There is a specific kind of energy a man gives off when he knows the thing he is saying is not quite working but has decided to say it louder. Pete Hegseth — former Fox News host, current Secretary of WAR-NOT-DEFENSE — had that energy this morning.
Last week, he was angry. Today, he was desperate.
Hegseth didn’t open his briefing today with any real detail about casualties, strategic objectives or military priorities — you know, all that fluff that people sometimes confuse with war. No, Pete focused on the real battleground: the American media landscape. Claiming to address “the American people” directly (because who among us isn’t tuning into an 8 am Pentagon briefing on a Thursday morning?), he threw out a few lines about the meanie, biased, “anti-Trump press” and how they’re telling lies about “forever wars.” They can’t be trusted, he added, because “TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome, presumably] is in their DNA”.
This has been the administration’s line throughout the campaign in Iran: Americans should stop reading newspapers and only listen to state-approved communications, because journalists are liars and President Trump — and this is another direct quote from the press conference this morning — “knows better.”
Needless to say, that is a really great way to differentiate oneself from an “evil” regime that doesn’t allow freedom of press, goes after protesters and refers to its head of state as the Supreme Leader. Not that any of it matters, because, as Hegseth informed us later, “why we fight” is “not for… democracy promotion but to crush direct threats to America.” And anyway, “no one can deliver perfection in wartime.”
This isn’t new behavior, of course, but it is tonally new. Because War Daddy Pete is looking increasingly harried. His delivery has changed: he now clenches his fists as he tries to stop his hands flinging around defensively; his forceful sentences have started to sound more like pleas.
“Our ungrateful allies in Europe, even segments of our own press, should be saying one thing to President Trump: thank you,” he implored, at one point. It was, bluntly, laughable.
The conventional understanding of how words work is that if you’re going to completely denounce one narrative, you should offer an alternative. But this strategy isn’t for Pete Hegseth. “Epic Fury is different,” he said, when comparing it to other Middle East campaigns enacted under other presidents. Why? Well, that’s classified: “We’re not going to tell people how many or how long or what we’re going to do or what we’re not going to do” but it’s all “very much going to plan.”
The only clarity that reporters at the briefing could get in the end was that, yes, more money will be poured into the spiraling war (“As far as $200 billion, I think that number could move, obviously. It takes money to kill bad guys”) and that “we wouldn’t want to set a definitive timeframe” for anything, and that “what President Trump refuses to do… is sit in the status quo” (something most of us have already gleaned.)
Every Hegseth briefing contains both an unfunny, adolescent joke (today it was, “We’ve decided to share the ocean with Iran. We’re giving them the bottom half”) but today we were treated to a new addition: an extremely cringey, LinkedIn post-style anecdote. His 13-year-old son, he explained, had wandered into his office last night while he was editing his remarks for this morning’s briefing. He asked something wonderfully convenient like: Daddy, why are the fallen American soldiers so special and why is their sacrifice worth it? And, looking up from his work, Pete Hegseth replied, probably with a single tear running down his cheek: “They died for you, son. So your generation doesn’t have to live with a nuclear Iran.”
Never mind that Hegseth’s 13-year-old son doesn’t have security clearance, and yet was apparently in the Secretary of Defense’s office while he was editing classified war remarks. Never mind that no 13-year-old in the history of the western world has ever ambled in to ask such a convenient and respectful question about the importance of his father’s work just while he was paused, pen hovering, wondering what to write next. Because we have now entered the era of Here’s what the war in Iran taught me about B2B sales. Click the ‘like’ button, dammit!
The whole thing, of course, is insulting: insulting to the American public being told to only listen to state propaganda, insulting to the families who have lost their loved ones in the pursuit of an ever-changing military objective that everyone says is “very clear” but also can’t ever be talked about, insulting to the people who voted for a better economy and no more pointless wars in the Middle East.
The families of fallen soldiers were very briefly mentioned as a prelude to his tirade against the media — the families who, we are supposed to believe, told him “through tears, through hugs, through strength and through unbreakable resolve…. ‘Finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver. Do not stop until the job is done,’” a message that curiously none of them have confirmed, instead only asking repeatedly to be left alone in their grief, despite their supposed fervor — might well wonder about the claims that nobody knows what they’re doing, that Israel is acting without American signoff, that there is vicious infighting between Hegseth, JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard and co going on behind the scenes.
But that doesn’t matter because Iran has “been at war with us, whether they acknowledged it or not, for 47 years.” A fascinating construction: a war that one side didn’t acknowledge; a war fought entirely in the mind of the other side. It makes total sense, of course, that we have always been at war with Eastasia.
Even with the room packed out with pro-Trump media, there were a couple of awkward moments here for Hegseth. Thrown a softball question about which allies have been the most supportive, the Secretary of Not-Defense unhesitatingly talked about how “incredible” Israel has been, before immediately attempting to downplay what he’d just said.
And when pressed by another (sympathetic) reporter about whether it might look to some people like America was following Israel’s objectives rather than the other way around, he said: “‘We hold the cards. We have objectives. Those objectives are clear,” before adding, “The president has made it clear,” and, “POTUS has made it clear. Very clear,” all within seconds, and all without elaborating on what had been made clear or why. Hegseth then pivoted straight into something about how Iran shouldn’t attack other Gulf states and promptly left the conference. He was simply … gone.
And so we are left with the smoldering ashes of a LinkedIn press conference, the “clear” drumbeat that always underpins uncertainty, and a lingering sense of panic. There the Secretary of War was, clenching his fists, using his son for a cheap little story, giving Iran the bottom half of the ocean. We’ve breezed right on past anger and denial and into bargaining, and now even Pete seems to know most people aren’t buying what he’s selling.
He is going through the stages of grief, in public, on camera, at 8 am, for a nation that he’s pretending is hanging on his every word. When he haltingly implored the American people to please “pray for” the military “every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools,” his voice almost broke. And I really believed that he needs our prayers.
