The GOP’s midterm election prospects appear dire enough that even War Secretary Pete Hegseth has noticed through the fog. In his case, that fog comes with the source’s distinctly unflattering mix of nicotine pouches, cheap whiskey, and testosterone injections.

Hegseth filmed a notably shiny video urging military personnel to request ballots by mail. Facing a problem his own political camp helped manufacture, he assured troops, “All of these processes are straightforward and protected by law.”

That message would be easier to sell if President Donald Trump had not spent years attacking the same voting method. Trump has called ballots sent through the mail “corrupt and out of control.”

Trump also erupted after the Supreme Court refused to let him interfere with mail voting. He called that decision one of the court’s “shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”

Apparently, the administration’s position depends on who is casting the ballot. Trump voting by mail is treated as perfectly acceptable, and active duty military personnel now receive the same rhetorical exemption from his endless fraud complaints.

The urgency behind Hegseth’s sudden enthusiasm is not difficult to spot. Military personnel voted at rates more than 20 percentage points below those of civilians in both the 2020 and 2024 elections.

Hegseth highlighted that shortfall in his video, lamenting that 300,000 troops did not register or cast ballots in 2024. That is a substantial group of potential voters for an administration nervously surveying the midterm landscape.

Reliable data about the voting preferences of active duty military personnel is less available than information about veterans. Veterans, however, lean heavily Republican, and Hegseth is clearly hoping current service members might help rescue the GOP from what looks like its worst election in decades.

He did not exactly bury the political framing beneath a layer of patriotic boilerplate. Hegseth described those 300,000 missing military voters as “more than the ballots cast in cities like Detroit, Boston, Milwaukee, or Seattle.”

That comparison makes the intended contrast painfully obvious. Rather than simply stressing military participation, Hegseth selected four cities as his measuring stick while trying to turn uncast military ballots into an urgent political talking point.

Unfortunately for Hegseth, Trump has already done significant damage to Republican confidence in voting by mail. A staggering 70% of GOP voters and 75% of people who identify themselves as “MAGA” say fraud occurs when people can cast ballots through the mail.

That leaves the administration trying to thread a ludicrously narrow needle. It has spent years portraying mail voting as corrupt, yet now wants military personnel to believe their mailed ballots somehow belong in a separate, unquestionably legitimate category.

Election experts have explained that Trump’s desired restrictions would not guarantee military ballots sent through the mail are recognized and delivered. His broader push to discard ballots he considers illegal would create chaos rather than some magical protected route for military votes.

That is the trap Hegseth helped inherit from his boss and political allies. After years of screaming that mail balloting is fraudulent, they now need certain voters to ignore the warnings, trust the system, request ballots, and return them on time.

Hegseth is effectively asking troops to believe Trump’s attacks apply to somebody else’s ballots. It is a remarkably slender reed on which to hang Republican electoral hopes, especially after Trump trained his own movement to view mail voting with deep suspicion.

The contradiction is now playing out in plain sight. Hegseth wants military ballots badly enough to make a pleading video, while Trump continues trashing the very process those troops would need to use.