is a polarizing figure who doesn’t quit]
EXCELLENT!!
Posted on 12/23/2025 7:10:18 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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.”
Typically, “bloat” in Washington refers to bureaucracy and spending, not the waistlines of generals Hegseth hauled together to be berated at a meeting in September. But unlike facial hair, hacking back the bureaucratic side doesn’t appear to be high on Hegseth’s priority list. Cutbacks announced in the spring to the number of senior leaders have “lagged in implementation,” a phrase that crops up frequently when it comes to his announcements of bold reforms.
The President’s signature missile defense policy, the “Golden Dome for America,” a multitrillion dollar, two-decade gambit to protect the United States from attack, has also yet to start sending out the money budgeted by Congress.
Hegseth’s socials may be full of running workouts, but there are many in Washington who question whether the actual work of running the Department of Defense is necessarily part of its renamed secretary’s agenda.
At another meeting, Hegseth was called upon to defend himself against the latest round of assaults from the “fake news” media against the numerous strikes conducted under his watch on specific boat-sized areas of the Gulf of America. The controversy over the Caribbean program has become the flashpoint of the Hegseth era, thanks to a confluence of events that seem (at least from the outside) to be an orchestrated effort by the long-lived Washington foreign policy blob to take out the SecWar. If you were going to war in an “America First” way, this would be how you’d do it.
First, an announcement of stepped-up aggression against Venezuelan narcoterrorists carrying drugs in international waters – a drone-centered campaign designed to blow unsympathetic criminals into smithereens in the spirit of the aggressive-in-your-own-neighborhood doctrine that Trump’s Jacksonian foreign policy encourages. Overlay the grainy footage of exploding speedboats with Van Halen’s “Panama” for that ideal Reagan-Bush early-1990s post-Cold War exuberance.
While Democrat partisans and the more principled pro-MAGA members of the Republican party raised eyebrows at the strikes and warned against getting sucked into a regime-change war in Venezuela (despite all indications that is the one area where Trump himself might consider getting a bit neocon), these are among the President’s most popular policies, with a Harvard-Harris poll finding support from 58 percent of Americans.
The next phase of Hegseth’s war involved a political video from multiple veterans of the CIA and armed forces, chief among them Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, warning officers against following “illegal orders” being handed down from senior officials. The video riled up even some of the more sedate members of the defense community, because it read as a warning against the officers themselves. Hegseth threatened to recall the senator to active duty to face a court-martial for a video that “intentionally undercut good order and discipline.” He announced this, as usual, on X.
Then came a Washington Post article that blared an astonishing story, claiming that after an initial strike on a drug boat in September, a second strike had been conducted – a so-called “double tap” – to eliminate two survivors dramatically clinging to the side of the wreckage, allegedly carried out following a verbal order from Hegseth to “kill them all.” Survivors of such strikes would obviously be a legal problem for the United States, particularly given the already debatable legality of this military action, most of which relies on Obama-era drone-strike rationalization.
The story the Washington Post told showed Hegseth as some kind of hyped-up teenager flinging around green army men willy-nilly, or someone who has opted for one too many nukes on a Call of Duty stream. Senator Rand Paul, already a GOP-skeptic, demanded Hegseth come to Congress to testify about the strike. Questioned about the story, Trump himself said that a second strike is not something he would have approved in that situation. Being undermined by the boss is usually a preface to getting fired, and quickly.
A year in, the cabinet seems overdue for a reshuffle. As a narrative, the Post’s story could have proved devastating – perhaps even career-ending. Perhaps an old hand at defense is needed instead of a young buck? Someone who gets along better with the Hill? The murmurs were loud – but only for a few days. Unfortunately for the legacy press, as the longtime Fox News observer Brit Hume said, the Washington Post exclusive remained an exclusive.
The New York Times, ABC News and the Wall Street Journal all ran stories in the following days casting serious doubt on the Post’s reporting, with major details changed and the decision process apparently not involving any additional kill order from Hegseth. “He dodged a bullet there,” one Senate staffer told me. “When the Post goes after you and misses, it buys you time and earns you cred with the boss.”
On the more traditional platform of Meet the Press, Mark Kelly declared that officers should be able to judge in the moment. “If orders are illegal, not only do they not have to follow them, they are legally required not to follow them.” But he failed on the follow-up: “You’re asking officers in the field to make really tough calls about the legality of what they are being asked to do,” host Kristen Welker asked. “If you were still in uniform, if you received an order to strike suspected drug boats overseas and kill everybody onboard, would you refuse that order in real time?”
