“That’s not why I am here,” Hegseth harangued, after doing an energetic pantomime of making a cocktail. “I am here because president Trump asked me to bring warfighting back to the Pentagon. Every single day. That is our focus.”
Hegseth’s big gestures and theater kid-bully energy made it easy to remember that he was, essentially, an influencer—a former Fox News talking head who was reportedly forced out, for financial mismanagement, of the small non-profit he’d been running. His nomination having already withstood a lengthy expose claiming a history of drunkenness, professional incompetence, and hush money payments over sexual misconduct, Hegseth now faces a revolt by colleagues and former friends. One of the “hit pieces” he railed against was written by John Ullyot, a guy who had written an earlier op-ed arguing that Hegseth was “the best choice to reform the Pentagon” just four months ago.
Ullyot has since reversed course, after Hegseth’s two Signal scandals and the firing of three of Hegseth’s closest advisors. Ken Klippenstein described an environment where Hegseth has lost the respect of the rank and file. Ryan Grim wrote of “a roiling internal meltdown among top Pentagon staff.” Even in her defense of Hegseth, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the entire Pentagon is working against” him.
Interestingly enough, the first high-profile guy to get rebuked, seemingly, over “Signal-gate” ended up being National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who had allegedly organized the group chat about Yemeni war plans that mistakenly included Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. Waltz, who actually looks like an older, more waterlogged Hegseth, wasn’t officially fired, just reassigned, as ambassador to the United Nations (an organization Trumpists have long held in contempt). Again, the move is only really possible to understand within the context of cartoon manliness. There’s nothing less manly to the MAGAsphere than caving to public opinion. They like the guys who “say whatever they want,” not the ones who would kowtow to the chattering masses. To actually fire Hegseth or Waltz would be to behave unmasculinely.
It seems that even those previously sold on Hegseth and the MAGA agenda in general are discovering that child-like notions of what a “warrior” should be and appointees designed for maximum optics appeal might not actually be that great at leading. Hegseth’s increasingly erratic performance lays bare the hysterical overcompensation at the root of it all. Even putting aside actual administration, the performance is slipping. Hegseth keeps hammering “warfighting” as his focus, a weird, techy-sounding neologism that conjures not so much Rambo as a startup boss in a quarter zip. Should we onboard more soldiers to fight wokeness? Calendarize a battle plan against pronouns? Or should we table that for later?
The Trump administration locked into a course where they can’t admit fault without tacitly feminizing themselves, but the contradictions are still obvious. After Mike Waltz was reassigned to the UN, he was replaced in his former position by Marco Rubio. It almost goes without saying that Rubio, who is also the Secretary of State, is pretty much no one’s idea of either a manly man or a “war fighter.” Trump’s own nickname for the man was “Little Marco.” (The chief appeal of an asshole like Trump is that he will occasionally be an asshole to people you don’t like.)
Much of the second Trump era has involved replacing career bureaucrats and politicians like Rubio with showmen like Pete Hegseth and Dan Bongino, men whose main (possibly only) selling points were being louder and more obvious in their presentations of masculinity. But now even Trump loyalists are beginning to realize that you can actually do a lot more evil stuff when you don’t spend so much time gossiping about it. As Tony Soprano once complained to his therapist, “What ever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type? That was an American!”
People like Hegseth certainly aren’t silent, and there seems to be a belated realization that maybe they were never that strong, either. Some of our caricatures have a way of collapsing when they collide with reality.