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Pete Hegseth would never have been handed a public-facing job of consequence in any normal presidential administration.
Not a service secretary slot. Not a deputy assistant secretary billet. Not a regional public affairs GS-12 for the Department of the Interior with a nameplate and a phone that occasionally rings during some unlikely natural disaster. Pete Hegseth wouldn’t be named president of the local pickleball club, once anyone met him.
This isn’t an insult to the lukewarm intellect of a man addled by booze and poor impulse control. It’s the triumph of the war on expertise, and expertise lost.
It’s exactly why Donald Trump gave him the Pentagon.
Trump doesn’t hire for competence. He hires for the shape of a man on television, and Hegseth had the shape: the hair, the jaw, the flag pin, the aggrieved certainty, the Fox News morning-show cadence of a guy explaining to America that the real enemy is a black colonel with a pronoun in her email signature.
Everything that followed was written the day Trump picked him as SECDRUNK and servile GOP Senators rammed his nomination through.
Every disaster a person of even the most ordinary imagination could have predicted from a midwit troll with a rep for boozy green room antics has now come to pass.
Start with the war.
From “total obliteration” to a fruitless, losing war with Iran, sold with the swagger of a man who has never once had to explain a casualty count to a room that isn’t nodding along. Our forces are stretched to the breaking point, holding a line nobody at the top can define, toward an end state nobody at the top has articulated, because articulating one would require admitting how far short of any rational objective we are.
Then the families. The wholesale, grinding indignity of a Pentagon playing semantic games with the families of the wounded and killed about when and how their sons and daughters were injured, litigating brain injuries and hostile fire like an insurance adjuster looking for the clause that voids the policy.
That’s a moral failure, and Hegseth is perfect for that job, lacking any moral framework that reflects military (or American) values. It comes from the top because Trump decided the political cost of honest American casualties is too high to pay.
Then the purge. The firing of any senior officer insufficiently enthusiastic about the Trump chaos agenda, and their replacement by the most reliably sycophantic person available at the rank.
Every flag officer in the building or at a combatant command now understands the promotion criteria, and they aren’t performance, knowledge, experience, or suitability. The “let’s do PT” bullshit does not substitute for strategic thought. Push-ups are not a war plan. A three-mile run is not a theater strategy. There is no ruck heavy enough to carry the weight of the decisions this man is so obviously ill-equipped to make.
And now the trolls. Hegseth has stood up his own online army inside the Pentagon. It has gone precisely as you would expect: disgruntled shitposters, keyboard commandos spinning conspiracy theories that make QAnon look like a Birmingham garden club circa 1955, and bitter O-6s who never made the general officer selection cut and have decided the reason is ideological rather than obvious. These are the people now speaking with the institutional voice of the United States military.
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Read that last paragraph again. Hegseth’s in-house Pentagon trolls. Disgruntled shitposters. Keyboard commandos. QAnon-tier O-6s stewing in a strip mall office park somewhere in Rockville.
These are not sophisticated operatives. They are cheap operatives. They do not have a $50 billion black budget. They do not need one. They have something cheaper and, in a way, more corrosive: a browser tab open to a data broker site and a company credit card with room on it for a coffee.
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If Hegseth’s shitposters are going to come at you for a dollar, at least make them work for it.
Now, back to the incompetence.
I saw the other version of it when I worked there.
One of the quiet achievements of the post-Vietnam military was rebuilding a public presence worthy of trust. Not open access to the darkest corners of the operational picture, and not a running commentary that would put troops in danger, but a genuine institutional understanding that a free press and an informed public were part of what the thing was for.
When I first got to the Pentagon, I worked alongside uniformed and civilian public affairs officers who could integrate open media relations into even the most classified programs, and do it in a way that helped Americans understand what we had bought, what was at stake, and how the end of the Cold War was about to change everything about how the United States built and used (and here’s a cut for the OGs) Global Reach and Global Power.
They were disciplined, serious, and honest, even in the days when honesty was expensive and uncomfortable.
The idea that the Pentagon Dick Cheney and Colin Powell ran would one day replace that function with a claque of internet trolls is beyond ludicrous. It’s obscene.
So set aside, for one moment, the fact that Pete Hegseth will go down as the worst Secretary of Defense in modern American history, a man so underqualified and ill-equipped that he will be a punchline in war colleges for fifty years.
