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.
This is a person produced by a culture, a society, and a history. He speaks with a deliberate viciousness, a desecration of humanity that recalls centuries of slavery and the American Indian Wars. He is 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. He practices that nasty Christianity. “Break the teeth of the ungodly,” he said at the Pentagon prayer service; Bull Connor comes to mind. So many of Trump’s men—Gregory Bovino, Markwayne Mullin, Tom Homan—resemble the primeval thugs of the heartland, who openly desire the submission of the most vulnerable.
These men are ignorant of many things, but certainly of foreign societies. In 2014 I took a trip to Iran with two friends, during which we had a cheerful young tour guide who also functioned as a minder of sorts. Together we road-tripped around the country, from Shiraz to Yazd to Isfahan to Qom to Tehran, and saw mosques, palaces, museums, and archaeological sites—we even passed the Natanz Nuclear Facility on the highway; it was right there, visible from the car.We attended a dinner party in a Tehran apartment and went to an artists’ space where young people gathered. In Isfahan the local people let us go up a minaret of the famous Shah Mosque and view that exquisitely designed city from the latticed wooden carriage at the top, a delight so extreme I felt like a child. For over a decade I spoke of those ten days in Iran as the best trip of my life. What I know about the dangerous American ignorance in men like Hegseth and Trump is that it prevents them, on some elemental level, from understanding that Iran is a real country full of real people.
What has allowed this worldview to persist? The systemic oppression of another people always deforms the oppressors in turn, and although slavery ended and civil rights were won, America has continued to pioneer new varieties of oppressor degradation: Little Boy and Fat Man, destroying to save in Vietnam, CIA-backed military coups, Abu Ghraib, ICE warehouses, Gaza. Hegseth is a repository of the cold war, the end of history, and the so-called war on terror. Anyone his age understands the particular environment in which his ideology took shape. A tour through his life and his actions in the last few years reveals forms of degradation that are fundamental to the Trump administration but not unique to it. If we are to have a renunciation of who or what is terrorizing the world, it will not only be a renunciation of these men.
Hegseth was born in 1980 and grew up in Forest Lake, Minnesota, the son of Brian, a basketball coach, and Penny, a business coach. The family was Baptist, and when Pete was young his parents took him to one of Billy Graham’s “crusade” rallies. Brian and Penny looked docile when Pete brought them on Fox and Friends in 2019. The cameras unnerved his father so much he seemed gentle. But Brian’s X account reveals a different person. He retweets Tommy Robinson posts—“Muslims praying in the streets is now BANNED in Quebec. Street prayers will be treat [sic] as ‘acts of provocation’”—and things like a clip of Sylvester Stallone running through Philadelphia in Rocky with the caption “Me after throwing a biology book into a pride parade.” These Hegseth men are scary like this, seeming “nice” in that smiling, sinister American way, while at the same time spouting anti-immigrant hatred and ornamenting their speech with biblical claptrap. When Hegseth was named secretary of defense, his brother Phil, who as a Department of Homeland Security liaison to the Department of Defense helped launch the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition—“designed to crush dangerous criminal cartels in the Western Hemisphere”—posted, “Thy will be done.”
Valedictorian of his high school class, Hegseth went to Princeton and joined the Army ROTC program and the basketball team. He was also the publisher of the campus’s right-wing magazine, The Princeton Tory, which sparred regularly with the more mainstream newspaper The Daily Princetonian. The issues from his tenure, still available online, show a young Pete already espousing a childish cruelty toward queer people, women, Muslims, and leftists. He repeatedly targeted a group called the Organization of Women Leaders (OWL), for instance, even publishing a cover depicting an owl in a tree caught in a rifle’s crosshairs. Hegseth also already had a foreign policy, one that was pro–Iraq War, pro-Israel, and fixated on Palestinians and Islamic terrorists. The cover of one issue promised to explain “why Jews should vote Republican” (apparently because Bill Clinton was too pro-Palestinian, whereas George W. Bush had “repeatedly recognized Israel’s right to defend itself”). In a cover story titled “Dig In and Fight,” Hegseth wrote that his classmates should recognize “the cold, hard fact that in order for peace to exist—in New York, Baghdad, and Jerusalem—America must take the lead” and that “eliminating Saddam and liberating Iraq could be the ‘Normandy Invasion’ or ‘fall of the Berlin Wall’ of our generation.” That the Iraq War played out very differently would prove to be one of the central disappointments of Hegseth’s life.
