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As Pete Hegseth faces a growing number of calls for his resignation post-Signalgate 2.0, the defense secretary has turned to blaming an age-old far-right enemy: the deep state.

In an interview with Fox & Friends Tuesday, the 44-year-old was asked whether there are some “deep-state forces” that want Hegseth booted from the Pentagon.

“They’ve come after me from day one,” Hegseth responded, repeating the excuse that any exposure of his own wrongdoing is just some kind of smear campaign from the left.

Chaos at the Pentagon ensued Sunday after The New York Times reported that Hegseth shared sensitive U.S. military plans about bombing the Houthis in Yemen in an unsecured Signal group chat—again. This time, the chat included his wife, brother, lawyer, and others in his personal circles.

Just hours after the Times’ report, Politico published an opinion essay by former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot detailing the department’s “full-blown meltdown” spurred by Hegseth over the last month. The frenzy has led both Democrats and Republicans to call for Hegseth’s ousting.

But Hegseth and Donald Trump are refusing to admit he did anything wrong, instead painting the defense secretary as MAGA’s latest victim in the left’s tirade against progress. “This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Monday.

Hegseth too doubled down while speaking to his former news network. “I’m here because the president asked me to bring war fighting back to the Pentagon. Every single day, that is our focus,” he said.

“If people don’t like it, they can come after me. No worries. I’m standing right here. The war fighters are behind us. Our enemies know they’re on notice, our allies know we’re behind them, and that, in this dangerous world, for the American people, is what it’s all about.” It would be a much stronger rallying cry if the administration behind him wasn’t single-handedly betraying every ally the United States has.

Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs will lead to a “significant slowdown” in global growth, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday.

The fund said that Trump’s “reciprocal tariff” policy, announced earlier this month—which placed at least a 10 percent tariff on nearly every import to the United States—would hurt everybody, the U.S. and its trading partners alike. “This on its own is a major negative shock to growth,” the IMF said of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, in the executive summary of its April 2025 World Economic Outlook.

The U.S. now faces a depressed growth forecast in 2025, down to 1.8 percent from 2.7 percent in January, according to the fund. The IMF’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, told reporters that the odds of a recession in the U.S. had increased from 25 percent in October 2024 to 40 percent. He said that the tariffs are a “negative supply shock for the economy imposing them.” Efforts to stymie inflation would also be undermined, the fund said.

The fund warned that the president’s radical reshaping of the U.S. economy would sink global economic expansion to an annual rate of 2.8 percent, a whopping half percentage point below what was projected in January. That rate is likely to rebound to 3 percent in 2026, but it would still be well below its average of 3.7 percent.

“The landscape has quickly changed,” said Gourinchas. “We are entering a new era as the global economic system that has operated for the last 80 years is being reset.”

The IMF serves as a lender of last resort for poorer governments, and has been the subject of some criticism over the terms of its debt-restructuring agreements, which demand austerity and privatization from borrower countries.

This newest economic outlook projection flies in the face of Trump’s repeated claims that his flurry of tariff announcements would make everyone rich, boosting the U.S. economy by crippling global supply chains to somehow promote domestic manufacturing.

Already, the effects on U.S. assets are pronounced. The stock market dropped yet again on Monday, the yield on a 10-year Treasury note rose to 4.89 percent, and the ICE U.S. dollar index—which measures the dollar against foreign currencies—sank more than 1 percent to its lowest level since March 2022. Trump has continued to level attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who last week predicted that the president’s tariffs would cause inflation to rise, and refused to cut interest rates.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is weathering calls for his resignation thanks to the support of President Trump. But he may not be able to hold on for long.

Politico reports that some of Trump’s allies doubt whether Hegseth will be able to keep his job, with two anonymous sources telling the publication that he is still in hot water. One of them said that Hegseth may “implode on his own,” while the other said that Trump could get tired of the distractions from the former Fox News host’s tenure at the Department of Defense.

Three top Pentagon staffers were fired on Friday over leak concerns, one of them being Hegseth’s former chief of staff from his time at a veterans charity.

“Central Casting can become problematic if all they’re doing is generating questions of instability,” the second source said. “What’s so troubling about it is—it’s not like these were people that were forced upon Pete. They were his own guys he had to get rid of.”

According to Politico, Trump and Hegseth met privately on Sunday, where the president reportedly offered his support to the DOD chief, as he has done publicly. At the White House’s Easter Egg Roll Monday, Trump criticized Hegseth’s detractors.

“They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing, so you don’t always have friends when you do that,” Trump told reporters.

But NPR also reported Monday that Trump has begun the search for a new secretary of defense, following this weekend’s report that Hegseth shared details about U.S. airstrikes in Yemen in a private Signal chat last month that included his wife and brother while also sharing the war plans in another group chat containing The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

If NPR’s report is true, it suggests that Trump is so frustrated that he doesn’t care if Hegseth’s firing validates his administration’s critics. It also suggests that Trump would be willing to deal with another confirmation battle in the Senate.

Republican Representative Derrick Van Orden seems to think Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s time serving in the Army National Guard justifies leaking national security information over text, not once but twice.

“I don’t want to hear from any healthy American that was of fighting age on 9/11 who did not join the military and deploy to combat talking shit about @PeteHegseth,” Van Orden wrote on X Monday. “You had your chance to serve our Nation when She needed you and you did not. Stand down, the Warriors will take it from here.”

A “warrior” would probably know better than to share sensitive information about a U.S. military attack in multiple group chats or bring along his spouse to classified meetings with foreign military officials. People aren’t mad at the 44-year-old defense secretary because they haven’t served in the military; they’re mad because he’s causing utter chaos as the Pentagon’s lead and putting the country’s national security at risk while he’s at it.

But Van Orden is a staunch Trump loyalist, and he’ll clearly use whatever weird excuse he can come up with to defend the president’s wildly inexperienced defense secretary, even as other GOP members begin to to turn on him.

“The military should always pride itself on operational security. If the reports are true, the secretary of defense has failed at operational security, and that is unacceptable,” Republican Representative Don Bacon told Axios about Hegseth Monday. X users in Van Orden’s comments shared similar concerns.

Senator Ron Johnson may now be a 9/11 truther.

The Republican and senior senator representing Wisconsin told right-wing commentator Benny Johnson on the latter’s podcast Monday that he has questions about the official story of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Specifically, the senator echoed a conspiracy theory about the collapse of Building 7, suggesting that the building on the World Trade Center complex fell as the result of a controlled demolition and attacking the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s investigation into the collapse.

“I don’t know that you can find structural engineers other than the ones that had the corrupt investigation inside NIST that would say that thing didn’t come down in any other way than a controlled demolition,” the senator said.

“Within these agencies, a lot of them are going to cover their tracks and cover things up and destroy a lot of evidence,” the senator noted, alleging a government cover-up. “It’s gonna be very frustrating for the American public because this is their information. They deserve the truth. It’s been hidden from them way too long.”

The senator said he expects there to soon be congressional hearings on the attacks, and praised the podcaster for “opening up the aperture on 9/11.”

“I know you and I are both considered conspiracy theorists, but that’s exactly how they keep this stuff covered up,” the senator said.

The senator was narrowly reelected in 2022, facing a tough Democratic challenger in Mandela Barnes, then Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor, but this isn’t the first time he has embraced an unfounded conspiracy. He embraced and even assisted Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, claiming that Democrats used fake electors, in a classic case of projection.