Set it aside, because here comes the part that is somehow stupider.
Pete Hegseth wants to be president.
Of the United States. Not of the aforementioned pickleball league, not of the HOA, not of a mid-tier veterans nonprofit.
There was the quick swing through Iowa. There was the clumsily placed leak to the Washington Post that he and his wife are “contemplating” a run, which, in this business, is not contemplation; it’s an announcement. The writing is on the wall in letters six feet tall.
Let’s game it out, because the political malpractice here is genuinely beautiful.
His appeal is a mile deep and an inch wide. Hegseth’s constituency is the audience that already watched him at 7 a.m. on Fox and agreed with him then. That is a real number of people, and it is nowhere near enough. He has never run for or won anything. He has never built a coalition. He has never had to persuade a single human being for money or support who wasn’t already sitting on the couch nodding. He has never survived thirty seconds of adversarial questioning from someone who wasn’t playing along. A primary is not a TV hit or a PT photo op; it’s a long, painful, intense beating, administered by political professionals who enjoy it.
The field will be a slaughterhouse. Set aside the high-ID folks: Vance, Rubio, RFK Jr., Donald Trump Jr., and Ted Cruz (R-Cuckold Valley, TX). Every GOP governor with a record, a few senators and reps with donor lists, every other heir apparent with a niche issue, are considering it. That seductive whisper in their ear as they
Each of them will see Hegseth as the guy in the field who can be safely dismembered over the most absurd war in memory. Hegseth is that guy. He is the free protein. He walks in with the highest name ID and the worst underlying numbers, which is the single most dangerous combination in presidential politics, because it means everybody knows who you are and the knowing is the problem.
He owns a losing war. Personally. By name. With his signature on it. There is no version of a 2028 Republican primary where the guy who ran the Iran war gets to stand on a debate stage and talk about strength. He will be asked about it at every single stop, by every single moderator, in every single living room in Sioux City, and there is no good answer, because the answer is a number.
MAGA hates forever wars. This is the part Hegseth’s partisans, such as they are, cannot see because they’ve confused the aesthetics of belligerence with the politics of it. The base that carried Trump did it partly on a promise to stop sending other people’s kids to bleed in places they can’t spell.
That was real. It’s still real. Hegseth’s entire pitch is that he is the war guy, offered to a movement that spent a decade organizing itself around the conviction that the war guys lied to them. He is trying to sell a Buick to a room full of people who hate Buicks and specifically hate the salesman.
And then, the veterans. This is the one that would keep Hegseth up at night if he had more intellect than a broken Keurig in a Days Inn. He will be campaigned against by enlisted troops, by junior officers, by senior officers, and by general officers, and here’s the elegant part: they will not have to attack him in a partisan frame.
They only have to describe him. Accurately, and on the record. What he said in the room, who he purged, who he put his thumb on the promotion scale, how he handled the wounded, how military families were treated. Every one of them a credible messenger the second the chyron reads Master Sergeant or Rear Admiral.
All of this brings us to the actual story of Pete Hegseth, which is not a political story at all. It’s a very old and very human one about a man whose ego has been outrunning his ability since roughly the day he learned that a confident jawline and thick hair get you further than knowledge, a moral framework, or experience.
He has been handed things his whole life. Institutions, platforms, organizations, a department with three million people. Each time, the pattern repeats: the arrival is loud, the promises are enormous, the reality curdles, and the fault always lies with someone else. The trolls exist to make sure the blame lands elsewhere. The purge exists to make sure no one in the room is qualified to say otherwise.
Now he’s looking at the presidency, and it’s the same reach it has always been, made from arrogance that has never once been calibrated against results.
Ability catches up eventually. It’s going to catch Hegseth next year in Congressional investigations that he can’t ignore or insult his way out of.
And when it catches Pete Hegseth’s futile presidential race, it will be in front of the entire country; it will be with the active-duty military and the veteran community he’s hurt so badly holding the door.
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Hegseth: Because MAGA demands an even bigger idiot.
Eh...it's a slogan that needs workshopping.
A Faux News weekend show host who fits the definition of an alcoholic aspires to be POTUS. He demonstrates utter loyalty, with false macho bravado thrown in. He's a war criminal. Just like his boss. Signed, Angry Canadian.