What's Wrong With Pete Hegseth? - Esquire

On Wednesday morning, Secretary of Defense—who wants you to call him Secretary of War—Pete Hegseth gave a press briefing at the Pentagon about Operation Epic Fury, our limited combat operation in Iran. In his remarks, he insisted that “we are playing for keeps,” “we are just getting started,” and “Iranian leaders are looking up and seeing only American and Israeli airpower, every minute of every day, until we decide it’s over.” Let’s look at a clip.

Wait, sorry, no! Here it is:

“We are punching them while they are down, which is exactly how it should be” will surely echo throughout history, just maybe not in the way he thinks it will (and “throughout history” means “until late Friday morning, maximum,” because who can keep anything in their head anymore). “It was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight” is a wild thing to say into a microphone about a country you are also trying to convince us is an imminent threat. He goes on to say that “we are accelerating,” which is not a great message to hear about a thing nobody even wanted to walk toward in the first place, even with the arm choreography to zazz it up, even while looking like someone who nearly made it to Hollywood Week on the exciting new Fox competition reality show So You Think You’re Timothy Olyphant.

These are words that are meant to suggest strength and resolve and toughness, and they work, in exactly the way a beard suggests a chin.

We have heard “this will not be another endless war” a lot in the past few days, which, as it has all the other times we’ve heard it, means it’s going to go for a very long time. This means we’re going to be seeing a lot of Pete Hegseth. If you haven’t been keeping up with him, here is a quick Pete Primer to give you some fast facts that may or may not include what the hell is wrong with him.

Pete Hegseth was born in Minneapolis in June 1980, the exact time when Prince was recording the Dirty Mind album in the exact same city, which is why they say America is a land of contrasts. He went to Princeton University, presumably on a squinting scholarship, where he edited the school’s conservative newspaper The Princeton Tory. After graduation he served in the Minnesota Army National Guard as a platoon leader at Guantánamo Bay and was later deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Upon his return to the States, he took that military posture, reactionary media experience, and what is undeniably a great head of hair to the job where they would make the most sense: Fox & Friends Weekend. That means the previous job of the man now charged with overseeing the most powerful military in the history of the world was … weekend anchor at a cable station. Here he is on Fox & Friends Weekend, throwing an ax at a target, missing the target, and hitting a member of the West Point Marching Band instead.

But Hegseth has made mistakes beyond nearly decapitating a military drummer from his own country on live television. I won’t get into his romantic history, because it would be ungentlemanly for me to do so, and I don’t have time. But I will say the dude appears to genuinely love the ladies, and the only reason I find that even mildly disappointing is that “Princeton Tori” would be one hell of a drag name. I will also say that his own mother called his behavior toward women “despicable and abusive” in a 2018 email to him that we all moved on from much too quickly. (His mom later said she sent the email in anger and immediately followed up to him with an apology; she said she disavows the remarks and has since defended her son.)

Hegseth has a tattoo that says “DEUS VULT”—or “GOD WILLS”—on his arm, which was a battle cry among 12th-century Crusaders who fought to take back the Holy Land and kill Muslims. He also has a giant Jerusalem cross on his pectoral. Both tats have ties to right-wing extremist groups—Hegseth has said they are symbols of Christianity, not extremism—which was enough to get him bounced from a job guarding Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration. It was not enough to prevent him from getting confirmed as the head of the United States Department of Defense. Congress determined he had the experience, intelligence, and discernment to lead the most powerful military in the history of the world, and then he disclosed sensitive, real-time details about a top-secret strike in Yemen to a reporter on a Signal chat about 45 minutes later.

Now, when he’s not protecting our freedoms and doing whatever else you’re supposed to do when you’re in charge of 3.4 million active-duty, civilian, and reserve military employees, he posts a lot of videos of himself working out, including this recent one where he did the kind of kettlebell swings that activated a sleeper cell of American YouTube CrossFit guys.

He also gives speeches during which he talks a lot of tough-adjacent talk—“They’re toast and they know it,” he said on Wednesday of the Iranian military, “or … at least soon enough, they will know it”—and a lot of the time that talk doesn’t make sense. Earlier in the week, he said Operation Velvet Rage or Whatever would have “no stupid rules of engagement”; on Wednesday, he said we have rules of engagement that are “bold and precise,” so bold and precise that three F-15’s have already been shot down by friendly fire. “No politically correct wars,” he says, then makes everyone else choose their own words with great delicacy because this still isn’t officially a “war” at all.

Perhaps worst of all, he used the death of U.S. service members to score political points. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it,” he said. “The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality.” “Things happen” will no doubt be of great comfort to the families of the fallen, but the real gag is that any adult human being thinks President Donald Trump, out here wrecking our alliances, pulling nouns and verbs out of the claw machine, looking like the absentee father of the sentient glob of sputum from the Mucinex commercials, needs outside assistance looking bad.

So … what the hell is wrong with this guy? One word: insecurity. Pete Hegseth is the textbook definition of “overcompensation,” “fragile masculinity,” and “incomplete pull-up.” Hegseth’s words tell you this is a deeply insecure man, and if they don’t, his eyes sure do. Pete Hegseth is the face and the voice and the posture of the classic American man as imagined by the second Trump Administration. This is the way the men and women of the current Cabinet have to speak. They have been given notes on their roles, and the director wants them to sound tough, even when their words reveal that they’re terrified of things like cities and trans people and the Spanish language.

Hegseth’s words reveal him, the lot of them, as the last gasp of the white, male, patriarchal society we were finally just beginning to move past. He’s an extinction burst, he’s Skeet Ulrich popping up one last time at the end of Scream. Great things await us when he and the rest of them are out of the way. But again, he’s in control of the most powerful military in the history of the world, so there’s no guarantee we’ll get there. We will in fact be lucky to survive him.

Great hair though.