U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting about military families in the Oval Office on Aug. 3.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News guy who’s now in charge of the U.S. military, has a rocky – to say the least – pre-Pentagon employment history of poor leadership, financial mismanagement, alleged sexist behaviour and substance abuse on the job. He has a well-documented problem with women: He has declared in the past that women have no place in combat roles in the military, and his own mother wrote that he “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego” in an e-mail that she then retracted. He also settled with a woman who alleged he sexually assaulted her, although he denied wrongdoing; he had been, according to his attorney, “visibly intoxicated.”
Yet Mr. Hegseth’s nomination was approved in early 2025. Today, he runs the most powerful military in the world.
As bad as his behaviour has been all along – for instance, having to be restrained while drunk from joining dancers onstage at a Louisiana strip club while he was president of Concerned Veterans for America, according to a whistleblower’s report – the guy has now outdone himself.
This painfully sycophantic lackey to the cognitively deficient and very mean Donald Trump has leapt in on the President’s big battle with Canada, with a tweet so stupid and crass that it is a perfect illustration of the absurdity of this moment.
Pentagon defends Hegseth’s controversial post about Canadian cadet program
Mr. Hegseth – or one of his own lackeys – screenshotted a happy photo shared last week on Instagram by the Cadet Training Centre (CTC) in Vernon, B.C. The CTC’s post showcased award recipients at the end of its summer training camp: proud young Canadians receiving medals from their beaming mentors.
“Congratulations and well done to all recipients who received awards on the final day of Vernon CTC 2026!” wrote the CTC in its post. “This is recognition of the amazing effort you have all put in as course cadets and staff.”
In his post, along with a screenshot of one of these happy CTC photos, Mr. Hegseth added a Canadian flag and the words “(this is real).”
I can’t claim to be inside Mr. Hegseth’s head – heaven forbid – but this has been universally understood to be a body-shaming comment targeting the instructor in the photo. The Daily Beast called it a “vile social media post apparently mocking a Canadian youth cadet instructor for being overweight.”
I suppose this is Mr. Hegseth’s way of trolling Canadians in this fragile moment of trade war. He has decided to fire up his troops at the expense of a person spending their summer training youth cadets – in Vernon, no less, a part of Canada that has dealt with catastrophic wildfires this summer owing in large part to the global warming catastrophe his government denies.
The Vernon Cadets, according to their website, offer programs for youth aged 12-to-18 in subjects such as leadership, fitness, sports and band. Mr. Hegseth, who has repeatedly displayed his lack of moral fitness and unsportsmanlike behaviour, could use some of that training himself. In fact, leadership is probably too much of a stretch for this guy. Maybe begin with manners and decency; start him off with kindergarten (with apologies to the kindergartners). This is the behaviour of a mean manchild, not worthy of a member of any government.
Oh – and there is currently an actual crisis at the Pentagon, with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll stepping down from his post, amid widely reported tensions with Mr. Hegseth. The Atlantic reports that Mr. Driscoll took his concerns directly to the President last week, and that Mr. Trump was “surprised” to hear “how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion” under Mr. Hegseth. Also, isn’t there a war he needs to be running?
Amid all this, Mr. Hegseth chose to pick this schoolyard fight and punch way, way down.
What’s even more awful, if this is possible, is that his ugly post had more than 43,000 likes on Tuesday morning. This is somehow still shocking, even as society has degenerated into a morass of petty nastiness. And why wouldn’t it? This is a top-down problem. What do you expect when people like this are in charge? You get sideshows like mocking cadet instructors and renaming lakes while the world burns – and not just metaphorically.
This small man has decided to use his great power to poke fun at a person who is doing good work, to comment on their looks in order to make them look bad. Or so he thinks. Only one person looks bad here: the shameless and shameful Pete Hegseth. A man who has no business running the U.S. military. Or an X account. Or anything else.