Pete Hegseth has an abnormal obsession with how he looks in photographs. This is not revelation: The defense secretary is well known for preening for the cameras with a level of self-regard that would embarrass most supermodels. But his fixation on striking a manly pose was confirmed in humiliating fashion this week when the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon banned news photographers for taking what was deemed “unflattering” photos of the former Fox News weekend host during a March 2 briefing about the Iran war.
The situation was a perfect synecdoche for Hegseth’s self-inflicted Sispyphean task of trying to be a big man. His efforts to butch himself up are so grasping that they inevitably backfire, revealing his vanity, insecurity and weakness — qualities that are very much the opposite of the John Wayne ideal of masculinity to which MAGA aspires. (Not that Wayne lived up to his own image either.) Liberals have always laughed at Hegseth and his self-owning, try-hard energy. But with the Iran war, even his fellow travelers in overcompensation, the MAGA bros, are starting to worry about the vicarious emasculation that is likely to come with his embarrassing failure to live up to his vaunted — and frequently espoused — “warrior ethos.”
Hegseth’s rhetoric is so alarming that it sometimes eclipses how he also can come across like an eight-year-old boy inventing dialogue for the villain in his G.I. Joe game.
Hegseth’s rhetoric is so alarming that it sometimes eclipses how he also can come across like an eight-year-old boy inventing dialogue for the villain in his G.I. Joe game. He likes to say things like, “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” and “violent effect, not politically correct.” It’s impossible to hear the secretary spout these rhymes and not picture how he must have practiced them in front of the mirror in his rumored makeup studio at the Pentagon, imagining himself the hero of an action movie, unable to realize that he’s making most listeners feel embarrassed on his behalf.
But hey, that’s just my opinion as a lady progressive. Hegseth’s Saturday morning cartoon idea of manhood, though, has impressed other men of similar persuasions. One is podcaster Joe Rogan, who praised Hegseth last fall, crowing that there was “no more identity politics” and whining about “guys in dresses” in the military. In December, the head of Hegseth’s church’s denomination, Doug Wilson, celebrated the secretary as a counterweight to “men with a My-Little-Pony fetish.” Last year the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh applauded Hegseth for supposedly sticking it to “nagging” women who insist that gender does not disqualify them to serve in the military.
As long as Hegseth keeps his chest-thumping and pull-up contests in the land of make-believe, these men are happy. Like their hero, the only masculine strength they seem interested in is the kind performed for cameras, far away from real-world challenges that might easily defeat their self-image as the mightiest of men. Hegseth, however, had to ruin it all by leading the U.S. into a real war with Iran. Unlike the imaginary wars conducted in right-wing rhetoric, which are won by yelling “no homo,” real wars are hard. They require planning, foresight and smart people, including women and minorities, to win — and even then, only if you’re quite lucky. War is not for clowns and fake tough guys.
To their slender credit, some MAGA dudes know that getting into a real war will backfire by disproving their fragile masculine fantasies. And with incompetent people like Hegseth and Donald Trump in charge, the odds of losing, which is experienced as emasculation on the right, is near 100%. So they’ve been trying to talk their leaders out of this foolhardy mission. Walsh called the war a “travesty.” Rogan said Trump voters feel “betrayed,” and he called the war “insane” as a political decision. Wilson, who has a personal relationship with Hegseth that likely tempers his typical inflammatory rhetoric, was more delicate. Still, he released a video expressing hope that the action would stay “limited” and advising Trump to get out quickly and avoid “the hubris of nation-building.”
All these criticisms are being ignored by Hegseth, and it’s no mystery why. As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times argued, chaos and mass death is, for Hegseth and Trump, “a price to willingly pay for them to feel like men.”
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The secretary’s efforts to sound like a big boy have only grown more cringeworthy since the war started. He grinned when he said, “No one’s putting us in danger. We’re putting the other guys in danger.” He mugged for the cameras while saying, “This is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change.” No doubt he imagines himself as the witty action hero, perhaps played by a young Bruce Willis. But Hegseth comes across more like the third grader reciting those lines after watching his favorite comic book movie for the umpteenth time.
These lines aren’t just clunky. They are also just plain false. In the same CBS News interview in which Hegseth used his “no one’s putting us in danger” bit, he admitted that at least seven American soldiers had been killed in the war and admitted “there will be more casualties.” And no — the regime has not changed, despite the death of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He was quickly replaced with his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who is widely believed to be even more of a hardliner. The younger Khamenei has already shown more real world tactical savvy than Hegseth by closing the Strait of Hormuz, effectively holding oil tankers hostage in the Persian Gulf, and engaging in strategic bombings that will drive up the price of oil and make the war even more politically difficult for Trump. Far from being a towering hero, Hegseth in these moments feels like Loki in “The Avengers,” declaring that he’s “a god” and humans are “beneath me,” only to have the Hulk comically bash him into the ground like a rag doll.
Hegseth may be a joke, but that doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous. Despite his cowardly attempts to escape blame, government investigations are showing that it’s likely the U.S. is responsible for the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran that killed at least 175 people, most of them children. Multiple people told the Washington Post that the school was “on a U.S. target list and may have been mistaken for a military site.”
The symbolism of MAGA may be unintended, but it’s not subtle. Hegseth talks about how he’s “politically incorrect,” as if that makes him tough. But there is no man that is weaker than one who revels in harming others in a pathetic bid to feel bigger. In the abstract, it’s easy to convince a lot of people that it’s the height of manly fortitude to extol your own sadism as loudly as he does. In practice, it looks not just immoral but pathetic: killing little girls and then not even having the guts to admit that you did.
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