How Roger Wicker Enabled the Dismantling of the U.S. Military
I’ve known the Senator for decades. Seeing him usher in Pete Hegseth and the purge of our military leaders is both tragedy and farce.
I know Roger Wicker. I worked for him when he ran for the Senate. Our fathers were both prominent in the Mississippi legal establishment — his dad a circuit judge, mine a founding partner of what became the state’s largest law firm. We both served as congressional pages for Democratic Mississippi congressmen. We’re fanatical Ole Miss fans.
The last time I saw him in person, before all this, was at the Mississippi Book Festival in the summer of 2016. Trump had just been nominated, which we both found alarming, and Roger pulled me aside and quoted Yeats. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” He said it with the troubled sadness of a man who meant it.
Roger Wicker has spent his career preparing to be Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Now that he’s accomplished that goal, he’s on track to be the most disastrous Chairman in modern history. It’s tempting to call this a Shakespearean tragedy but any cast with Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth is doomed to farce.
There is a particular kind of Washington failure that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t come with a dramatic moment of cowardice you can point to and say, “There, that’s when it happened.” It accumulates slowly, through small accommodations, through the quiet calculation that staying in the room is what matters, that proximity to power is a form of power itself. Roger Wicker has spent the last year and a half demonstrating what that kind of failure looks like when it reaches its logical conclusion.
He shepherded Pete Hegseth through a confirmation hearing before the committee that exists for one reason: to provide civilian oversight of the American military. That was a choice. Roger Wicker could have told Donald Trump to pick a serious person as Secretary of Defense, refusing to support Hegseth, and Trump would have done his TACO thing and backed down. Wicker could have done it quietly, behind the scenes.