MY Columns

Pete Hegseth: Yes, Virginia, there is still a Santa Claus

If there's one thing never-Trumpers need this holiday season - and, remember, we are the majority of Americans! - it's a bit of good cheer. Here it is.

First, let's not kid ourselves. These are still perilous times. Every day, Donald Trump does something more outrageous, more destructive, more un-American - and gets away with it. In the last few weeks alone, he's launched an illegal war against Venezuela, blowing up 23 small boats and intercepting an oil tanker on the high seas; declared France, Italy, Germany, and Spain America's new enemy; pardoned the former president of Honduras convicted in helping smuggle tons of cocaine into the United States; torn down the East Wing of the White House; sent the military into Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis and New Orleans; unleashed ICE to track down and arrest brown-skinned American citizens; admitted he would personally intervene in the competition between Netflix and Paramount over who would buy Warner Brothers in order to kill CNN. And announced the EPA is loosening rules on exposure to formaldehyde, which is just what families need, instead of lower grocery prices.

Sheesh! It's too much to keep up with. There's not enough outrage to go around. As the New Yorker's Susan Glasser recently wrote, the "new normal is we have to forget about yesterday's scandals in order to make room in our brain for tomorrow's."

However, as bleak as it is, I see glimmers of hope, no matter how faint, in two places: Trump's political problems and personal problems.

Start with the political. Almost every candidate Trump endorsed this year lost. He lost in the Virginia race for governor, the New Jersey race for governor, the mayor's race in New York City - and this week he lost in the mayor's race in Miami. In a stunning win, Eileen Higgins became the first Democrat to lead Miami in almost 30 years, trouncing Trump-endorsed Emilio Gonzalez 59 percent to 41 percent.

Democrats also won down-ballot races: flipping two state Senate seats in Mississippi; electing two Democrats to the Georgia Public Service Commission; flipping 13 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates; and confirming three Democrats to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The only race a Trump-endorsed candidate won was last week's special congressional election in Tennessee. But, even there, Republican Matt Van Epps only won by 9 points in a district Trump carried by 22.

The numbers don't lie. Trump's a political loser, and everybody knows it.

But Trump's also in trouble on the personal front. There are signs he's suffering from both physical and mental decline. While the White House is in total denial, two headlines generated a lot of news this week. The Express blared: "White House in State of Panic as Trump Keeps Falling Asleep." And the Drudge Report asked: "Why Hasn't His Hand Healed?"

Twice this week, Trump was caught on camera dozing off. During a three-hour Cabinet meeting, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio was praising his foreign policy prowess, Trump, sitting next to him, slumped back in his chair with eyes closed, clearly catching a few z's. He also dozed off the next day while hosting leaders of Rwanda and the Congo. Looks like "Sleepy Joe" has been replaced by "Dozing Don."

Also caught on camera, and tracked for months by the Drudge Report, Trump often wears a bandage on his right hand, which also appears swollen. The White House shrugs it off as the result of shaking so many hands, but several medical professionals have raised questions about signs of serious venous insufficiency. He was spotted with one or two bandages on his right hand every day last week.

And then there's Trump's mental health, or lack thereof. For years, leading psychiatrists have warned that Trump is mentally unfit to be president, which is more and more evident each passing day. Any doubts about his mental illness disappeared after a 488-word rant Trump released in the middle of the night, December 10, on Truth Social.

It's not enough to read it. As MS-NOW's Philip Bump said, you have to hear it out loud to make "the bonkers-ness sink in." So here, dear friends, thanks to AI, is a link to the president of the United States howling at the moon. Listen and cringe.

If the CEO of any company acted that way, he'd have been escorted out of the office by health professionals in white coats.

So, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. The wheels are starting to come off the Trump train. Just not fast enough.

You will know him by his friends

Nothing was more important than family in the small town of Delaware City, Delaware, where I grew up. Our extended family, the Cook Cousins, numbered in the dozens. And whenever the whole clan - grandparents, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, grandchildren, cousins - got together, especially after maybe the second round of drinks, we always broke out in song.

Most of the adults had a favorite song which, with little coaxing, they would perform every time. Uncle Blondie's was "Autumn Leaves." Aunt Kass was famous for her "Ave Maria." My father had his own favorite, an old English pub tune called "The Pig." I've no idea where he first heard or learned it, but he belted it out with glee. I can still hear him singing it:

It was an evening in November,

As I very well remember,

I was strolling down the street in drunken pride,

But my knees were all a-flutter,

And I landed in the gutter

And a pig came up and lay down by my side.

Yes, I lay there in the gutter

Thinking thoughts I could not utter,

When a colleen passing by did softly say:

'You can tell a man who boozes

By the company he chooses'--

And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

After which, we would all laugh and applaud and my father would take his bow. He never explained the meaning of his ditty. He didn't have to. It was clear to all: You can tell who a man is by his friends.

I couldn't help but think of that man lying in the gutter with a pig when I saw President Trump roll out the red carpet and a military jet flyover to welcome Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to the White House this week. Remember: this is the man who came to power in 2017 by locking up hundreds of wealthy Saudis in a Riyadh hotel until they agreed to let him become the country's de-facto leader. And while he's applauded for letting women drive and go to the cinema, this is also the leader of a country where independent journalists are arrested or "disappeared," where political opposition is forbidden, where beheading is the preferred form of execution, and which still does not recognize Israel.