But Hegseth did not fully fit in at Princeton, and not because of woke-ism or even the type of globalist elitism he despises but because of class in the most mundane sense. One day Hegseth ventured inside Ivy, Princeton’s most exclusive social club, “where all the Manhattan blue bloods congregated,” he writes in his 2020 book American Crusade. “I immediately sensed that I was not welcome. Theylooked at me sideways, like What are you doing here?” Hegseth goes so far as to call his experience “a glimpse of how blacks must have felt during segregation.” It is always telling when a white person makes this kind of analogy; it reflects how badly they desire a legitimate claim to suffering—and how little they ultimately understand of the black American experience.
Hegseth felt better in the army. After Princeton he became a lieutenant, and in 2004 he took his first job, at Guantánamo Bay. At the time the base housed six hundred detainees in tiny cells in maximum-security blocks; men reported being “beaten, shackled in painful positions,” according to Amnesty International, as well as “photographed naked and subjected to anal searches.” It was “a legal-limbo-land that housed some of the world’s most dangerous Islamic militants,” Hegseth writes in his 2016 book In the Arena. “I was proud to be there.” Guantánamo, he suggests in American Crusade, brought him back to himself:
We guarded Islamist assholes for a year. It was long, boring duty. But as a platoon leader, I got to know the lives of my men intimately. They were hardworking, God-fearing, America-loving, middle-class men. Like the guys I grew up with in Minnesota. They loved their country, their families, and beer. I went from partying with millionaires at Princeton to sleeping in a tin can with hundredaires at Gitmo.
In In the Arena, Hegseth lays out his sense of the history of American foreign policy, which closely resembles what many public school students were taught in the 1990s. He sees the Guantánamo facility’s existence in Cuba as a testament to the triumph of the US—and especially of his personal hero, Theodore Roosevelt—in the Spanish-American War, which happily secured “American regional dominance” and set the young nation on its rightful imperial path. Hegseth began carrying a small picture frame containing a quote from Roosevelt’s 1910 speech “The Man in the Arena,” which the former president wrote after coming home from a safari. Every day, Hegseth writes, he would ask himself, “Am I striving valiantly? Is my face marred by dust and sweat and blood? Am I spending myself in a worthy cause? Am I daring greatly? Am I in the arena?” He wanted to be, as D.C. operatives like to say, “in the mix,” but it soon becomes clear that the arena he is speaking of is war.
After a stint at Bear Stearns in New York City, Hegseth deployed to Iraq, furious after reading about a suicide bomber who had killed American soldiers while they were “passing out candy” to kids, he writes. He ended up in Baghdad and then Samarra, in what was known as the Sunni Triangle, in 2005 and 2006. These were some of the war’s worst years, the time of the Sunni insurgency and Shia militias, when as many as one hundred Iraqi civilians were being killed every day. Iran-backed militias were attacking American soldiers with rudimentary roadside bombs, engendering in Hegseth a hatred for the country and a desire for revenge.
In fact, Hegseth’s notion of “overwhelming violence” comes from this terrifying experience as a soldier in Iraq. Lawyers gave confusing instructions about when soldiers should shoot at combatants and when they shouldn’t, and Hegseth grew disillusioned observing the rare cases in which Americans were accused or charged with war crimes. He became convinced that the only way to win wars was through what he now calls “maximum lethality,” the unshackling of soldiers from any rules of engagement so that they can kill with impunity. In reaction to the surreal pointlessness of the “war on terror,” a deranged vision of total annihilation began to take shape. “In Iraq and Afghanistan,” he told 60 Minutes in a recent interview, “a lot of foolish approaches were used. This is war. This is conflict. This is bringing your enemy to their knees.” The only way a soldier can believe that his sacrifice is not in vain is if he obliterates everyone and everything in sight.
