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The term virtue signaling refers to an annoying moral peacocking that has less to do with politics than with self-gratification. It’s the dinner guest who feels compelled to comment on the climate impact of every course. It’s the guy who annoys his colleagues during meetings with constant bits of civic guidance. (The author Richard Russo, in a 1990s satire of academic life, created a character whose nickname was “Orshee” because when anyone in a faculty meeting used he as a generic pronoun, the fellow would chirp “Or she” as a correction.)
But Donald Trump and his administration have embraced the Mirror Universe version of virtue signaling. They’ve pioneered the practice of “vice signaling,” or saying insulting or odious things both as attention-seeking behavior and as a way of showcasing their supposedly transgressive political views. They aim to demonstrate strength by being willing to appall other people, much as schoolyard bullies insult their classmates to gain the approval of other bullies. It’s the same peacocking, but with uglier feathers.
Few people besides the president himself have done more to advance the cause of vice signaling than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a man who honed his communication skills at Fox News, where the hosts routinely say outrageous things as a way of showing their viewers how eager they are to own the libs. Hegseth, for example, has long stewed about the fact that women occupy positions of leadership in the U.S. military, and he has hammered on the idea of “merit” as a way of implying that minority officers have been promoted because of their race rather than their talent. He put those beliefs into action almost immediately upon arriving at the Pentagon by pushing for the firing of one Black and several female senior officers who were then replaced with white men.
A few weeks ago, he did it again: According to The New York Times, Hegseth intercepted the Army’s promotion list, which consists mostly of white men, and struck off four officers—two Black men and two women—preventing them from advancing from colonel to brigadier general. Hegseth did not provide a public explanation for his decision, but military officials told the Times that one officer was singled out for writing a paper about the career choices of African American officers, and another was targeted because she had served during the pullout from Afghanistan.
Usually, the defense secretary doesn’t get involved at that level of the process. Promotions like these, to one and two stars, are generally a routine matter, decided on by promotion boards within the military and then presented to the Senate for approval. (Promotions to three and four stars get a lot more scrutiny; those generals and admirals will likely head major commands and become part of the civil-military leadership in Washington.) Hegseth had to know that carving those four colonels out of the list looks both misogynistic and racist, and he chose to send a clear message to the rest of the military: I will intentionally harm the careers of loyal American officers in a display of obvious bigotry just to show that I’m a tough guy.
Meanwhile, every time he steps to the podium, Hegseth seeks not to reassure or inform the American people but to hit hot buttons that will please Trump and the MAGA faithful. He raps out some inane sloganeering rather than offering real information: “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” He says that America will show “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies”—chesty, movie-villain talk that is typical of Hegseth’s cringe-inducing attempts to project confidence. (Perhaps he has become aware that some in the Pentagon now reportedly refer to him as “Dumb McNamara,” comparing him—unfavorably—to the late Robert McNamara, his predecessor who helped mire America in the swamps of Vietnam.)
But nowhere is Hegseth’s embrace of vice signaling more obvious than in his efforts to combine his adolescent, gung-ho excitement about war with Christian prayer. When Hegseth tries to don the armor of a warrior priest, the result is a rancid mess that should offend believers and nonbelievers alike.
Praying for the safety of the troops is not controversial in America, nor should it be. In my faith (I am a Greek Orthodox Christian), we pray each week for “the peace of the world” and “for our country, the president, all those in public service, and for our armed forces everywhere.” Nor are petitions to the Almighty unusual in wartime: In 1944, General George Patton ordered up a prayer to God for an end to bitter weather that was holding up his attacks on the Nazis. His chaplain beseeched the Lord to “restrain these immoderate rains” and to allow the Third Army, “armed with Thy power,” to “advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations.”
But even Patton’s weather prayer looks timid next to Hegseth’s impious rage. Last week—during Lent, no less—he prayed in much the same way as the jihadists he hates might have: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” Hegseth said, asking God to give American forces “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Christianity—whose founder preached peace and mercy and then was tortured to death—has struggled for centuries with the moral questions concerning the permissibility of war for people of faith, and how they should conduct themselves if armed conflict is inevitable. The works produced by these debates are collectively called the “just-war tradition,” a body of thought that is at the foundation of the laws of war both in the United States and in other nations. The just war tradition has always recognized the sanctity of human life and the spiritual peril of taking it, which is one of the reasons “no mercy” and “no quarter” orders are traditionally a violation of the laws of war—and why they are also against American law.
Christian thinkers have always insisted that princes and generals approach war with a sense of grave responsibility. Hegseth, however, sees war as just another opportunity to display depravity as if it were a martial virtue. (During Trump’s first term, Hegseth reportedly encouraged the president to issue pardons to two men convicted of war crimes.) As Greg Sargent noted today in The New Republic, Hegseth’s wartime prayers—rooted in his apparent adherence to a far-right evangelical sect—not only contravene the traditional Christian abhorrence of war but also suggest that “God actively approves of as much killing as possible.” One Baptist minister told Sargent that the secretary gets to this conclusion by cherry-picking various bloody passages from scripture, using them in a “kind of a Mad Libs mash-up of biblical violence.”
Vice signaling is rampant throughout the Trump administration because the president’s appointees know that the boss likes underlings who emulate his aggressive indecency. But when the man in charge of the Defense Department disgorges this kind of toxic waste, it seeps into the groundwater of military culture. It tells young service members—and men, especially—that racism, sexism, and the display of faux masculinity is the sign of a true warrior.
Whether Pete Hegseth is sincerely a man of faith, I cannot say. His brand of Christianity is unrecognizable to me, but ostensibly we worship the same God, and we definitely read the same Bible. So perhaps I can suggest that he revisit Matthew 6:5, in which Jesus admonishes his followers about showy displays of piety: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.”
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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The post Pete Hegseth’s Shameless Vice Signaling appeared first on The Atlantic.
