3 December—There’s no question that Donald Trump’s pettish, pettifogging, petulant warlord, Pete Hegseth, is—just like all Trump’s favorite fanatical flunkies, when you think about it—unqualified, unsuitable, and unworthy, as well (of course) as unprincipled, unscrupulous, and untruthful.

Hegseth is the personification of misfeasance and malfeasance. Misfeasance is the wrongful exercise of lawful authority; performing a legal and authorized act improperly, carelessly, or negligently—misconduct without the intention of causing harm. Malfeasance, on the other hand, is intentional evil-doing; conduct that is intentionally unlawful or otherwise wrongful and thus fully meant to cause some manner of harm; malfeasance is corruption, criminality, sin.

So warlord Hegseth denied from the outset giving the illegal order to kill the incapacitated survivors of the U.S. Navy’s illegal attack on the first of several alleged—with absolutely no proof offered by Hegseth, Trump, or anyone else—drug-running boats in the Caribbean, off the coast of Venezuela. It certainly was good to have an underling—in this case Admiral Frank Bradley—to pass the buck to.

And now Hegseth has added what he and his coterie must consider plausible deniability to his having given the kill order by claiming that he “didn’t stick around” after ordering Bradley to take out what was probably just a fishing boat. Okay. Let’s say Hegseth didn’t stick around for whatever reason.

But why not? After all, that was (as far as we know) the very first foray into what was for all intents and purposes—as far as Hegseth and his senile sugar daddy Trump gave a damn, anyway—an active war zone. So wouldn’t you expect the senior military official—i.e., warlord Hegseth—to insist on being there, being on top of it, closely monitoring the situation? Especially since even the screwed-up Trump-Hegseth war department must have had some lawyerly misgivings about the operation. Same goes for supreme dictator Trump, come to think of it, but he’d have slept through it.

But Hegseth claims to have “moved on to my next meeting.” At the very least, then, that was irresponsible and illustrative of his incompetence. If that was actually the case, then, Hegseth clearly was misfeasant. In addition, of course, to being malfeasant in ordering what’s either a war crime—killing incapacitated survivors in an armed conflict, as Trump’s criminals insist the they’re engaged in are—or just plain murder—since Congress hasn’t declared war.

Plausible deniability has its place. But Hegseth, like Trump, has made deniability implausible . . .