I’m starting to feel sorry for Pete Hegseth. Week after week, the defense secretary turns up at 8 a.m. sharp to defend the latest disaster in the Iran war — and week after week, he gets more angry about it, more visibly desperate, and more bizarrely religious.
Hegseth is quite clearly a man who wants to cosplay as Captain America but instead keeps wandering onto the set of Joker. “This is not a fair fight,” he said at the podium today, supposedly directly addressing Iran. “We are locked and loaded… We’d rather not have to do it… You don’t have a Navy or real domain awareness! You can’t control anything!”
If that weren’t enough, he then dabbled in threatening war crimes again: Iran will have “blockades and bombs falling on infrastructure, power and electricity” if they don’t sign a deal, he added. Truly, diplomacy at its finest.
So far, none of this deviated from his usual rhetoric. But then Pete took a hard pivot — and began to address the press directly. “Speaking of choosing wisely,” he said, having just implored Iran to “choose wisely” lest they be bombed into submission, “a note to the press of the press corp.”
“I just can’t help but notice the endless stream of garbage,” he continued, his voice speeding up. “The relentlessly negative coverage… Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what side some of you are on. It’s incredibly unpatriotic.”
Pete was sitting in church with his family this Sunday, he said, when the pastor conveniently started talking about Chapter 3 of the book of Mark, and specifically the part where Jesus heals the sick on the Sabbath but the stickler Pharisees — “the so-called elites of their time” — criticize him for it.
“They came to see if he’d heal them on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him,” said Hegseth, a funny little smirk playing on his lips. The Pharisees, you see, were “only looking for the negative.” And as he sat there in church with his family, ruminating upon those lessons of the bible, Hegseth couldn’t help but think: “Our press are just like the Pharisees.” These enemies of Jesus had the “hardened hearts of our press,” who steadfastly refuse to “open your eyes to the goodness.”
It’s hard to even know whether to laugh or cry at such blasphemous chaos, just as it’s hard to know how to respond to an AI-generated image of Trump depicted as Jesus, which is then swiftly deleted and replaced with another AI-generated image of Trump being hugged by Jesus.
But the look on Pete’s face as he delivered this asinine attempt at rhetoric was genuinely worrying. The man who insists on calling himself Secretary of War instead of Secretary of Defense — a Christian move if ever there were one, whatever that silly, non-MAGA Pope thinks — had a curiously vacant expression. His words were absurd and his delivery was flat. It was an unsettling combination.
There was another, jerky pivot into how great military recruitment numbers are (“Where are the reports on that?... The surge of Americans wanting to join the greatest military in the world?!”) Then he bludgeoned the Pharisees point again, in case anyone had missed the analogy: “The American people, with goodness in their hearts, see past the Pharisees in the press.” Finally, he promised that the US military would “stay aggressive” and that the “War Department is locked and loaded.”
So, yes: a holy war! Just what the people voted for, in the name of AI Jesus, amen.
Hegseth then opened the floor to questions, and used them as an opportunity to play around with his favorite themes: America’s allies are meanies and bad for not following them into the war; America is very, very strong and excellent and winning all the time; Donald Trump is the greatest deal-maker in the world and that label isn’t contingent on whether or not he can actually make deals.
Pete’s defense mechanism is logical fallacies, and they were out in force today. At this point, what else does he have?
Then he walked right into a trap that may or may not have been set deliberately. A reporter in the room asked his opinion about Iran’s latest propaganda video: an AI graphic showing Jesus casting Donald Trump into the fires of hell.
“As far as a video like that, that’s disgusting and detached from reality,” the Secretary of War, a man with no sense of irony, responded.
Poor Pete. He doesn’t deserve our Christian sympathy, but still: Poor Pete.
A man called upon to defend the indefensible; to apply biblical passages to a useless, unpopular war and a failing ceasefire and now even to the journalists reporting on it; a man who’s in way, way too deep and only knows how to scream that he doesn’t need rescuing and he isn’t in the water anyway. A man whose leader put up not one but two images of himself as a holy icon over the past few days, not long after calling Iran “you crazy bastards” and adding “praise be to Allah.” A man who thought the best way to paper over all of this was to invoke the tale of the Pharisees, which is supposed to warn against calling good things evil and evil things good, and also to warn about the dangers of acting in bad faith. A man who thought it was a good idea to spend a press conference stretching out an analogy where reporters are the Pharisees and Donald Trump is, once again, Jesus.
But sometimes you don’t need a cherry-picked passage from the Book of Mark or a star-spangled image generated by an algorithm. Sometimes the lessons are simpler and more straightforward, and staring you right in the face. Lessons like: a truly popular government doesn’t need to shout about how popular it would be from a podium every day, if everyone just stopped criticizing it. And a truly popular war doesn’t require a press conference warning people not to talk about the negatives any longer, specifically to “choose wisely” when they think about what to write.
It’s a lesson the Trump administration really could have learned from the Iranian regime a long time ago.
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