Every era has its great conundrums that great minds struggle with. Centuries ago, there was serious debate about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. In America, a heated discussion has gone on for decades about whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich.

But in this moment, there are few questions more certain to break the brains of even the most worthy intellectuals than this: Who is the worst member of Trump’s cabinet?

It may, indeed, be impossible to answer. Is it the former heroin addict HHS Secretary who snorted cocaine off of toilet seats, collects raccoon penises and opposes modern science? Is it the anti-environment Interior Secretary who seems as though he will not be happy until every American has an endangered species for breakfast each morning? Is it the deputy White House Chief of Staff who sleeps hanging upside down from barn rafters and subsists on a diet of the blood of small rodents? The invertebrate Secretary of State? The soon-to-be-official Attorney General who sees his job as mob lawyer to the capo di tutti capi in the Oval Office?

Increasingly, however, it is becoming clear that in terms of the profundity of the damage they have done to the United States, the sheer scope and scale of their manifold failures, the degree to which they are despised by those they are supposed to be leading, and the urgency with which we should all demand their removal from office, that no one compares to our posturing, vapid, incompetencemaxxing Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.

According to news reports, even Donald Trump, the architect of the chaos and corruption that defines this administration, has grown angry at Hegseth’s serial fuck-ups, with the Washington Post suggesting Trump blew up at Hegseth during the Cabinet’s summer excursion to Camp David. The fact that the Post’s report triggered fierce denials from the prevaricating hyenas in the White House press office and assertions by the president that the leaks that fed it amounted to nothing less than treason seems to confirm it is true.

That is because Hegseth, who has been a disaster since even before he was confirmed by the somnolent U.S. Senate, had committed the one sin for which there is no absolution in Trumplandia: he made the Jabba the President look bad.

Experts in the military and veterans of the Department of Defense with whom I have spoken consider Hegseth to be not only the worst SecDef in our history—by a mile. They also consider his record to be the most egregious example of defense management malpractice in our history. And that’s saying something since this is the country that gave us the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the........

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