s direction, a rift deepened between Joe and them,” said one of the people. “After several weeks, Joe began trying to move them out apparently by bad-mouthing them to the secretary.”
Hegseth started to feel increasingly isolated and paranoid, according to two people close to him. Last week, it all caught up to the secretary. He fired some of his most senior staff, believing they were leaking.
Kasper emerged from the battle wounded. POLITICO reported Friday that he was stepping down from his top post for a new role.
