Pete Hegseth 'defiling' US military aided Trump's failures in Iran: ex-GOP strategist

Political analyst Steve Schmidt said the fallout from President Donald Trump's botched Iran war could haunt America for generations in the latest episode of his show, "The Warning," on YouTube.

Schmidt started by praising Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who called the Trump administration's Iran peace deal a disaster. "This will go down as a tremendous foreign policy blunder," Cassidy said. "Iran ends up stronger, our allies in the region are weaker."

Schmidt, a former Republican strategist, agreed, pulling no punches in his assessment of how the war was managed — and placing much of the blame squarely on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

"Pete Hegseth lost the war," Schmidt said bluntly. "He has wrecked the military, hollowed out its integrity, defiled it, and lost a war."

Perhaps most damning is the whiplash over Iran's missiles, Schmidt noted. The Trump administration once promised to destroy Iran's missile program entirely. Now, Trump himself is arguing Iran deserves to keep them. "Missiles aren't the problem," Trump said. "They hurt a little, but they don't blow up the planet."

Schmidt wasn't buying it. He pointed out that Trump spent roughly $80 billion fighting Iran only to turn around and offer the country $300 billion in reconstruction aid, a reversal that Schmidt compared unfavorably to the Obama-era Iran deal Trump once ridiculed.

The political damage appears to be piling up, Schmidt concluded. Recent Fox News polling puts Trump's net approval rating at minus 21 points, with independents sitting 55 points underwater on the president.

"The American people are going, what was the point of all of that?" Schmidt said.

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