Hegseth came home from Iraq and started drinking. He was married to his high school sweetheart, and he had affairs. They divorced in 2009, and he fathered his first child, Gunner, with a woman named Samantha Deering before marrying her in 2010. Hegseth met Deering at Vets for Freedom, the first of two nonprofit groups where he worked on behalf of his fellow soldiers. It was not a cause he took seriously. In 2024, before Hegseth was confirmed as secretary of defense, Jane Mayer detailed in The New Yorker the way he grossly mismanaged the organizations’ finances. He incurred almost $500,000 in debts at Vets for Freedom. At the second nonprofit, Concerned Veterans for America, Hegseth was “repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity,” Mayer writes, “to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events.” Whistleblowers reported 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.” According to Mayer, Hegseth was essentially forced out of both organizations.
But again the elite institutions of America made space for Hegseth. After he returned from a brief tour training Afghan soldiers, he finished a graduate degree at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Instead of embarking on a policy career, Hegseth got a job as a contributor at Fox News in 2014, becoming a cohost of Fox and Friends three years later. There he remained, marinating in the propagandistic and fame-hungry culture of the network, until—despite never having risen above the midcareer rank of major in the Army National Guard—he was confirmed as secretary of defense. By then he had perfected the garish, preening caricature of himself that he plays on TV, his squinting, threatening eyes always searching for the camera.
And he was still drinking: NBC News spoke with multiple Fox employees who recalled instances in which Hegseth showed up to set hungover or smelling of alcohol. “He had a kind of what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas kind of attitude, while his wife and kids were in Minnesota,” one of his Fox colleagues told Mayer. “He was a huge drinker. I can’t say if he had a problem, but he was very handsy with women, too.” In 2017, while still married to Deering, he fathered a child with a Fox producer named Jennifer Rauchet, whom he married in 2019. During his divorce from Deering, her lawyers produced an email in which Pete’s steely mother, Penny, called him “an abuser of women” and a man who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” (She later said she regretted writing it.)
It was also in 2017 that a woman accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her at a conference at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa in California. That evening she texted her husband that Hegseth creeped her out; she reported to police that he was touching women’s legs. Later in the night she confronted him about his behavior. Her next memory was of Hegseth in an unfamiliar hotel room. The woman says he took her phone, blocked her from leaving the room, and assaulted her. Afterward she remembered his dog tags “hovering over her face,” according to the police report; four days later she went to the hospital to undergo a forensic exam, known as a rape kit. She told a nurse she thought she might have been drugged. In 2020, as part of a confidential settlement agreement, Hegseth paid her $50,000 to go away.
Hegseth has denied having a drinking problem and said he has never received treatment for alcoholism. At the time of his confirmation hearings, he insisted he would not drink “a drop” of alcohol if he became secretary of defense. Of his personal life, he has said that he is still married to Jennifer, and they have a “blended family of seven kids.”
Perhaps the fact about Hegseth that plays least to type is that he has written six books. In addition to In the Arena and American Crusade, he is a coauthor of The Case Against the Establishment (2017) and Battle for the American Mind (2022) and the author of Modern Warriors (2020) and The War on Warriors (2024); the two most recent were bestsellers. The books share consistent themes—antiglobalism, antiqueerness, antifeminism, anti-Islam—but over time Hegseth’s prose has become steadily more juvenile, as if his mind were maturing in reverse. He asks a lot of questions to which he knows the answer. On unisex bathrooms: “Can I be blunt? (Too late to ask, I suppose.) Does a person of either sex really want to relieve him or herself in a bathroom stall next to someone of a different sex? Of course not.” On fatherhood: “Let me be clear—I will not raise a ‘beta male.’ It ain’t happening.”
But what most dominates these books is Hegseth’s mounting, narcissistic hysteria about his own destruction, the idea that people like him “have been targeted for annihilation.” He warns that conservatives must crush the left because the left wants to crush them. The left and Islam are interchangeable because they are both engaged in jihad. He even puts Islam in the “Leftism” section of American Crusade because, he writes, “no ‘ism’ benefits more from leftism than Islamism does. And no ‘ism’ is more dangerous to freedom than Islamism is.” In the same book he returns repeatedly to the stories of two people who represent the Muslims he tolerates and the Muslims he despises. “Texas Omar,” an Iraqi immigrant who worked for the Americans during the war and then fled to Texas, gets a pass because he is happy and patriotic. “Somali Omar,” aka Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, is both a Muslim and a leftist, and therefore the type of person Hegseth hates most on earth.
