American Narcissus

As Hegseth railed against ​“wokeness” and ​“political correctness,” insulted decorated generals and castigated soldiers for being ​“fat,” the audience stared back silently, countless medals glinting hard against the drab olive and navy of their dress uniforms. Even those with little affinity or affection for the U.S. military could see how awkward and embarrassing and weird it all was, from Hegseth’s insistence on hammering ​“DEI” and denigrating women (sorry, ​“females”) in front of a multiracial, multigender crowd, to his tortuous little jokes that probably would have killed on a frothy Fox News weekend panel but fell agonizingly flat in front of a roomful of battle-hardened veterans.

Hegseth also sneered at ​“Ivy League faculty lounges” and ​“the media” for their inability to understand them — ​“us,” as he styled it. Given his own degrees from Princeton and Harvard, and his network television career, some may have wondered how Hegseth ended up claiming to speak for regular people.

During his speech, Hegseth laid out 10 new directives. They include intensifying physical fitness and grooming standards (as he said, no more ​“beardos”) that will specifically discriminate against women and Black men; reimplementing hazing and physical punishment for new recruits during boot camp; doing away with military members’ ability to anonymously report harassment or sexual assault; and throwing out the rules of engagement for armed conflicts. He preemptively waved away concerns about racism or sexism, preferring to home in on his ultimate message: War trumps peace.

“Our number one job, of course, is to be strong so that we can prevent war in the first place,” he said. ​“It’s called peace through strength. And as history teaches us, the only people who actually deserve peace are those who are willing to wage war to defend it. That’s why pacifism is so naive and dangerous.”

The secretary of defense recently lobbied to rechristen his jurisdiction as the ​“Department of War” to emphasize the department’s forced shift toward a ​“warrior ethos.” As illustrated by Hegseth in his various books and recent actions, the phrase roughly translates as, ​“War crimes are fine, no girls allowed.” The man takes obvious, unctuous pleasure in referring to himself as the ​“secretary of war” — his social media handles updated as the pseudo-change was announced. This all ignores the fact that actually changing the department’s name requires an act of Congress; like so much else about this administration, the new title is nothing but cut-rate window dressing, hastily slapped together to please a petty tyrant.

Speaking of which, President Donald Trump himself decided to horn in on Hegseth’s party and take the headlining slot for himself. The elderly politician tilted unsteadily at his usual windmills before unveiling a genuinely chilling new thought: that the military should view ​“dangerous” blue-state cities—like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Chicago — as ​“training grounds” and concentrate on fighting ​“the enemy from within.”

That enemy? Any U.S. citizen or resident who falls afoul of the regime’s crackdowns on immigration, free speech, civil rights and human rights, the people the president likes to characterize as ​“radical left lunatics.”

During Hegseth’s own closing remarks, he had magnanimously promised that ​“President Trump has your back and so do I.”

You have to wonder how many troops felt the sudden urge to check their six.

How did such a man arrive in such a position? By all accounts, Peter Brian Hegseth had a normal, albeit privileged and politically conservative, upbringing in a leafy suburb of Minneapolis. Raised with a high school basketball coach for a dad and a mother who worked as a high-powered Republican executive business coach, Hegseth played hoops, did well at school and coasted to Princeton on an Army ROTC scholarship. There, his passion for conservative politics and war games blossomed. He took aim at his political opponents, figuratively and literally, railing against progressivism during his term as publisher of the Princeton Tory newspaper and representing the Republican team in a heated paintball match with campus Democrats as a member of the Princeton Dueling Society. (He successfully nailed one opponent in the groin.) 

On his watch, the Tory tussled angrily with campus women’s rights groups and printed an editorial condemning homosexuality as ​“abnormal and immoral” and dismissed alcohol-involved sexual assault as, essentially, the drunk woman’s fault. In his own writing, he called for government support of the ​“traditional family unit” and urged his classmates to give conservatism a chance. Former classmates remember this younger version of Hegseth as intelligent, driven and kind — a person who believed, in Hegseth’s own words, ​“you can civilly agree or disagree while respecting each other’s differences.” Sometime in between his salad days in the Ivy League cradle and his unexpected ascension at the Department of Defense, though, something took a turn. 

