President Donald Trump’s administration is preparing for a literal war while its “Secretary of War” rants about restoring a children’s organization to its perceived glory of yesteryear.
“After 2012, the Boy Scouts lost their way, and a once great organization became gravely wounded,” Pete Hegseth, who remains legally designated Defense Secretary despite his department’s informal MAGA rebrand last year, says in a bizarre video posted on X Friday.
The United States is presently closer to an all-out conflict with Iran than at any other time since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Trump has reportedly sent an additional 10,000 troops to the Middle East and increased naval presence in the region to 16 warships, including a fresh dispatch of two aircraft carrier strike groups. More than a hundred combat aircraft are now standing by for action.
Hegseth does not appear to have used either his personal or official X account to post about Iran so far this year.
In his Friday clip, he laments how since “diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, crept in” at what is now Scouting America, girls have been permitted to join the organization as Christian teachings assumed a less central focus. He attributes these changes to “an insidious, radical, woke ideology that is anti-America, and anti-American.”
He warns that the situation had become so desperate, he was “very seriously considering” ending his department’s longstanding relationship with the group. But after a meeting with the organization’s leadership to “convey our deep concerns,” it has now capitulated on “several key reforms.”
These apparently include abandoning its DEI-related badges, offering membership based solely on biological sex at birth, and waiving registration fees for the children of active-duty service personnel.
Hegseth nevertheless remains wary of his adversaries. “As President Reagan famously said—trust, but verify,” he said Friday. His support for Scouting America is now “contingent on them making substantial progress toward reaching these and many other positive changes in the next six months.”
Allies, enemies, intergovernmental organizations and even the Defense Department’s own staff are presently at a loss over whether that same period may see the Trump administration embroiled in active conflict with one of America’s most ardent nemeses.
As the White House continues its military build-up in the Middle East, high-stakes negotiations between the U.S. and Iran ended Thursday with no deal over the president’s demands for the authoritarian theocracy to abandon its nuclear armament program.
Pentagon staffers told Politico earlier this week that Trump has repeatedly dithered on a plan of attack against the Islamic Republic. “One defense official told me there have been multiple times just in the last few weeks or couple of months that they’ve left the building thinking they were going to come back at three in the morning because something was going to happen,” journalist Dasha Burns told the outlet’s Playbook newsletter Monday. “And then you wake up to the regular alarm being like—‘oh, I guess we decided not to go through with that’.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the Pentagon for comment on this story.
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