Speaking to the media as the government shutdown, which began on Tuesday, September 30, ground through its first weekend with no end in sight, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went nuclear on Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), hammering the woke Democrat for putting America at risk to slake his own vanity.
As background, the shutdown resulted in the wake of the Senate being unable to strike a deal on funding the government with a continuing resolution, as Democrats insisted that a massive amount of spending, most of which the Republicans characterized as unacceptable, particularly $200 billion in spending that would go toward healthcare for non-citizens, including illegal aliens.
While Democrats have continually insisted that their spending would not fund healthcare for illegal aliens, Republicans like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) have shown that the spending they want would, in fact, do so. Further, as shown by Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), Schumer seems to be getting pressured into the ridiculous shutdown for political reasons, as he doesn’t want to be outflanked to the left by AOC in the looming Senate race in New York that could see her unseat him.
In any case, SecDef Pete Hegseth skewered Sen. Schumer when commenting about the matter as the shutdown ground through its first weekend, declaring in comments to Fox News Channel that the Senate Minority Leader’s vanity and political wishes are putting Americans at risk.
Beginning, SecDef Hegseth said that the military would continue to do what it needs to despite the political dysfunction, saying, “So we’re going to do the job no matter what. The Navy and the Air Force, that’s the game we’re at here today. They’re going to do their job. They’re going to defend the nation. We’re going to continue training.”
Continuing, however, he noted that dysfunction of the sort shown by the Senate is putting American national security at risk because it limits the funding for key matters like training, saying, “But eventually you stop paying people, you stop doing things, you stop training. You’re less ready. You’re less capable of being mission ready. You can’t maintain everything.”
Turning from that major risk to who has caused it, SecDef Hegseth then went nuclear on Chuck Schumer, snapping, “So yeah, I mean, we’re dealing with a Chuck Schumer special right now. This is the vanity of one man who doesn’t want to look weak to his base, and so he’s trying to look tough.”
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Echoing President Trump in slamming Sen. Schumer for how he had made the bill a poison pill with his ludicrous demands, Hegseth then said, “Throw [a trillion and a half] dollars on top of what is otherwise a clean bill to fund the government to move along on a regular order, and so we’re going to fight through it.”
Concluding, Hegseth noted that what the Democrats are doing here is very dangerous and has put America at risk, saying, “But it’s unfortunate that the Democrats are pushing politics into something when all we want to do is defend the nation and we’re going to keep doing it.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: By I, DavidShankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2301835