After graduation, Hegseth joined the Army National Guard and gravitated toward a slightly less hazardous theater for his civilian job: investment banking. He barely had time to settle into his cushy new gig at Bear Stearns before his unit was sent to Guantanamo Bay, where Hegseth led a platoon of guards overseeing the detainees imprisoned within its walls. Hegseth served as an infantry platoon leader in Iraq before moving on to a civil affairs posting. Shortly after his departure, the squad he had previously led became embroiled in a war crimes investigation. 

After returning from Iraq in 2006, he moved to New York City and took a job with a conservative think tank. The charity work he undertook with the astroturf conservative group Vets for Freedom, first as a volunteer and then eventually as president, ended with his ouster among a snarled mess of unpaid bills and mismanagement in 2011. (Years later he would tell a military magazine that, during that time, he ​“had no idea what he was doing.”) 

In 2012, Hegseth worked as a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan. From there, he drifted over to the Koch-funded Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), mounted a half-hearted Senate run and, like so many troubled thirty-somethings, even went back to school, bringing home a degree in public policy from Harvard in 2013. 

Rumors of alcohol abuse and bad behavior followed him. Former coworkers at CVA remember him, allegedly, pursuing female coworkers aggressively and drunkenly yelling, ​“Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” at a bar in 2015.

One whistleblower told The New Yorker that Hegseth ​“treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account — for partying, drinking, and using CVA events as little more than opportunities to ​‘hook up’ with women on the road.” (Representatives for Hegseth, in response to questions from The New Yorker, said they would not respond to such ​“outlandish” claims.) When Fox News brought him on as a contributor in 2014, Hegseth positioned himself as an archconservative decorated veteran and military expert, smirking smarmily alongside the channel’s other Republican talking heads. That performance landed him more airtime and ultimately a cohost gig on Fox & Friends Weekend in 2017. From this bully pulpit, he caught the president’s eye and firmly hitched himself to the Trump train, serving as both advisor and cheerleader until he ultimately snagged the plum job he enjoys today. 

Thus, Hegseth’s rise to the top of the military heap came not as a result of his own (mediocre) military credentials but at the behest of Trump, who was a fan of Hegseth’s work on TV (and Hegseth’s willingness to handwave war crimes) and assumed this polished, macho posturing would translate to real life. That, or Trump just thought Hegseth looked the part — a tough-guy Army hunk hauled straight out of central casting who would happily follow orders without asking any unpleasant questions. 

The image Hegseth broadcast as a television host and author of endless ​“warrior” books was decades in the making; he may have come by his looks honestly, but everything else is a careful construct dating back to his days as an Ivy League striver with a deep-seated disdain for women and a poorly hidden inferiority complex. 

Both have only continued to congeal.

The cameras loved Hegseth, though, and he loved them right back. His ongoing obsession with physical appearance rivals that only of his boss, Trump (a cut-rate Tantalus if there ever was one), and his fellow henchman, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Dolos incarnate). Since the moment of Hegseth’s controversial confirmation (which only squeaked through because of a tie-breaking vote from another weak, desperately image-conscious man, Vice President JD Vance), Hegseth’s every move has been in service to the malignant goal of recreating the American armed forces in his own hyper-curated image. Hegseth genuinely seems to believe he can conjure up a sea of milk-white military Adonises through sheer force of will and repeatedly haranguing the top brass about ​“wokeness” and their waistlines. If Hegseth has his way, the shock troops of white supremacy will be lethal and looksmaxxed, dammit! 

The cruelty is the point, of course, but so is the desperate artifice of it all. A deeply vain man with (poorly) tattooed glamour muscles and an architectural swoop in his well-shellacked hair, Hegseth’s primary vision as the nation’s preeminent ​“warfighter” relies more on sheer vibes than any sort of military strategy. Whatever useful lessons he may have gleaned from his own military service have been crowded out by his perception of himself as a modern-day Crusader, tasked with conquering all enemies of Trumpism and anything else he considers to be the ​“true faith.” In his 2020 book, American Crusade, Hegseth specifically identified leftists and ​“Islamists” as enemy forces bent on destroying America, a theme he continues to enthusiastically embrace. 

The ​“crusader” thing is literal, by the way; Hegseth is very open about his Christian nationalist beliefs and frequently adds religious references and prayers to his public speeches. At his Quantico appearance, he tossed in a ​“commander’s prayer” at the end of his rant. 

