This is the Aug. 13, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
“I don’t want to worry that the circumstances of this deployment will get the best of my son and he doesn’t make it back home. That’s an unbearable burden on my heart.”
— Manuel Guevara, whose son is serving on the USS Abraham Lincoln
There’s still an empty wall inside the Pentagon where a portrait used to hang.
It belonged to Gen. Daniel “Chappie” James Jr., the combat legend who became the first Black four-star general in American history.
Pete Hegseth had the picture taken down.
Seven thousand miles away, a sailor aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln tried to jump into the Arabian Sea. The crew has been deployed for more than 260 days with no end in sight — living with contaminated water, moldy showers, and shortages of toothpaste, soap, and food.
One story tells you what this secretary of defense cares about. The other tells you what he doesn’t.
This is what happens when the man running the Pentagon is more obsessed with the color of someone’s skin and testosterone levels than with job one: military readiness.
On the Armed Services Committee, we worried about readiness all the time. I’ve never seen anything like this.
For years, we’ve heard that DEI was getting in the way of the mission.
It’s just the opposite.
Hegseth is so consumed by DEI that the mission itself is falling by the wayside.
Pete Hegseth helped push the president into this war, and Hegseth’s Pentagon has run out of munitions to fight it.
Any other secretary of defense would have been fired by now. I’m not sure why he’s still there.
POLLS OF THE DAY
Source: Fox News polls conducted May – August 2026 of 1,002 Georgia voters, 1,005 North Carolina voters, 1,015 Ohio voters, 1,003 Iowa voters, 1,006 Texas voters, and 1,000 Maine voters. All polls have a margin of error of ± 3 percentage points
WHAT THEY SAID
Franklin Foer on Ukraine
“Over the long run, the alliance between the United States and Ukraine will remain, no matter how hard Donald Trump tries to push them away. We’ll be pushed together because we don’t see the world the way Vladimir Putin does, and we have these vulnerabilities. We simply need Ukraine.”
David Drucker on Trump’s immigration crackdown
“I’ve talked to Hispanic Americans who now have to have conversations with their children about what to do if you get stopped by Border Patrol. For those of us who remember the Soviet Union — and the old joke about having to show your papers — this has been politically devastating. It’s antithetical to how we think of ourselves as a country.”
Jonathan Martin on Democrats’ divisions
“If this were in the U.K., these would be two different parties. But they’re in America’s two-party government, and so they’re forced into the same coalition.”
The post Pete Hegseth cares more about dismantling DEI than being mission-ready appeared first on MS NOW.
