When “Fox & Friends” weekend host Peter Hegseth sat before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday morning, he did so under a cloud of accusations and allegations.

Officials barred Hegseth, a major in Minnesota’s National Guard, from President Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration detail, citing tattoos on his chest and arm appearing to compare America’s Middle Eastern wars to the Crusades. Hegseth was said to have chanted “Kill All Muslims!” while drunk in an Ohio bar, The New Yorker reported. Former coworkers of his said he was loudly, repeatedly drunk in public. And the most glaring claim against him wasn’t so much the chanting as his alleged rape of an organizer at Concerned Veterans for America.

President-elect Donald Trump nominated Hegseth, most recently a weekend host of “Fox & Friends,” to serve as defense secretary on Nov. 12, 2024. Word of the sexual assault accusation aired on NPR nine days later. Yet the Wall Street Journal reported that these allegations took the incoming White House completely by surprise.

A second nominee, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for Health and Human Services, stands accused of sexually assaulting a teenager who worked for him as a babysitter. Kennedy apologized to the woman, via text, in the wee hours of the morning after the allegation ran in Vanity Fair. He also reportedly bragged about possessing lewd photographs of a New York magazine reporter to friends, sparking the unraveling of her personal and professional life.

A third, former Florida U.S. Rep. Matthew Gaetz, dropped Trump’s bid to make him attorney general when House Republicans corroborated reports he’d paid a 17-year-old girl for sex.

And a fourth, World Wrestling Entertainment executive Linda McMahon, finds her nomination for education secretary muddied by questions over WWE’s handling of sex abuse claims against employees. 

Students and professors on Temple’s campus are largely fearful of Trump’s shaky selections for cabinet positions during his return to the White House on Jan. 20. Hegseth, Kennedy and McMahon are all expected to secure the votes necessary for confirmation, The Hill reported. Still, leaders at Temple worry about inexperience, character and the personal history of a number of the selections. 

“I think the incoming administration’s priorities are pretty clear, just by who’s at the top of it,” said senior political science major Ray Epstein.

A New York grand jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and battery in the rape of advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store dressing room, Epstein noted. Eighteen women have in the last nine years accused Trump of sexually assaulting or harassing them. The once-and-future president is on tape, saying his fame entitled him to grab women by their private parts.

Still, Trump is in line for a promotion himself, Epstein pointed out — to the presidency of the United States.

Epstein serves as Temple Student Government’s president. Last Tuesday, however, she spoke as founding president of Student Activists Against Sexual Assault. 

At colleges and universities, student conduct officials often dissuade victims from reporting sex crimes, Epstein said. 

“[It’s] so that they’re not considered to be ‘the rape school,’” Epstein said.

A government awash in misconduct claims, she argued, could turn that pressure into national policy with minimal effort.

Jay Lockenour, a professor of history and scholar of military culture, spent the 2013-14 academic year as a lecturer at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado — a hotbed for the sort of religious sentiments apparent in Hegseth’s tattoos that also plays host to the evangelical media powerhouse Focus on the Family.

Most of the Christians Lockenour encountered at Air Force were consummate professionals, he said. But some really did merge the quest for Christian dominion with more standard martial goals, Lockenour recounted. 

There’s no telling how such a reading of Scripture could influence their conduct in uniform, said Lockenour, the grandson of Methodist ministers.

That didn’t make Hegseth a contemporary crusader.

“A cross is a religious symbol,” Lockenour said. “If you light it on fire, it becomes something else entirely.”

In other words, understanding an image’s context is often as important as the visual itself.

Lockenour brought the same lens to Hegseth’s ink — the Crusades-era cross on his chest, the period slogan “Deus Vult” on his Fox News-spec bicep, the colonial-era musket crossed with a modern firearm, the thirteen-star U.S. flag. 

In isolation, they could hold individual, innocuous meanings. Taken together with, say, the rise of right-wing militias in the late 2010s and that liquor-logged barroom incantation, the likely next Defense secretary’s body art could herald the rise of a theocrat to the headship of the Pentagon.

And all that still leaves unsaid many of the concerns circling other Trump administration picks — for example, Kennedy’s view that raw milk is fine while fluoridated water is not amid attempts by a top advisor to revoke FDA approval of the polio vaccine.

Call it MAHA, “Make America Healthy Again.” Call it Man-Goop, with all due respect to Gwenyth Paltrow’s alt-life-health brand. Or call it crazy. No matter: Kennedy’s legions of believers span the political spectrum, and he’ll almost certainly take charge of public health policy in the spring. 