Hegseth’s shoddy tattoo collection includes multiple references to the medieval Christian Crusades (which ultimately failed but left the Holy Land soaked in blood). A Jerusalem cross is inked on his chest, and his bicep sports the Latin phrase Deus Vult, ​“God wills it,” a Crusader’s rallying cry that has since been repurposed by various religious extremist and neo-Nazi movements to emphasize anti-Muslim hatred. While Hegseth has protested that these and his other religious tattoos are merely symbols of his Christian faith, their connections to militant far-right extremism run deep enough that he was flagged as a possible ​“insider threat” and booted off President Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration military security detail. In response, Hegseth quit the military entirely, grousing in his book that ​“I joined the Army to fight extremists in 2001. Twenty years later, that same Army labeled me one.” 

While Hegseth has said he was initially inspired to enlist following 9/11, his full-on conversion to religious zealotry came fairly late in the 45-year-old’s life — while he was embroiled in one of his many personal-slash-professional scandals. In 2018, Hegseth was in the midst of divorcing his second wife and former Vets for Freedom coworker, Samantha Deering, to wed a third, his former Fox News producer, Jennifer Rauchet. Previously, he had an affair with Deering while married to his first wife, a high school sweetheart, then racked up a few extra sins by welcoming a child with Rauchet while he was still married to Deering. In 2017, two months after his baby with Rauchet was born, Hegseth allegedly sexually assaulted a woman at a Republican conference in Monterey, Calif. He denied the survivor’s account but ultimately paid her $50,000 as part of a nondisclosure agreement.

The next year, as his affair with Rauchet became public, his own mother, Penelope Hegseth, took him to task for his damaging pattern of behavior. ​“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” she wrote in an email published by the New York Times. She went on to tell her son that ​“I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.” 

Mrs. Hegseth went on to tell the press that she’d sent another email apologizing to her son immediately after, explaining that she’d sent the original in a moment of heightened emotion. By then, Hegseth had started attending a new church with his new wife and began publicly identifying as a man of faith. His mother may have forgiven him his trespasses, but it might have stood to reason that his fellow churchgoers would’ve had a different reaction to the revelations. Strangely, none of it seemed to make waves at his new church, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which maintains that God should have control over every aspect of society. 

Nor did it matter to the church’s spectacularly misogynistic, racist, far-right Christian nationalist figurehead, Doug Wilson, who Hegseth views as a type of spiritual mentor. ​“Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” as Wilson once explained, not the kind who lead. Accordingly, there’s no place for skirts in Hegseth’s dream of a ​“360-degree holy war.” Hegseth has stated that he expects all of his various sons and stepsons (five at last count) to join the military, though he has not mentioned similar plans for his daughter and stepdaughter. 

Wilson’s patriarchal views on women dovetail handily with Hegseth’s behavior toward them. In August 2025, Hegseth approvingly retweeted a video of Wilson expressing his support for repealing the 19^th Amendment, and it took several days of public outcry for the Pentagon to have to release a statement clarifying that he did in fact believe women should have the right to vote. In any normal administration, that ideologically suspect blunder would have been cause for a firing, or at least some sort of consequences. This is Trump 2.0, though, and such a thing no longer exists for the chosen few.

The ancient Greeks gave a name to the seething madness of paranoia, which has come to define Hegseth’s shambolic turn at the wheel. It’s obvious that he’s in over his head in this position, and it’s been unsurprising to read reports of him cracking under the pressure. In an echo of his time with Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, Hegseth’s tenure as secretary of defense has been pocked with a series of cascading scandals. Two months after his contentious January 24 confirmation, Hegseth was caught leaking real-time attack details, regarding Houthi militants in Yemen, in multiple unsecured Signal chats, one of which included a journalist from The Atlantic while the other included his wife, brother and lawyer. He also thought nothing of bringing his wife along to multiple meetings with foreign defense leaders or scoring his podcaster brother a job at the Pentagon. 

The negative response from congressional leaders, who launched an inquiry into the Signal fiasco, left Hegseth rattled and defensive, but Trump wasn’t fazed. ​“Pete’s doing a great job,” Trump commented breezily. ​“Ask the Houthis how he’s doing.” 

Hegseth seems to have found the magic formula for being telegenic and ​“tough” enough to keep Trump happy but not important or ambitious enough to threaten the visibly deteriorating president’s fragile ego. Since those rocky first few months, Hegseth has managed to skitter along beneath Trump’s radar, popping up only when he’s certain the man in charge will welcome his presence. (After all, we all saw what happened to Elon Musk.) 

