Pete Hegseth – the secretary of WTF

It plays like a testosterone-injected nightmare mash-up assembled by a meme-addicted teenage gamer on Adderall: “unclassified” images of missile strikes on Iran mashed together with clips from Hollywood blockbusters and video games. Russell Crowe in Gladiator thunders about “Strength and Honour” (did he give permission to feature?). 

Tom Cruise as Maverick flashes across the screen from Top Gun. Keanu Reeves in John Wick growls, “Yeah, I’m thinking I’m back.” Christopher Reeve’s Superman promises to fight for “truth and justice and the American way.” Walter White’s “I am the danger” meme from Breaking Bad appears alongside assorted Reddit-ready clips.

At the end, an AI video-game voice declares the verdict: “Flawless Victory.”

And who from the administration gets a guernsey in this monstrosity of a social media clip? Not the president, but Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s bench-pressing, Fox News-generated, slicked-back-hair, fist-pumping secretary of defence. Of course he delivers the meme line “FA”, shorthand for “fuck around”, the first half of the internet slogan “FAFO”, for “fuck around and find out.”

In another video prepared for his Department of War account, the self-styled “Secretary of War” appears again, barking lines from his press conferences while action-movie trailer music roars behind him.

“You’re punching them while they’re down,” he says approvingly. “Which is exactly how it should be.”

Even his deputy Sean Parnell joined the performance, posting the clip with the caption:

“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have empowered our warriors to move fast and DESTROY THE ENEMY. We are UNLEASHING American power.”

Welcome to the Pentagon and America, and the world, at war in the age of unbridled Make America Macho Again spectacle. War with Iran becomes just another excuse to brag about the capacity to create mass destruction and death.

Here the tattooed, whiskey-swigging defence secretary likes to boast that America’s enemies are cooked. Standing before reporters at the Pentagon this week in a press conference that appeared to shock even some of his own staff and generals for its callous tone as the first reports of US casualties in Iran emerged, television man Hegseth delivered the line with the swagger of John Wayne meets Jean-Claude Van Damme.

“The Iranian regime are toast and they know it,” he declared with a snide smile.

Cue the cringe – and the football metaphors. 

“America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history, B-2s, fighters, drones, missiles, and of course classified effects, all on our terms with maximum authority,” Hegseth bellowed.

“No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars.”

Shame about that storming of the beaches in Normandy.

“The team knew what plays to run because their first few drives were scripted,” he said. “But now that the game has started and the blitz is on, they don’t know what plays to call.”

Like a Visigoth handed modern airborne artillery, he also barked about “Death and destruction from the sky. All. Day. Long.”

Thrilled to report that a US submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship thousands of miles from Iran, he described the vessel as having met a “quiet death”, whatever that is.

“It took the 47th president,” he said, “a fighter who always puts America First, to finally draw the line. If you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation, and we will kill you.”

Gee, thanks bro.

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Even America’s allies are not spared the big swinging phallus display. While Israel is part of the team of “capable partners”, he engaged in obvious Euro-bashing, sneering against “traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls hemming and hawing about the use of force.”

To the clear chagrin of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, general Dan Caine and the majority of Americans who did not vote for this kind of jingoism and gung-ho forever war slogans, the former soldier has not stopped all week mansplaining the Iran war for his Dear Leader boss. 

It is as if he were narrating a video game, casually insulting the memories of American servicemen who have already lost their lives in the conflict he treats with zero empathy, gravity or basic humanity. Instead he presents it like a virtual-reality spectacle in which only Trump and himself are the stars.

The anti-gravitas secretary of war is peak Hegseth: macho bravado marinated in alcohol, Red Bull and cross-fit theatrics. The same man who once boasted about bench-pressing 180 kilograms now struts across the Pentagon stage bloviating about death and destruction like he is Rambo.

Except he isn’t single-handedly rescuing American prisoners of war in the jungle like John J. Rambo.

He’s sitting in the Pentagon, in the makeup studio he had installed at considerable expense last April as one of his first measures following his contested congressional confirmation. It sits next to the briefing room, where he gets his face powdered and his Marvel-comics spray-on hair brushed back before stepping to the podium to wag a finger at the cameras and admire his own reflection on the monitor.

It is war as performance, with the secretary of defence lolling in all the attention while the bombs fall and the body count rises.

And yet this is no parody. Hegseth, a self-described Christian nationalist with an intensely misogynist streak who has openly derided the presence of women in the armed forces, and even suggested they should not have the right to vote, is in charge of the most powerful military force on earth.