Hegseth seems confused by the fire of his own anti-Muslim feeling. In the Arena lovingly describes the visage of a fierce Islamic State fighter he saw in a photograph, a man, Hegseth notes, who is, indeed, “in the arena.” “I am drawn to him, because I relate to him,” he writes. Just as the antiblack racism of white Americans is often fraught with sexual jealousy, the Islamophobia of the contemporary right is rife with a furious envy—a resentment of everything they don’t understand about Muslims and a grudging admiration of the qualities they see in their enemies: masculinity, toughness, bloodlust.
Like those fundamentalist Islamic fighters, Hegseth experienced a radical conversion. Before 2017 he was a Rubio guy. Then he saw the light. He joined Trump’s “holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom,” which he understands as the historical continuation of two previous world-shaking events: the original Crusades (against “conquering Muslim hordes”) and the American Revolution. “Surrounded by the Left, with the odds stacked against us, only a crusade will do,” he writes. The left and the entire religion of Islam offer Hegseth something he seems to have craved at least since he walked into a Waspy eating club: a righteous claim to victimhood.
Trump, meanwhile, offers him absolution from his sins by proving that a debased, sleazy criminal can ascend to the highest office in the land. “Part of the reason that Donald Trump resonated with millions of Americans so quickly is that he didn’t—and couldn’t—hide his personal failings,” Hegseth writes in American Crusade. “As it turns out, with God and with regular people, the reservoir of forgiveness is deep.” The secretary of defense who stepped up to the Pentagon TV podium in 2025 seemed energized by his redemption. He cut a quintessentially American figure: “a pastless futureless man,” in Lasch’s terms, a born-again zealot, finally dispatched to the holy arena of his dreams.
As he was following Trump into office, Hegseth’s religiosity was becoming more extreme. He and his wife moved to Nashville and joined the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, of which there are about 150 branches in the US. According to The Guardian, the church advocates for the subordination of government to Old Testament law, capital punishment for homosexuality, and “rigidly patriarchal families and churches.” Its longtime leader Doug Wilson doesn’t think women should have the right to vote. (“A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” Wilson has said. “A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”) The church also espouses a fire-and-brimstone foreign policy. It favors a particularly radical version of Christian Zionism, elevating the US–Israel alliance to the status of a biblical necessity and justifying great violence in the region as part of the path to the Second Coming.
Last Christmas, Hegseth invited another preacher to Pentagon prayer time: Franklin Graham, Billy’s son, who at CPAC this year said that Trump should get a third term as president. (He later claimed he “misspoke.”) Graham has called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion” bent on “world domination.” In his Pentagon sermon, he said, “We know that God loves. But did you know that God also hates? Do you know that God also is a God of war?” He then quoted the book of Samuel: “Now, go and attack Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have. Don’t spare them, but kill them, both man and woman, infant, nursing child, ox, sheep, camel, and donkey.” His words echoed Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers’ many invocations of Amalek to justify the killing of Palestinians in Gaza—statements that human rights experts cite as evidence of intent to commit genocide.
On February 28 the US and Israel began bombing Iran. By then Hegseth was speaking like a preacher, too. “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” he said at the Pentagon prayer service. “Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” To date the Americans and the Israelis have killed at least 3,300 people in Iran. Before the US and Iran agreed to a cease-fire on April 8, the bombing was relentless: on the first day the US struck over 1,000 targets; in total 13,000 targets were hit in six weeks. (Many were hit by multiple bombs, making the total number of strikes much higher.) In the city of Minab, American missiles killed as many as 175 people at a girls’ school, most of them children—an attack likely attributable to old intelligence and Hegseth’s recklessness with civilian life. Events have unfolded so quickly, we hardly register the losses. Only the rare independent outlet like Drop Site News has been dogged about chronicling the specific deaths of ordinary people. As the publication posted on X on the fifth day of the war:
A US Tomahawk missile struck a residential home in Oshnavieh County, killing an entire family; an air-launched missile hit a private car in Salman County, killing five people; a missile strike in the Qasemiyeh neighborhood of Urmia killed an elderly couple.
Even amid a supposed truce, hostilities persist; in particular, Israel has continued striking Lebanon, killing rescue workers, journalists, and others.