While Hegseth is perhaps the most underqualified secretary of defense in the nation’s history, when it comes to waging war on one’s own physical flaws, he can at least boast of some genuine experience in the church of iron. The still camera-conscious Hegseth is vocal about his workout routine, taking every available opportunity to show off his physical fitness (and has coyly flaunted his toned torso on Instagram). 

He’s also a veteran of the makeup chair. In an echo of his ancient counterpart — and his own former career as a talking haircut on Fox News — Hegseth even had a glam studio installed in the Pentagon. The media may have had a field day with that one, but it was a savvy move on Hegseth’s part. Every hair must be in place, every soundbite crafted for maximum impact, and every talking point must be fully in line with the day’s approved version of reality. Failing to look perfectly camera-ready whilst spewing his Trumpian talking points would reveal a crack in his carefully crafted facade. As has become more and more apparent over the past nine months, that’s all Hegseth really has to offer. 

As vain as the self-styled ​“secretary of war” undoubtedly is, his hypermasculine gender performance illustrates yet another branch of the far-right political project to which he belongs. Fascism’s hardbody aesthetics have long proven irresistible to the insecure and power-hungry, and while the workout programming may change, the goals remain the same; the subculture-inspired, reactionary gym cults of the late 2010s and early 2020s have given way to neo-Nazi workout clubs. Jordan Peterson is old news when mainstream Republican politicians vie to out-macho one another by challenging union leaders to brawls and posturing with big ol’ guns. 

The MAGA faithful politely ignore their leader’s doughy physique while sharing AI-generated memes of muscular Trump cartoons. The current wave of male far-right influencers jabber ceaselessly about the gospel of self-improvement, swearing that those who hit upon just the right combination of lifting weights, living off red meat, eschewing modern medical science and sucking down branded supplements can achieve true alpha male supremacy.

Hegseth floats comfortably in this morass of toxic masculinity, secure in the knowledge that here, at least, he’s winning. In a regime characterized by its members’ frantic, bleating masculinity, he is the top dog. He is who tragicomic goons like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino want to be, and he’s probably the only member of the Trump administration who can actually fight (even if he still can’t do a proper pull-up). The military honors he received may have been lackluster, but those medals shine just as brightly. His every misstep has been either ignored or rewarded. After his doomsday speech at Quantico, an old video of Hegseth hitting himself in the cojones with a skateboard recirculated on social media; it may have felt good to giggle, but it did not change the reality that this man — this terrible, broken man — is in command of the largest military force on Earth and answers only to a fading despot who is all too happy to leave all that boring troop stuff to him.

If pride goeth before a fall, Hegseth will have an awfully long way down to tumble.

So what is to become of a figure as tragic — and dangerous — as this? We’ve met him before. According to the great poet Ovid, many a youth and many a maiden sought the favor of Narcissus, but Narcissus spurned them all. The beautiful boy was intoxicated by pride, assured of his own superiority over all those who dared approach him, whether it be a blushing village girl or a lonesome forest nymph. It was his cruel dismissal of the latter that sealed his fate (with a little help from Nemesis, the goddess of retribution). ​“If he should love, deny him what he loves!” the nymph cried before collapsing in grief.

But Narcissus loved only Narcissus. When he came upon a clear forest pool, he caught sight of his reflection — and was immediately smitten. Entranced by his own beauty, he refused to move; enraptured by his own reflection, he reached out to kiss its rosy cheeks, to caress its pale neck, but each time, the boy he saw disappeared. Maddened by love and grief, Narcissus wasted away, watching his beloved specter’s beauty fade alongside his own.

In the end, Narcissus died alone, leaving behind only a small golden and white flower as his epitaph.

Pete Hegseth loves only Pete Hegseth. But unlike his mythic counterpart, he does not wither beside a pond, transfixed by his own gaze. He does not collapse harmlessly into a flower, no. This star-spangled Narcissus is restless, ambitious and drunk on power. He does not simply admire his reflection; he weaponizes it. Fueled by ego and unbothered by those he deems beneath him, he charges forward intent on grasping his fascist vision of perfection by the throat. It seems certain that he will not achieve this dream, nor even come close to it, without leaving a trail of scorched earth and blood in his miserable wake. 

Where Narcissus left a flower, Hegseth will leave something far less delicate.