Remember also this is the leader who, according to our own CIA, personally approved the gruesome murder and dismemberment of American journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Yet when an ABC reporter raised that issue to Trump and MBS in the Oval Office, Trump berated her for "embarrassing our guest," threatened to cancel ABC's license, and waved it all off - the murder of an American journalist! - with the disgusting comment "Things happen."

Of course, MBS is only one of Trump's best buds. Don't forget Vladimir Putin, whom Trump calls "highly respected" and under whose rule, as described by Senator Bernie Sanders: "There is no freedom of speech. Protests are violently suppressed. Tens of thousands of people are imprisoned for speaking out against his rule. And the bravest and most prominent dissidents - people like Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov and Sergei Magnitsky - are murdered outright." And whose forces have killed some 14,000 civilians in Ukraine.

Earlier, in July 2018, Putin also got the special MBS treatment when Trump said he didn't believe the CIA when it concluded that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 election. "President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be," he sniffed.

Then, of course, there's convicted sex pervert Jeffrey Epstein, whom Trump hung out with, chased women with and welcomed at Mar-a-Lago - for 15 years! Epstein's gone, but Trump's already rewarded Ghislaine Maxwell, his partner in crime, by transferring her from a federal prison in Florida to a new country club facility in Texas and has said he's open to issuing her a presidential pardon.

With friends like these! It's so true. You can tell who a man is by his friends. A ruthless dictator, a convicted pedophile and a man accused by the CIA of approving the murder of an American journalist. I'll leave it up to you. You tell me what those three friends tell you about Donald Trump.

Jeffrey Epstein comes back to haunt Donald Trump

He had an impressive career as U.S. senator, Senate majority leader, White House chief of staff and ambassador to Japan, but, above all, Tennessee's Howard Baker is remembered for one question he asked in 1973 as Republican vice-chair of the Senate Select Committee investigating the Watergate break-in: "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

Back then, that was the big question for Richard Nixon about Watergate. Today, that's the big question for Donald Trump about Jeffrey Epstein. According to emails released this week, we now know the answer: Trump knew a lot more about Epstein than he's willing to admit.

For starters, let's remember: The Epstein scandal's not something Democrats laid on Trump. This is a problem he created for himself. In 2024, J.D. Vance, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino - all of whom are now leaders of the Trump administration - accused Democrats of covering up a pedophile ring led by Epstein and demanded release of the "Epstein files." Which candidate Trump promised to do, if elected.

Then, suddenly, once in the White House, Trump reversed course. No longer calling it a coverup, Trump dismissed the whole Epstein matter as a "Democratic hoax." On his orders, Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to release the Epstein files. Trump begged his supporters to stop talking about it. And Speaker Mike Johnson shut down the House of Representatives for six weeks to avoid having to vote on a bipartisan resolution to release the files.

All of which puzzled and angered many members of Trump's MAGA base, and raised the obvious question: Why? Why the change of course? Why not release the Epstein files? What are they afraid of? As even Trump's best bud Elon Musk said, it must be because Trump's name is all over the files. That's why Bondi wouldn't release them.

Bingo! As the just-released emails prove, Musk was right.

Democrats released three bombshell email exchanges. In the first, when many leading New Yorkers were being questioned in the early days of the investigation into his sex ring, Epstein told his top aide Ghislaine Maxwell: "I want you to realize that the dog that hasn't barked yet is trump ... (name of victim) spent hours at my house with him." Maxwell replied: "I've been thinking about that."

In the second exchange, Epstein tells journalist Michael Wolff that Trump, now president, is wrong in insisting he knew nothing about what he, Epstein, was up to: "Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop" (recruiting them from Mar-a-Lago). In a memo to himself on Feb. 1, 2019, Epstein wrote: "Trump knew of it, and came to my house many times during that period," then adding: "He never got a massage."

In the third set of emails, Wolff warns Epstein that CNN might ask Trump about his relationship to him in an upcoming debate. What should we do? Wolff advises: "I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn't been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt."

So what do those emails tell us? They do not prove that Trump had sex with underage girls. In fact, in a 2016 deposition, victim Virginia Giuffre testified: "He didn't partake in any sex with any of us."

But they do prove that everything else Trump said about the Epstein affair is another big, fat, Trump lie. He was Epstein's close friend. He did hang out at Epstein's house. He did fly on Epstein's plane. He said in 2002 he knew Epstein liked women "on the younger side." He once told adviser Roger Stone how Epstein's "swimming pool was full of beautiful young girls." He knew that Epstein and Maxwell were recruiting young girls to entertain men in New York, New Mexico and on Epstein's private island. And he never asked himself why?

Now here's the worst part: He did nothing about it! He knew Giuffre was underage when Maxwell recruited her from Mar-a-Lago. But he never alerted authorities. He looked the other way.

It's pretty clear that's why Trump's fighting so hard not to release the Epstein files. Because, while they might not prove he was Epstein's accomplice, they will prove he was Epstein's enabler. Release the files!