Or consider the case of Lt. Col. Tulsi Gabbard of the Hawaii National Guard. Many of her fellows-in-arms note she served her country honorably in Iraq — and continued to serve, honorably, as she climbed the ranks of congressional Democrats in the early-and-mid 2010s. But Gabbard’s service in Iraq left her with a Chamberlain-grade distaste for war, and she raised eyebrows in Washington by defending Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. 

When former secretary of state Hillary Clinton questioned Gabbard’s loyalties during her 2020 campaign for president, it was the beginning of a yearslong exile into political homelessness. 

Gabbard — who, not for nothing when tracing her rightward arc, also moonlights as a fitness influencer — morphed into a Trump-backing Republican after leaving Congress in 2021. She routinely guest-hosted Tucker Carlson’s high-ratings Fox News program, even outlasting Carlson on the network’s payroll. She addressed Trump’s infamous Madison Square Garden rally and sat with his triumphal entourage at UFC 309 in the same building. 

Still, even some Republicans balked when Trump nominated Gabbard to serve as his Director of National Intelligence — essentially, a conduit between the White House and the various intelligence services. The administration didn’t initially submit her to an FBI background check, either.

New York Times columnist David Brooks chalked up the scandal-plagued hiring to the president-elect’s belief that such nominees would have no choice but to serve him. The rise of Gabbard, Kennedy, Hegseth and Gaetz certainly represent a broader trend: Their main qualification appears to be that they’ve spent a great deal of time touting Trumpism on TV.

New to governance in his first administration, Trump often took personnel recommendations from Republican insiders — filling the ranks of the federal government with officials who occasionally rebuffed his orders.  

But the president-elect enters his second go-round atop a wire-to-wire election win, having stunned his critics into silence and meek complicity. This time, he’s removed appointees long viewed as apolitical — forcing out the leaders of the FBI, the IRS and the U.S.-run international radio network Voice of America. 

Moot is the baggage long referenced by critics left and right. The eternal campground of the “Deep State” is set to be replaced by luggage of Trump’s own choosing; in its loyalty to him, it’s Louis.

Political science professor Michael Hagen traces the origins of the civil service in an introductory course. Before the Civil War, he noted, incoming presidents offered government jobs to loyalists. But the killing of crusading anti-corruption president James A. Garfield moved Congress to insulate swaths of the federal workforce from partisan graft. 

To most chief executives, the civil service proved vital, if often frustrating, partners in governance. Then came Trump, a political outsider elected on a promise to upend Washington’s ways. To him, such “bureaucrats” represented an insidious “deep state,” stonewalling popular policies in a silent, undemocratic power grab. 

In the fall of 2020, Trump White House officials proposed lifting civil service protections in a sweeping executive order known as Schedule F. The president-elect’s restoration to power could embolden him to end the civil service altogether, Hagen said. 

“It’s a big population: Employees of the federal government whose jobs do not depend on implementing the policies that the president would like to see implemented,” Hagen said. 

The problem, he continued, is that presidents enter office by the hand of the people; bureaucrats generally don’t. 

“When we elect a new president, people expect things to change,” Hagen said. “And if the bureaucracy is hell-bent on making sure nothing changes, the president can’t always do a lot about that.” 

Not every change, of course, is welcome.

Trump spent the last days of his first term chafing against the guardrails of the U.S. government, jonesing to overturn the results of the 2020 election any way he could. In his second go-round, the barriers might fall altogether. 

November’s victor spent early January threatening to annex Canada; rename the Gulf of Mexico; repossess the Panama Canal; and seize the Danish island outpost of Greenland — the latter two by force of arms if necessary, he said. 

Lockenour, whose expertise covers German military history, said the thought of the State becoming wholly obedient to Trump worried him more than anything. Even if only parts of the government bend the knee to the new chief, he said, “It’s possible to do really serious damage.”  

Brief pause. “As the Nazis did.” 

Elsewhere, leaders had a hard laugh at Trump’s expense. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo conducted a Wednesday news conference in front of a map reading “America Mexicana” — a Spanish term that described much of North America in the 17th century.  A Canadian MP joked about annexing Minnesota — to give them free healthcare, she said.

Maybe they had a little too much fun: Last time the world lampooned Trump for wanting something, it was the presidency of the United States.