Most Americans want Donald Trump to live up to his old Apprentice catchphrase and tell Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, “you’re fired,” a new poll suggests, as anger grows over deadly boat strikes and a string of national security scandals.
According to a J.L. Partners poll conducted for the Daily Mail, 54 percent of registered voters think Hegseth should step down from his job running the Pentagon, while only about one in five say he should stay and the rest are undecided. That includes a plurality of Republicans, 38 percent of whom say it is time for him to go, compared with roughly a third who want him to keep the post.
Hegseth is taking a lot of heat from all sides for a campaign of U.S. strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific that the Trump administration says were ferrying drugs for Venezuelan and Colombian gangs. At least 83 people have been killed in 21 strikes on 22 vessels since September.
One mission in particular has become a symbol of the controversy. On September 2, U.S. forces destroyed a boat from Venezuela, killing 11 people in what officials hailed as a clean hit on “narco terrorists.” Weeks later, reporting by the Washington Post, The Guardian and others revealed that two men survived the initial blast and were killed in a second strike, prompting accusations of an unlawful “double tap” that targeted shipwrecked survivors.
Hegseth has insisted he did nothing wrong. At a Cabinet meeting this week, he told reporters he did not see anyone in the water when he watched the first strike unfold on screen. The boat, he said, “exploded in fire, smoke, you can’t see anything … This is called the fog of war.” He said he “didn’t stick around” for the follow up and argued that the admiral in charge “made the right call” in ordering the second hit.
Pete Hegseth says he’s going to court-martial me for saying the same exact thing he said 9 years ago. What changed for Pete? Well to start, he spends all day thinking about how he can suck up to Trump. When Trump says jump, he says how high. pic.twitter.com/VnKBfLzmmU
— Captain Mark Kelly (@CaptMarkKelly) December 3, 2025
Human rights advocates and some lawmakers say the timeline described by military sources, including roughly 48 minutes of footage showing survivors clinging to wreckage before the second strike, undermines any claim that commanders did not understand what they were seeing. Legal experts have warned that if senior officials knew or should have known there were survivors, the second strike could qualify as a war crime under international law.
The boat attacks are only part of Hegseth’s troubles. Earlier this year, he was caught up in “Signalgate,” when it emerged that he had outlined sensitive attack plans in a Signal group chat that included Trump’s top national security aides and, by mistake, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. A Daily Mail and J.L. Partners poll taken after that leak already showed a majority of voters, and a majority of independents, saying he should resign.
Trump has brushed off the uproar, reportedly dismissing the Signal fiasco as a “glitch” and railing at the press instead. For now, there is no sign the president is preparing to cut his defense chief loose. Hegseth still has allies who argue the strikes are a tough but necessary response to lethal drug cartels operating under the protection of hostile regimes.
