The defense of the United States is a serious business. Every day, men and women, civilian and military, attend to the smallest details—the caloric content of a soldier’s meal, the fabric in a uniform—while others advise senior leaders on the use of violence to achieve the ends of national policy. Some, stationed underground, underwater, or on bomber airfields, stand ready to fulfill orders with apocalyptic consequences. These people are professionals and carry themselves with the quiet pride that comes from serving their nation.
And then there’s Pete Hegseth, the self-declared secretary of war.
Hegseth approaches his job as if it’s a vacation rather than public service. He shows up on military bases looking as exuberant as a bored househusband who just got a kitchen pass from his wife for a weekend of paintball with the boys. He sports a pocket handkerchief that looks like an American flag. He carries himself with an effortful swagger that is meant to convey machismo but instead just looks awkward. He talks with practiced drama, like he’s constantly trying out for the lead in a school play.
He is, for want of a better word, corny. Corniness isn’t always bad; sometimes it comes from people who are so effusively sentimental or expressive that others laugh at them, albeit with a certain amount of indulgence. But Hegseth’s behavior is not the endearing corniness that comes spontaneously from an overly earnest person trying to express great emotion. It is the overbearing corniness that comes from trying to mimic deep sincerity, and it tends to end up sounding like a cross between a late-night-television preacher and an arrogant luxury-car salesman: Jesus brought you here, my brother, so what’s it gonna take for you to fly home in one of these super-lethal F-35 babies today?
[From the July 2026 issue: Being Black in Pete Hegseth’s military]
Hegseth’s public statements are full of such corniness. This is someone who thought that changing the name of the Department of Defense to the “Department of War” would convey strength. Perhaps a better man could have sold the idea that President Harry Truman made a mistake changing the name during the Cold War, but Hegseth is not that man. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” he semi-rapped at the time, “violent effect, not politically correct.” This political doggerel is meaningless—and because he seems to have practiced before saying it, it is also cringe-inducingly corny.
My Atlantic colleague Peter Wehner has referred to Hegseth’s “callow, performative, light-as-air quality,” calling it evidence of the secretary’s “moral unseriousness.” As Wehner noted, only a deeply unserious person would “post an image on social media of Franklin the Turtle targeting narco-terrorists with the caption ‘For your Christmas wish list.’” But again, it’s not just unserious behavior; it’s cornball shtick. Franklin the Turtle?
Most of this would be merely embarrassing, and mostly harmless, were the United States not at war. When the United States was attacking what it claims were drug smugglers in the Caribbean, Hegseth took juvenile glee in blowing up boats. And now Operation Epic Fury—a name that itself sounds like it was workshopped in the basement of a mediocre fraternity—has brought out the worst of Hegseth’s hokey posturing. In March, he said: “America is winning decisively, devastatingly and without mercy.” He continued: “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
I’m sorry, did you want an actual update from the secretary of defense about the progress of the war? Good luck with that. This is a performance, not a briefing; if you want the facts and numbers, you’ll have to wait for General Dan Caine, a grown-up who has had to stand next to Hegseth during these moments.
A few weeks after this contrived bravado, Hegseth said: “We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.” This time, he went too far: Under U.S. and international law, “no quarter” orders are a crime. Hegseth later backtracked, claiming that the goal was to “fight to win and follow the law,” a typically vaporous Hegseth formulation.
In April, he was at it again. As the U.S. and Iran edged toward a cease-fire, he said: “Iran wants it to happen. They’ve had enough. Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital V military victory.” Not just a victory, mind you, but a capital V military victory. That’s some effusive corn, but Tehran isn’t buying it: On Tuesday, Iran shot down a U.S. Apache helicopter.
Hegseth’s rhetoric is silly enough, but he has also taken to engaging in theatrical corniness, including posting videos of himself running and working out with the troops. Yesterday morning, he arrived at Guantánamo Bay in shorts and a T-shirt—for some reason, he brought the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer with him—and addressed a group of service people. “We are defending the homeland, and we are taking back our hemisphere,” he told the troops, sounding less like a secretary of defense and more like an outtake from the 1984 classic adventure film Red Dawn.
He then lifted weights and did calisthenics with some of the fellows, because a Pentagon boss working up a sweat with young soldiers is sure to strike terror in the government in Havana. He’s also had himself photographed flying around in combat gear, presumably all part of the effort to show he’s just a regular guy who has eaten dirt with the Real Men.
Except Hegseth is 46, and he should be running the Defense Department instead of cosplaying in helicopters. He has even pulled his kids into the act by dressing them up like soldiers for their visit to France for D-Day festivities, putting little military uniforms, complete with captain’s bars, on them as if they were going trick-or-treating.
Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves saw these images and posted on X that Hegseth had become America’s Kadyrov, a reference to the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, who also dresses his children in military gear. The comparison is a bit much; Hegseth is not Kadryov, and I’m sure his children were delighted with the uniforms. But this ongoing cavalcade of corniness leads naturally to the question of why Hegseth is doing and saying such things. The responsibilities of his job—and presiding over a war that America is losing—seem to have had no effect on him. He is not “growing in office,” as the saying goes; indeed, he even seems to be regressing.
We’ve all had moments of being corny, because human beings sometimes get carried away by their emotions. But Hegseth does all of this repeatedly, most likely because he, like all senior Donald Trump appointees, knows he’s playing to one man in the White House. In Hegseth’s case, it’s working. He has survived blunders and scandals and, so far, a miscalculated war that he enthusiastically advised the president to launch.
[Peter Wehner: Hegseth’s unholy war]
His behavior is more than unprofessional: It carries risks. Every cringe-inducing statement, every moment of military dress-up, every ostentatious chin-up, sends a message to America’s enemies: This is what the American secretary of defense thinks his job is, so don’t worry—this is not someone you have to take into account. That would be a very bad conclusion for a foreign power to reach, because it would confirm that one of the weakest links in the president’s team is the man responsible for leading the U.S. military.
People in the White House might already know this, which may be why other officials (such as Army Secretary Dan Driscoll) have attended foreign meetings rather than the secretary. Hegseth appears to be playing almost no part in major defense issues; instead, he is preoccupied with firing senior Pentagon leaders and pruning promotion lists. You can almost hear the ball bearings rolling around in his hand while he squints at the names on those rosters.
Pete Hegseth is playacting his way through one of the most important jobs in the world. America will be safer—and its military more effective—once he is replaced by a competent and serious leader.
The post Pete Hegseth, Cornball in Chief appeared first on The Atlantic.