In response to this surely obvious follow-up, Kelly hemmed and hawed, unable to answer the very question he would put to every member of the military. Nor could he answer what specific orders the President made that could be considered unlawful. The defiant inability to explain why this was terrible was not a great narrative for Democrats to adopt, especially when it led to a parade of commentators across cable networks boldly announcing their support for the narcoterrorists. “People on a boat, carrying cocaine, are not a direct threat to the lives of our service members or Americans,” Democratic Representative Adam Smith said. Not exactly an applause line.
The challenge of the current situation is that Hegseth is viewed on Capitol Hill as a conduit, not a policymaker. In his initial Senate hearing for the job, Democrat Richard Blumenthal said he would support Hegseth as a spokesman for the department, but not its head – and most of the time, to much of Congress, it seems as if that is his approach to the job.
This plays better with some corners of the GOP than others. Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, one of the more neoconservative members of the Senate, can’t get enough of the pump-up influencer activity – apparently viewing it as a much-needed morale booster for lackluster armed forces (recruitment levels are indeed up).
Ohio Representative Mike Turner – a true blue neocon with an early-2000s viewpoint on the outs with many in his party – is a constant behind-the-scenes critic. More in the middle is Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and one of the most serious and faith-minded Republican senators in the defense space, who has openly vocalized his frustrations with the Hegseth Department of Defense. For Wicker and the majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill, the irritation is that they just don’t know enough about what’s happening. They don’t want to learn about things from Instagram and X. They want to know ahead of time. But as any good influencer knows, that’s not the way to make things trend.
Hegseth’s tenure has been surrounded by critics, old-school Washington hands who look down on his Fox News past, distrust his Barstool Sports attitude, and view him as the last type they would want with the responsibility of running something as important as the Department of Defense. But his detractors have failed to recognize the reason he endures. He is doing what his Commander-in-Chief wants. He is doing it loudly and boldly, calling out his foes instead of letting them gain footing. He is broadcasting his tenure and his views in a way that appeals to a generation that saw the likes of Lloyd Austin lumbering around spouting platitudes and disappearing entirely for weeks at a time.
And for all the Capitol Hill critics, there remains an awareness that if Hegseth were to get the boot, whatever came after might actually be much worse. His denunciation of the former Reaganites who dabbled in neoconservatism notwithstanding, if Hegseth were to go, many on the Hill believe his potential replacements might be more akin to the MAGA ranks who think blasting narco-boats is a bridge too far. All this makes @SecWar the man for the moment, and for the foreseeable future. It’s about time for another gym run, so like and subscribe for more.
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Jim
Sounds like a resume enhancer if you ask me.
The last toad sure as shit could not work out with the troops. Maybe meet them in the mess hall.
Hegseth is doing great. Screw anyone who says otherwise.
Short hair, short side burns, clean shaven were required when I served. I don’t know when it all changed, but I didn’t like it.
Agreed.
WISH WE HAD ABOUT 1000 CLONES OF PETE
“ polarizing”
Snort
Democrats
Public information manipulators formerly regarded as “ journalists”
Perfumed Princes leading from the rear
Wokist civilian DoD bureaucrats
If the measure of a man is to look at who are his enemies…its Hegseth in for the win.
I suspect the urgency in Trump's agenda to depose Maduro may be in having Venezuela's legitimate-government-to-be (and especially María Corina Machado) expose Chavez/Maduro's role in election theft by software worldwide. To internationalize the damage Cartel de los Soles has done including in the United States as allied with Democrats would be a powerful inducement to reject the left in the mid-terms.
This vet is on the side of Hegs. The “thing” pretending to lead our military under Biden was a pathetic joke. He was the very definition of a total loser who was laughed at behind his back by real military members.
Lloyd Austin never quit either. It’s just nobody could ever find him.
First paragraph clearly outlined “this is a hit piece”. I rapidly lost interest.
RE: First paragraph clearly outlined “this is a hit piece”.
First paragraph simply tells us Hegseth likes to train with other soldiers in uniform. Where does it insinuate “hit piece”?
Hegseth has been a rock star in the Cabinet!
Polarizing only to Deep Staters, globalists, neocons and war pigs.
It wouldn’t have mattered who Trump picked. Anyone would have been attacked just as viciously.
Well, consider that this piece was written by Mr Meghan McCain ....
“polarizing” = engages in wrongthink against traitors and other commie trash.
“...something most defense secretaries have done without someone dutifully filming the experience for Instagram.” (working out with the troops)
Stop right there. Bring the receipts.
Did domenich ever serve?
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