Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is suddenly looking like the weakest link in Donald Trump’s cabinet, and his popularity polling is in the dumps.
According to a new analysis by CNN number cruncher Harry Enten, the odds that Hegseth will be the first member to exit Trump’s cabinet have nearly doubled in a matter of days, fueled by yet another scandal and a brutal public opinion record that would rattle almost any politician.
Enten walked viewers through the numbers on CNN News Central, tying a fresh wave of outrage over a deadly missile strike at sea to Hegseth’s already dismal standing with voters. The Washington Post reported that sources say Hegseth verbally ordered Adm. Frank Bradley to “leave no survivors” in a strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean, a directive that has sparked talk of possible war crimes and renewed calls for his resignation.
“This is not the first time that we have covered Pete Hegseth, and there’s a reason why, and that is because he has, simply put, not been a popular guy in the American electorate,” Enten said.
Then he laid out just how bad it has been for Hegseth since Trump tapped the Fox News favorite to run the Pentagon. “I mean, Pete Hegseth’s net favorability in the last year. There have been no polls, no polls in which his net favorability has been positive. Every single poll that I could find in the Roper Center archives has his net favorability in the negative from when Donald Trump first nominated him nearly a year ago.”
In other words, the more Americans hear about Hegseth, the less they seem to like him.
There have been zero reputable polls over the last year where Pete Hegseth has had a net positive favorable rating. ZERO. Every one has had him negative.
Per Kalshi, the chance Hegseth is the first to leave Trump’s cabinet has skyrocketed since Friday… Going from 18% to 35%. pic.twitter.com/sI4qYIlagQ
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) December 2, 2025
“Every single poll has found that the American people are more likely to dislike than like him,” Enten added, “and the first poll that was taken found that the plurality of Americans said that the United States Senate should not confirm him to the post of secretary of defense.”
That kind of hostility would be notable for any cabinet official, but it is especially remarkable for a defense secretary, a job that usually flies under the political radar unless there is an active war or a marquee conflict dominating the headlines.
Secretaries of defense “get so little attention” that polling firms rarely ask about them by name, Enten noted, yet Hegseth has managed to rack up double digit surveys in less than a year. “This is extremely unusual for a defense secretary to be generating this much interest, especially when we’re not at a time of war,” he said.
To find anything similar, Enten said you have to rewind to the tenure of George W. Bush and Barack Obama era Pentagon chief Robert Gates. “You have to go all the way back to Bob Gates to find this many polls asking about the popularity rating of a defense secretary, and, of course, Bob Gates served four times as long so far as Pete Hegseth then, and, of course, that was during a time of war.”
The difference, of course, is that Gates was generally well regarded, while Hegseth is under fire over a strike that allegedly killed survivors in the water in an earlier incident and, in the more recent case, obliterated a small boat whose crew, critics say, may not have been the “extraordinarily violent” traffickers Trump describes online.
For prediction markets, where political junkies and professionals alike gamble on outcomes, that combination of scandal and unpopularity is toxic. “This is, I think, a great chance to use the prediction market odds, chance to be the first to leave Trump’s cabinet,” Enten said. “Pete Hegseth on Friday, it was just 18 percent, it’s now doubled. It’s now doubled to 35 percent given the recent controversy, so a lot of folks out there who are putting their money where their mouth is think there’s a far better chance that Pete Hegseth exits the cabinet now, being the first one.”
Trump has so far stood by his defense secretary, but the numbers, and the bets, suggest that patience may be running out everywhere else.
