The people in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet often seem to be competing for the title of the worst member of the administration. Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have compiled records that demand full consideration.
But Pete Hegseth is playing a different game. He doesn’t aspire to be the worst member of this Cabinet. Even before he played a major role in Trump’s decision to embark on the ill-fated war with Iran, he was a serious contender for the title of the worst secretary of defense ever.
Hegseth began his tenure with minimal qualifications. He was a Fox News personality with a mission to inflame, not educate. He treats his current job as a platform for dishonest propagandizing and performative masculinity. He’s not known for incisive analysis, depth of knowledge or sober judgment — qualities that distinguished most of his predecessors.
He replaced Lloyd Austin, a retired Army general who served for more than 30 years, gaining extensive experience in high-level positions, including heading U.S. Central Command in the Middle East.
Hegseth never rose above the rank of major. He was forced out as president of Concerned Veterans of America after repeatedly getting drunk in public. Once he took aides to a strip club, where “he was so drunk he tried to get on the stage and dance with the strippers,” as a whistleblower reported.
Hegseth promised to abstain if he was confirmed. But drunk or sober, he’s supremely unfit for the job: arrogant, inept, ideologically extreme, addicted to brutality and utterly lacking in the sober gravitas Americans have long expected from the person overseeing the world’s most powerful military.
He has made a habit of preening and boasting, with vacuous self-promoting stunts such as a “fitness challenge” of pushups and pullups with Kennedy.
He’s preached a demagogic agenda, pledging “to remove the social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics. No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. … We are done with that s—.”
He’s fond of macho slogans such as “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” He’s blocked promotions for Black and female officers who have compiled stellar records.
All this might be forgivable if the secretary were not conspicuously incompetent. Last year, he shared details about a pending airstrike on a private messaging app on his personal phone — with a group that inadvertently included a journalist with The Atlantic. The Pentagon’s inspector general found that “the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”
Anyone else in the U.S. military who did what Hegseth did would have been court-martialed. Fiascoes such as these have earned him a nickname among Pentagon personnel: “Dumb McNamara,” a reference to the 1960s-era secretary who did so much to mire the U.S. in Vietnam.
Hegseth exudes contempt for the rules of war, international law and simple humanity. The U.S. attacks on boats allegedly transporting drugs have been a gross misuse of military force, and they have undoubtedly killed innocent people. Especially shocking was the September attack in which the U.S. hit a boat and, when survivors were seen clinging to the disabled vessel, hit it again, snuffing out their lives.
Other defense secretaries have committed forces only after a thorough examination of the risks and alternatives — and after making careful plans that account for all foreseeable contingencies. Under Hegseth, the U.S. launched a war on Iran in clueless disregard of how hard it would be to win and how badly it could go wrong.
It came as a shock to him and his boss that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, even though experts were well aware of the danger. “Planning around preventing this exact scenario,” a former official in both Republican and Democratic administrations told CNN, “has been a bedrock principle of U.S. national security policy for decades. I’m dumbfounded.”
Hegseth thinks bravado and firepower can substitute for actual strategy. He promised Iranians “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” He bragged, “We negotiate with bombs.” He called on the Christian God for aid in inflicting “overwhelming violence” on “those who deserve no mercy.”
That’s not a promising formula to win over Iran’s Muslim population. And so far, raining bombs on Iran has confirmed the limits of air power. The war goes on, and Iran has shown its ability to hit American targets in the region, as well as to wreck the global economy.
For all his professed Christian faith, Hegseth never absorbed the wisdom of Proverbs, which warns that “pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
But war has a way of teaching Americans humility.
Steve Chapman was a member of the Tribune Editorial Board from 1981 to 2021. His columns, exclusive to the Tribune, now appear the first week of every month. He can be reached at stephenjchapman@icloud.com.
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