From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily.

Over the past few weeks, the resistance of a single Republican senator has threatened to derail Donald Trump's controversial choice of Pete Hegeseth to run the Department of Defense.

Today, Karin Demersion and Jonathan Swan,

with the story of how Trump and his allies ensured that that senator's resistance quickly went away.

Thank you. quickly went away. It's Monday, December 16th.

Karin, in your role as a congressional reporter, you have been closely tracking the fate of Trump's pick to run the U.S. military, Pete Hegsseth, a pick that was controversial from the start, but has become only more controversial over the past couple of weeks.

Right. I think everyone was pretty surprised when President Trump picked a Fox News host to be his next Secretary of Defense.

And the surprise turned into discomfort for a lot of people and shock as allegations started coming out

about these fairly sorted details from his past. First, it was an accusation that he had

committed sexual assault. And then after that, it became this article for the New Yorker,

which alleged that he was drinking on the job and harassing female employees and was mismanaging the veterans' nonprofits that he was running.

In the middle of all that there was this email that cropped up that his mother had written him in 2018,

calling him an abuser of women, and telling him what a reprehensible person he was.

And so as that mountain of allegations grew, there started to be more senators, including

some of Trump's allies who started to express real discomfort with having to back this guy,

or at least with the fact that they were having to grapple with these allegations and, you know,

calling them disturbing, calling them troublesome. And that's a problem for Trump because even though Senate

Republicans are going to take the majority in the new year, it's a very slim majority. They cannot

afford to lose more than three of their own if they actually want to get these nominees confirmed.

And it becomes clear that there's really one senator who has the potential to swing things one way or another.

It's a senator whose whole brand, basically, has been built on these issues around which

Hegsteth is having problems with these allegations. And that senator is Joni Ernst of Iowa.

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