Sean Duffy & Pete Hegseth Are Feuding Despite Both Being Terrible

It’s little comfort that all of these people hate each other since they still manage to unite and ruin all our lives.

By Kylie Cheung | May 7, 2025 | 3:53pm

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Sean Duffy & Pete Hegseth Are Feuding Despite Both Being Terrible

Like everyone in the Trump administration, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are both awful, so it’s surprising to learn that the two former Fox News co-workers don’t seem to like each other very much. Throughout the past week, a feud between the two appeared to spill over when Duffy appeared on Fox News to accuse Hegseth of failing to be transparent, pointing to an incident last week in which two commercial flights had to be diverted near Washington’s Reagan National Airport because of a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter that the FAA claimed was carrying an unnamed VIP. The recent incident comes a little over three months after the January 29th midair collision between a Black Hawk and a passenger jet that killed 67 people.

On The Ingraham Angle, Duffy complained that Pentagon personnel shouldn’t excessively use helicopters to travel between locations, which can disrupt commercial flights and the crowded D.C. airspace, and potentially endanger lives. “The question becomes, who are the VIPs? Who are they?” Duffy asked. “The top brass at the White House—they take a Suburban, or a Tesla, or they take their own car. Who do these generals think they are, that they have to take helicopters to go to meetings?”

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Host Laura Ingraham pressed Duffy on who the VIP helicopter rider was for, but Duffy maintained that he didn’t know and would have to ask the Defense Department, since the Federal Aviation Administration wasn’t privy to this information either. “The DOD has promised radical transparency, they should tell us who is qualified to take a helicopter out of the Pentagon. I don’t know, but they have to tell us,” Duffy said. In an awkward bit, Ingraham offered to call up Hegseth live on-air. Duffy jokingly replied, “You call Pete. Dial in! She [Ingraham] actually has a phone right by her desk!”

But on a serious note, Duffy repeated, “Those are the answers we need, again, when we have near misses, you have to stop traffic. And listen to the president, the vice president, Pete Hegseth, they all should fly in helicopters but a two star [general]? I mean, come on. Again, it’s suspect when they won’t tell you who the VIP is.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Duffy went on Martha MacCallum’s show to say he’s still waiting for the Defense Department to get back to him. “I look around the White House and there are a lot of important people there. Take the Suburban,” he reiterated again. “Why is the Pentagon that much more sophisticated that they have to take helicopters in a busy airspace? I’m hoping we will get the answers.”

Duffy and Hegseth both worked at Fox News at the same time, Duffy starting in 2019 and Hegseth from 2014 to 2024, before both joining the second Trump administration. It’s unclear if they shared preexisting beef, but it seems clear Duffy, at least, currently carries some degree of animosity toward Hegseth.

The FAA has been struggling for months now since a mass staff exodus of employees at the start of Trump’s term, with many being terminated or accepting voluntary buyout packages as part of Trump and Elon Musk’s moronic efforts to completely gut the federal budget. The Newark Airport in New Jersey, for instance, has recently been plagued by mass delays and other chaos from being short-staffed.

In any case, Duffy’s pointed critiques of Hegseth come as Hegseth, himself, continues to make headlines for breaking all kinds of privacy standards, engaging in a range of reckless behaviors with state secrets, and even reportedly defying Trump’s orders on military aid for Ukraine. Apart from this unsubtle spat between Duffy and Hegseth, almost no one, really, seems to like each other in this administration. Vice President JD Vance literally bad-mouthed the president, suggesting Trump didn’t know what he was doing vis-a-vis foreign policy, in a Signal chat discussing war crimes against Yemen back in March. And Rolling Stone reported last month that everyone hates Musk’s wildly unfunny jokes. Speaking of Musk, he recently went as far as to call one of Trump’s top economic advisors, Pete Navarro, “retarded” on Twitter.

And yet, at the end of the day, however much they hate each other, rest assured, I hate them all more.

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