His press conferences feel less like Pentagon briefings than extended Fox News segments not even worthy of the atrocious Jessie Watters.

The difference is that this is not a film set. Real soldiers are dying. Not that Pete “War is hell” cares.

During a Pentagon briefing, after American casualties in the Iran conflict were reported, Hegseth kvetched and moaned that journalists were honing in too heavily on the deaths.

“When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news,” he said, clearly irritated that deaths of servicemen were getting in the way of his communications plan.

“I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality.”

Six American service members had just been killed, but Hegseth only cared about the headlines and the “optics”. Shame about the body bags. 

According to The Atlantic, the remark sent a “stunned silence” through the briefing room. Even members of Hegseth’s own staff appeared to flinch. Some put their heads down. Others looked around awkwardly.

Then someone in the room said quietly but audibly: “That was one of the most insulting things I have ever heard.”

If Hegseth does not resign, Tom Nichols, a staff writer at the Atlantic wrote, “he should at least get out of the way and let better men than him talk to the nation and to the press.”

For diplomats accustomed to the prudent language of previous US defence secretaries, the spectacle has been a shock to the system.

“If you wonder why Pete Hegseth talks like he’s in the middle of a Call of Duty raid with his bros,” he wrote, “it’s because this administration thinks posting stuff like this is just awesome while American forces are fighting overseas.”

The unease deepened when Hegseth insisted there were “no parallels” between the conflict with Iran and the invasion of Iraq.

Former US ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill reacted with disbelief.

“I think it’s extraordinary to say there are no parallels,” Hill said.

“There are a lot of them… There’s never been a question whether US forces can prevail. The question is how do we win the peace?”

Reaction online to Hegseth’s repeated press conferences this week has been savage.

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Bea Nielsen of Campaign Dispatch described them as “remarkably unwatchable… just the sheer alcoholic stepdad energy radiating off that video.”

“This man,” she wrote, “is a walking miasma of divorced energy.”

“This is what the end of empire feels like… He’s one of the most divorced motherfuckers I’ve ever encountered in my entire life.”

Anti-Trump activist Jim Stewartson concurred, describing Hegseth as “a symptom of American degeneracy… a drunk neo-Nazi misogynist who failed into a backup couch job on Fox News.”

“Just the idea that this guy will be leading our military makes me want to break things.”

Hegseth, 45 grew up in Minnesota and once played basketball at Princeton while training as an Army officer and editing the conservative campus magazine The Princeton Tory. Fox News eventually made him famous and brought him to Trump’s attention. 

His personal life has been as chaotic as his short tenure as America’s defence secretary. During the confirmation process, a police report surfaced describing a 2017 allegation of sexual assault at a political conference. Hegseth denied the accusation, but the case was resolved with a financial settlement. Senators were also confronted with reports of heavy drinking and a trail of broken marriages and family drama.

Scandal has followed him since his elevation. He shared details of planned strikes against Houthi targets in a Signal group chat that also included a journalist, a breach the Pentagon’s own watchdog later concluded violated departmental policy.

Last September he summoned senior commanders from around the world to what many assumed would be a strategic briefing. Instead they received something closer to a culture-war sermon, railing against “politically correct wars” and promising a return to what he called maximum lethality.

In December he was again in the headlines, this time celebrating a highly contested US campaign of blowing up alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

Silicon Valley has also discovered what happens when the Fox News demagogue arrives at the Pentagon.

In a confrontation with the AI company Anthropic, the start-up resisted giving the military unrestricted use of its technology so the secretary declared them a threat to military security. One of Hegseth’s closest allies inside the Pentagon, the venture capitalist Emil Michael, attacked Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei on X, calling him a “liar” with a “God complex.”

American diplomats once had a phrase for the stereotype they warned their compatriots not to embody abroad: the Ugly American, loud, swaggering and oblivious to how he sounds to the rest of the world. It was on full display in Hegseth’s latest TV address on the Iran war.

“The dumb, politically correct wars of the past were the opposite of what we’re doing here,” he said. “They had vague objectives with restrictive, minimalist rules of engagement. No more. Our authorities are maxed out. Our capabilities are overwhelming and gathering still, as are those of our Israeli partners. Our munitions are full up and our will is ironclad, which means our timeline is ours and ours alone to control as long as it takes.”

Hegseth’s will may be “ironclad” as he cosplays IronMan in social media meme videos.

But if sentiment at home turns more decisively against another Middle East war – Congress only narrowly defeated a motion to outlaw Trump’s strikes without approval – it may yet be Pete himself who discovers the second half of his favourite slogan.

FAFO.