Pete Hegseth is on a Mission: Can't Stop, Won't Stop
Year One of SecWar
Here’s my latest in The Spectator magazine — check it out on the new website.
Pete Hegseth’s Saturday begins with personal training. The Secretary of War, @SecWar on your socials, is very fond of working out with the troops – something most defense secretaries have done without someone dutifully filming the experience for Instagram. Then he heads off to the Reagan National Defense Forum, the annual gathering of war hawks, policy nerds and defense contractors in Simi Valley, California. Hegseth, the veteran of the Global War on Terror, is there to fulfill his mission of denouncing the neocons. “Out with idealistic utopianism, in with hard-nosed realism,” he declares, insisting the United States will no longer be “distracted by democracy-building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation-building.”
By the evening, Hegseth is being lampooned on the opening of Saturday Night Live by Colin Jost, rocking out with the iconic flag pocket square, crushing a can of seltzer and calling out the “beta cucks” of the media while bragging about the Caribbean strike success of “Operation Kill Everybody.” “I was so jacked up after the first strike,” Jost says, in one of the repeated jokes about Hegseth’s boozy reputation, “I had to make an emergency call to my sponsor… sorry, a guy I met at an anonymous meeting.”
This is just another day in the life of Hegseth, the himbo hound of war who sits near the very top of Donald Trump’s Influencer Cabinet, a collection of people named to their roles to be the face of policy but not necessarily the makers of it. Hegseth has, in his first year in the role, become one of the most parodied and criticized members of the brigade, but he has also earned a following among service members who appreciate a secretary closer to their generation in experience and thought. Sure, he shows off for the ’gram with his workouts and do-it-for-the-bros attitude, but at least, unlike other secretaries, he can actually do pull-ups.
His myriad announcements attacking wokeism and ableism are targeted at people outside the services – what members of the armed forces appreciate is Hegseth’s good-riddance rejection of mandatory cybersecurity training and other elements of time-consuming drudgery. Though his rules on haircuts and beards are not so popular among the troops. “No more beardos,” Hegseth announced in his typical parlance in September. “If you want a beard, join Special Forces. If not, then shave.” “What does he think we are, the Derek Jeter Yankees?” one officer tells me, comparing it to the Simpsons episode when Mr. Burns demands while managing the company softball team, “Mattingly! Get rid of those sideburns!”
But the same officer quickly adds: “But I did like that he called out the bloat.”