I can never decide whether “embattled” or “beleaguered” is the preferred adjective to describe a cabinet secretary pick whose confirmation chances appear to be vanishing. But with Donald Trump reportedly shopping around for backup candidates to run the Pentagon in his new administration, let’s just say that Pete Hegseth, Trump’s original choice for defense secretary, is officially embattled, as well as beleaguered. And we can throw in a “besieged,” too.
The irony of the situation is that Hegseth, a former Fox News host and combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan with two Bronze Stars and (here’s his problem) multiple allegations of sexual and managerial misconduct to his name, is in fact aligned with the once and future president in one critical respect. He is more concerned about domestic enemies than foreign ones, and he is willing to break rules to defeat them — even the rules his potential job requires him to uphold.
Throughout his latest presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly warned Americans about “the enemy within,” an amorphous collection of left-wing ideologues whom he said pose a greater danger to the country than Russia or China. Sometimes he was specific, calling out Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. At other moments he spoke broadly of “radical left lunatics” and “very smart, very vicious people.”
Hegseth invokes the same concept in his recent book, “The War on Warriors.” He is eager to wage war against that enemy within. Hegseth believes that the battle has already been joined — and that his side is losing.
“America today is in a cold civil war,” Hegseth asserts in the book, which was published in June. “Our soul is under attack by a confederacy of radicals.” While his generation was fighting wars abroad, Hegseth writes, “we allowed America’s domestic enemies at home to gobble up cultural, political and spiritual territory.”
If Hegseth somehow manages to win confirmation as secretary of defense, he’ll seek to take that terrain back. And “The War on Warriors” shows the convictions he would bring to the effort. If Hegseth doesn’t make it through, his worldview will still matter, if only because it neatly fills in the details of Trump’s own vision, and his certitude that even the military, one of the few remaining trusted institutions in American life, must be disrupted and remade.
The territory preoccupying Hegseth most is the 6.5 million square feet in Northern Virginia that house the Pentagon, which he says is overrun with progressive ideas and policies promoting diversity, critical race theory, feminism, transgender “lunacy” and the misguided search for violent extremists in the ranks. (“We will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything!” he writes in the first paragraph of his first chapter, mocking the supposed priorities of the military brass.) There is a “cultural Marxist revolution ripping through the Pentagon,” Hesgeth argues, and military standards, readiness, recruitment and meritocracy are all suffering. If unqualified officers are promoted to satisfy diversity imperatives, leadership will erode and people will die.
“Forget D.E.I.,” Hegseth writes. “The acronym should be D.I.E. or I.E.D. It will kill our military worse than any I.E.D. ever could.”
Hegseth does not use the term “enemies” as a hyperbolic euphemism for ideological rivals or competing policy visions. He reminds readers that his oath of service is to protect the Constitution “against all enemies — both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)”
In particular, he calls out politicians such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden for manipulating weak, foolish generals, such as Wesley Clark, Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin. “This unholy alliance of political ideologues and Pentagon pussies has left out warriors without real defenders in Washington,” Hegseth writes. (Yes, his writing is packed with tough-guy insults and expletives; his favorite weapon is the F-bomb, which he deploys against Biden, Milley and others.)
The problem is not really the politicians — there’s no reason to expect better from them, Hegseth says — but rather the generals that kowtow to it all, eager for praise from the liberal media. They are “cowards with stars, complicit as they laud the enemy within,” Hegseth writes. “The next president of the United States needs to fire them all — or at least most of them — and install leaders with real fidelity to the Constitution.”
Trump, of course, is eager to do so. “I would fire them. You can’t have a woke military,” Trump said in a June interview with Fox News. “You need people that want to win. They want to win wars. That’s what their purpose is, to win wars. Not to be woke.” One of the Fox News hosts interviewing the president? Hegseth himself, whose book was coming out just days later.
Moments in the book almost read like Hegseth was fantasizing about the very job he’d be offered less than six months later. “We have only one Pentagon,” he writes. “One secretary of defense. One Army. If we lose it — we are toast.”
Diversity initiatives trouble Hegseth because the kind of people he wants in the military are, well, just regular guys. “Our key constituency is normal men, looking to be heroes and not victims,” he writes. “Normal dudes have always fought, and won, our wars. Prove me wrong.” He loves the 2022 movie “Top Gun: Maverick” because it was a story of “brave men, normal men.” The guys he served with as an Army National Guard officer were normal, too: “Strong. Tough. From Nowhereville, America, just like me. My men. They all look different. Different races, and different dialects. But all normal dudes.”
When you define one group as normal dudes doing normal stuff, the rest are reduced to various forms of abnormality. In Hegseth’s world, some people are just weird, at odds with his beloved normal dudes. He refers to his left-wing enemies, for example, as “a cartoonish circus” or “the freak squad.” And in Hegseth’s vision of the armed forces, women have no place in combat, and transgender troops no place at all.
Rather than fight, women are best suited to “carry the banner of Christian love” into war as nurses and support staffers, Hegseth writes. (Clara Barton comes up right away.) Women’s physical shortcomings compared with male warriors — in terms of bone density, muscle mass and lung capacity — would make the U.S. military “softer” and easier to defeat. Hegseth also emphasizes that women are naturally “life-givers,” so do we really want to train them to become killers? Besides, if men grow accustomed to treating women as equal targets in wartime, he reasons, “then you will be hard-pressed to ask them to treat women differently at home.”
Perhaps not everyone would be hard-pressed. I could not help but recall that passage when The Times reported that Hegseth’s mother called him out as “an abuser of women” in a 2018 email; she called it an “ugly truth” and urged her son to “get some help and take an honest look” at himself.
