American Stain
Suzy Hansen on Pete Hegseth
One of the more ludicrous obscenities foisted on the world by Donald Trump is Pete Hegseth, America’s self-styled “secretary of war.” “With his cowboy arms and crispy gelled hair,” writes Suzy Hansen in our June 11 issue, Hegseth “is a parody come to life.”
But this is not parody, just as the ridiculous, brazen horrors of the war Hegseth oversees are not the stuff of movies and TV: “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.” The assorted cretins who make up the Trump administration did not emerge in a vacuum; as Hansen argues, they are “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…the primeval thugs of the heartland, who openly desire the submission of the most vulnerable.”
With democracy shriveling up in the US and a hapless Democratic Party struggling to muster opposition to an unpopular war, Hansen writes that it is imperative for a political party in this country to renounce “the strain in American life that produced a man like Pete Hegseth” and for “Americans to accept that they are not special but, in accordance with the most basic of religious principles, equal with the rest of the world before God.”
Below, alongside Hansen’s essay, are five articles from our archives about some familiar American types.
Made in the USA
Suzy Hansen
I lived in Turkey for many years and watched as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became more repressive. When I asked a Turkish academic why a segment of society had continued, for two decades, to vote for an increasingly authoritarian leader, he told me that for those people, to renounce him would be to renounce their own souls. He said this with some sympathy. Erdoğan’s policies early in his reign had helped religious and poor people to feel proud, to believe they had a place in Turkish society. I returned to the United States six years ago, but the idea of renunciation stuck with me—this notion that to renounce a leader or a movement or an ideology can be to renounce oneself. I’ve been thinking about it lately while watching the illegal American-Israeli war against Iran and the conduct of the American “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth.
It 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.
Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.
From the Archives: Boys Club
Fintan O’Toole on William Barr
Robert G. Kaiser on Mitch McConnell
Garry Wills on Barack Obama
Joan Didion on Dick Cheney
Ronald Steel on Henry Kissinger
