Tt is a condition of the Trump era, and particularly of this war, that we regularly, every day, every hour, see things online so ridiculous or obscene that they merge with images we’ve encountered in novels, Hollywood films, and TV satires. Heightening the disorientation, the Trump administration has spliced together real-life footage of bombings and scenes from action movies to make maniacal snuff films, something even the social critic Christopher Lasch could not have imagined. The videos provoke a cognitive confusion, a reflexive desire to dismiss what must not be real.
Hegseth in particular, with his cowboy arms and crispy gelled hair, is a parody come to life. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly as it should be,” he said in his first press briefing about February’s attack on Iran. And on the same occasion: “We have only just begun to hunt.” He loves to use the word “hunt” and to recite weapon names. He also frequently invokes God and Jesus, especially when talking about killing; in a Christian prayer service at the Pentagon, he called for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy…. We ask [this] with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.” He compares Trump to Jesus and journalists to the Pharisees. He has fired or forced into retirement subordinates with significant expertise—as many as twenty-four top military officers, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the army. He has openly targeted black officers and women officers. He has also, according to numerous reports, routinely abused alcohol, and in 2020 he paid off a woman who said he had sexually assaulted her. Congress knew that when it confirmed him as secretary of defense.
Extreme though Hegseth may be, he is a recognizable type: a jockish, puerile white man, a boy you knew in your public high school, if you went to one. He is the Jersey Shore as much as he is Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Oregon. You may recall him as the guy who shoved queer kids into trash cans in the cafeteria and said things about girls like “You’d need a crowbar to get her legs open.” As an adult, Hegseth is a man whom people have described leaving a bar, shit-faced, chanting “No means yes!” and “Kill all Muslims!” He is what the world thinks some Americans are, the bleakest caricature. But like the violence in the administration’s videos, Hegseth is real, and he is American, which means we have no choice but to ask what to do with him, and what to do with ourselves.
This is a person produced by a culture, a society, and a history. He speaks with a deliberate viciousness, a desecration of humanity that recalls centuries of slavery and the American Indian Wars. He is heir to a tradition handed down from the Founders—not the noble, revolutionary ones in the history books but the ruthless, ragged genocidaires who went west. He practices that nasty Christianity. “Break the teeth of the ungodly,” he said at the Pentagon prayer service; Bull Connor comes to mind. So many of Trump’s men—Gregory Bovino, Markwayne Mullin, Tom Homan—resemble the primeval thugs of the heartland, who openly desire the submission of the most vulnerable.
These men are ignorant of many things, but certainly of foreign societies. In 2014 I took a trip to Iran with two friends, during which we had a cheerful young tour guide who also functioned as a minder of sorts. Together we road-tripped around the country, from Shiraz to Yazd to Isfahan to Qom to Tehran, and saw mosques, palaces, museums, and archaeological sites—we even passed the Natanz Nuclear Facility on the highway; it was right there, visible from the car.We attended a dinner party in a Tehran apartment and went to an artists’ space where young people gathered. In Isfahan the local people let us go up a minaret of the famous Shah Mosque and view that exquisitely designed city from the latticed wooden carriage at the top, a delight so extreme I felt like a child. For over a decade I spoke of those ten days in Iran as the best trip of my life. What I know about the dangerous American ignorance in men like Hegseth and Trump is that it prevents them, on some elemental level, from understanding that Iran is a real country full of real people.
What has allowed this worldview to persist? The systemic oppression of another people always deforms the oppressors in turn, and although slavery ended and civil rights were won, America has continued to pioneer new varieties of oppressor degradation: Little Boy and Fat Man, destroying to save in Vietnam, CIA-backed military coups, Abu Ghraib, ICE warehouses, Gaza. Hegseth is a repository of the cold war, the end of history, and the so-called war on terror. Anyone his age understands the particular environment in which his ideology took shape. A tour through his life and his actions in the last few years reveals forms of degradation that are fundamental to the Trump administration but not unique to it. If we are to have a renunciation of who or what is terrorizing the world, it will not only be a renunciation of these men.