It’s hard to know whom Hegseth denigrates more casually in his book: the women whom he believes can only function as nurturers or the men whom he imagines would so easily become abusers.
There is little ambiguity with Hegseth’s views on transgender troops, whom he mocks as the left’s “very special” forces. While he expresses concern that some medical treatments required for gender transitions make it harder for transgender troops to deploy for prolonged periods, such logistical matters don’t seem to be his primary complaint. “Men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa, are a distraction,” he writes. “It might be your thing, but it’s weird and does not add substantive value to anyone.” His conclusion is straightforward: “Transgender people should never be allowed to serve. It’s that simple.” (This echoes the position Trump announced during his first term — “the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” he tweeted — and which Biden reversed upon taking office.)
There is a frequent sexualized subtext, not particularly subtle, to Hegseth’s critiques. One of his favorite verbs is “neuter,” which is what the bad guys want to do to the good guys. “The Left must control everything — and today they are obsessed with controlling, and neutering, our military,” he writes. If the enemy within wins the war, he writes, America will be “neutered at home and neutered abroad.”
It’s an odd fixation, particularly when the tools of cultural castration include, for example, the existence of a diversity and inclusion studies minor at the United States Military Academy, which Hegseth believes is setting cadets “on the same ideological path as Che Guevara.” Seeking to confirm the left-wing radicalization of West Point, I reviewed the 18 other minors listed on the academy’s website: aeronautical engineering, America in the world, American foundations, applied statistics, cybersecurity, engineering management, general history, geography, grand strategy, mathematics, nuclear science, photonics, regional studies, robotics, space science, systems engineering, terrorism studies and war, technology and society.
They’re not exactly recreating the Sierra Maestra up there on the banks of the Hudson.
For all his concerns about the weirding and weakening of the armed forces, Hegseth concludes, with typical dismissiveness, that “there just aren’t enough trannies from Brooklyn or lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne.” His real worry is that his normal dudes may not want to join, either. “Across America, from small town to small town, there are still hundreds of thousands of patriotic, strong, manly men ripe for recruitment,” Hegseth writes. But he fears that “all the ‘diversity’ recruiting messages made certain kids — white kids — feel like they’re not wanted.”
Hegseth’s expectations of normality flow not just from his experiences in war but also from a juvenile obsession with pop-culture depictions of the military and manhood. In addition to his “Top Gun: Maverick” references, Hegseth quotes from “Team America: World Police,” a savage 2004 satire of mindless militarism. (When he recalls capturing insurgents in Iraq, Hegseth adds, “’Merica, [expletive] yeah.”) He also draws inspiration from the 1988 blockbuster “Die Hard” and argues that America needs more men like Bruce Willis’s character, John McClane, the down-on-his-luck cop who saves the day. “Our elites are like the feckless drug-addled businessmen at Nakatomi Plaza,” Hegseth writes in his introduction. “But there will come a day when they realize they need John McClane.”
Hegseth sees himself as a yippee-ki-yay kind of guy. “When the traditional types scream about ‘norms,’ I embrace the chaos,” he wrote in an earlier book, “American Crusade,” published in 2020. “When the media punches, I punch back. When the Left attacks, I counterattack.” The book jacket features a blurb from Trump: “You’re a f**king warrior, Pete. A f**king warrior.”
If Hegseth becomes Trump’s warrior at the Pentagon, we know one of his early tasks. The president-elect has made clear that he plans to declare a national emergency over immigration and enlist military resources in his mass deportation efforts. I would not expect much opposition from Hegseth, who warns of an “invasion” at the southern border and regards illegal immigration as a leftist ploy to amass more Democratic voters. “We need to build a big, beautiful wall along our border,” he writes in the 2020 book, “because the Left has used every mechanism at its disposal to ensure that illegal immigrants can come to our country and steal — yes, steal — the benefits paid for by taxpayers.”
Debates over the legality and propriety of using the U.S. military in support of the president’s immigration policy may not matter much either because, over time, Hegseth has voiced growing indifference for norms of military conduct and rules of engagement. In “The War on Warriors,” he looks back on Army lawyers’ instructions over when and how they could engage the enemy in Iraq as “nonsense” and says he told men under his command to disregard them. During Trump’s first term, Hegseth urged the president to intervene on behalf of U.S. troops who had been charged with war crimes. And he minimizes the value of international agreements governing the treatment of civilians and prisoners of war.
“Should we follow the Geneva Conventions?” he asks. “What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism?” He reveals his indifference toward allies and partners when he wonders, “Aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?!”
Hegseth’s disdain for rules is perplexing in part because, in “The War on Warriors,” he worries that domestic enemies might abuse their own powers when they control the U.S. military. He urges “perpetual vigilance” against a “rogue or radical executive branch” that might use the military “extraconstitutionally,” even “against our own people.”
Hegseth describes the battle against this enemy in martial terms. “Just like an enemy at war, the radical Left never stops moving and planning,” he writes. “They do not respect cease-fires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy.”
“They’re traitors,” he concludes. “Plain and simple.”
The notion that he could be the rogue, that abuse of power is not the domain of just one side or one party, does not seem to cross his mind. After all, in his vision of the Pentagon, the normal dudes will be back in charge, as they must be. “The Department of Defense — before the full-out assault from the Obama and Biden administrations — was the last bastion of meritocracy in America,” Hegseth writes. He wants to restore it.
No matter that, in a truly meritocratic America, someone like Pete Hegseth would come nowhere close to running the Department of Defense. This beleaguered, embattled and besieged man just needs to take an honest look at himself to grasp that ugly truth. Or perhaps some Republican senators will do it for him.
The post Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth Have the Same Enemies appeared first on New York Times.
