Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is weathering calls for his resignation thanks to the support of President Trump. But he may not be able to hold on for long.

Politico reports that some of Trump’s allies doubt whether Hegseth will be able to keep his job, with two anonymous sources telling the publication that he is still in hot water. One of them said that Hegseth may “implode on his own,” while the other said that Trump could get tired of the distractions from the former Fox News host’s tenure at the Department of Defense.

Three top Pentagon staffers were fired on Friday over leak concerns, one of them being Hegseth’s former chief of staff from his time at a veterans charity.

“Central Casting can become problematic if all they’re doing is generating questions of instability,” the second source said. “What’s so troubling about it is—it’s not like these were people that were forced upon Pete. They were his own guys he had to get rid of.”

According to Politico, Trump and Hegseth met privately on Sunday, where the president reportedly offered his support to the DOD chief, as he has done publicly. At the White House’s Easter Egg Roll Monday, Trump criticized Hegseth’s detractors.

“They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing, so you don’t always have friends when you do that,” Trump told reporters.

But NPR also reported Monday that Trump has begun the search for a new secretary of defense, following this weekend’s report that Hegseth shared details about U.S. airstrikes in Yemen in a private Signal chat last month that included his wife and brother while also sharing the war plans in another group chat containing The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

If NPR’s report is true, it suggests that Trump is so frustrated that he doesn’t care if Hegseth’s firing validates his administration’s critics. It also suggests that Trump would be willing to deal with another confirmation battle in the Senate.

“Trump goes to bat for people until the moment he flips on them,” said one of Politico’s sources. “That’s always a possibility.”

Republican Representative Byron Donalds was met with boos and jeers at his town hall on Monday, after refusing to answer a basic question about Elon Musk and DOGE.

“As a member of the Oversight Committee, what oversight are you imposing on Elon Musk and DOGE?” a constituent asked. The question was followed by over 10 seconds of cheering and applause. 

Donalds proceeded to explain how DOGE works rather than answer the question directly, insisting that Musk’s anti-woke, government-slashing operation was in the same vein as what former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama did with “special employees” in their own administrations.  

“In terms of oversight from Congress, that’s much more of an Appropriations [Committee] aspect,” Donalds said. “What DOGE is doing right now, is they’re going through every agency and they’re examining any contracts or any lack of efficiency in spending federal dollars. This is something that—”

The crowd began to groan and boo, but Donalds continued. 

“Like I said, what they are doing is under the direction of the president of the United States. If you’re gonna talk about what oversight is doing, we actually have to let the DOGE uh, uh, Committee, the DOGE Department, actually finish its work,” Donalds explained. “What they are examining right now is inefficiency in the federal system. This is something that President Obama wanted to do when President Obama was elected—”

This nonanswer was met with even more frustration from the town hall crowd. 

“You can boo if you want to, but those are the facts,” Donalds replied.

Donalds essentially admitted that he’d be doing absolutely nothing to monitor DOGE as an Oversight Committee member. Trump already gave DOGE permission to fire thousands of people and start cuts to Social Security, so everything must be fine. 

Donald Trump blew his top at the Supreme Court Monday, complaining that the high court, along with the rest of the judicial system, is getting in the way of his removing “criminals from our Country.”

The president took to Truth Social to vent after the nine justices voted 7–2 over the weekend to block Trump’s deportation of Venezuelan immigrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act without due process.

“My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela, or any other Country, for that matterPeople that came here illegally!” Trump posted.

The president scoffed at the notion of every immigrant receiving due process before deportation.

“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years. We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do,” Trump added.

Trump is upset that his mass deportation efforts are running into legal hurdles. The self-proclaimed “law and order” president, however, seems to think that people he doesn’t like don’t deserve the right to due process but only the punitive measures of the law.

If Trump is concerned that there are too many people to stand trial, perhaps he should have increased funding for immigration courts and judges rather than divert so many government........

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