The war is also cover for the ongoing killing elsewhere. In Gaza, Israel has reportedly killed 72,600 people since October 7, 2023—and that figure is believed to be an undercount, since it includes only “direct” deaths, leaving out those who have died of starvation or preventable disease, as well as many who remain buried under the rubble. The UN reported on April 10 that Israel has killed at least 738 Palestinians in the Strip since it supposedly agreed to a cease-fire with Hamas in October. In the West Bank, according to the UN, settlers backed by the Israeli military carried out 1,800 attacks against Palestinian residents in 2025 and more than 580 so far in 2026. In Lebanon, Israel’s annihilationist bombing campaign has involved detonating entire villages and resulted in over five thousand deaths since October 7, 2023. On April 8, the day of the cease-fire, Israel bombed more than one hundred sites in Beirut in the span of only ten minutes. Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, is again speaking openly about mass killing. The campaign to wipe out the entire south of Lebanon, he said, is “following the Rafah and Beit Hanoun model in Gaza.”
To Hegseth, all of this “death and destruction from the sky” has been a triumph for the United States, a “gift to the world,” as he said in late April. Wes Bryant, a former US Air Force special operations attack coordinator and the head of the Pentagon office charged with mitigating civilian harm—which Hegseth shut down in 2025—told Christiane Amanpour that in Iran the Americans are now emulating the “sheer recklessness and bloodthirst” of Israel’s ongoing carnage in Gaza. Bryant looked a little shell-shocked as he responded to Hegseth’s belligerent rhetoric. “We have to take a look here and ask ourselves,” Bryant said, “who are we as a people when we have people like this in extreme positions of power?”
But, of course, Hegseth and his ilk aren’t the only ones in such positions. With the invasion of Iran, the Trump administration picked up where the Biden administration and the Democrats left off; the Biden people may not have exhibited that nasty Christianity, but they did exhibit that nasty hegemony. The first politician many Americans heard use the word “obliterate” in reference to Iran was Hillary Clinton in 2008. And Hegseth’s truculent press conferences don’t come out of nowhere but rather build on the State Department briefings of the Biden years, at which spokespeople like Matthew Miller and John Kirby disdainfully waved away questions about the destruction of Gaza. The Biden foreign policy team often spoke as if, for some strange reason, they had no control over Netanyahu as well as no way to influence an ailing and unsophisticated Joe Biden. Whether the perpetrators are Democrats evading responsibility through feigned haplessness or Republicans claiming the power of a wrathful God, the violence is the same.
Even now, Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries—the leaders of the so-called opposition—stop short of condemning the war on Iran outright, focusing their criticism on the Trump administration’s failure to obtain congressional approval for it or the chaos it has sown. Meanwhile, some of the mainstream media has gone so far as to suggest that the real question about the war is how to get the job done. “Israel Keeps Killing Key Iranian Leaders. Will It Work?” asked one New York Times headline that came across my iPhone as a push notification. The liberal establishment and the mainstream media have taken this line even though some analysts suggest that this is the most unpopular war in the history of the United States. Trump has a rapidly diminishing approval rating, polls show that most people hate Hegseth, and it is widely acknowledged that under Trump, the US is becoming a failed democracy. And yet the opposition has not grasped the fact that any endorsement of mass violence by an autocrat is also an endorsement of its own demise. Many Americans cannot let go of the hope that their country, with its righteous destiny and its unrivaled military, might yet triumph—because dominance is so central to their idea of themselves and because the alternative, humiliation, is too painful to bear.
There is another path for American politics: renunciation, as described by the Turkish academic, of the strain in American life that produced a man like Pete Hegseth. This strain runs through the country’s history, its media and universities, its churches and television programs, and both major political parties. It is marked by a presumption of the right to use violence and a concurrent assumption of innocence, and in some cases a sadistic pleasure in “winning” and in other people’s suffering. The act of renouncing it might require a political party that seeks to dismantle the security apparatuses and alliances that perpetuate the mass bombing reflex—a political party that is explicitly antiviolence and antiwar. And it might require 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.
During the Iraq War, the popular French news parody show Les Guignols de l’info ran a series of skits about the Bush administration. As always on the program, they featured puppets, not live actors, but in this case only Bush had a puppet in his likeness; the rest of the administration was depicted as versions of Sylvester Stallone, speaking in his ignoramus style as they dropped bombs out of helicopters. The show reveled in Bush’s rudimentary vocabulary and Christian platitudes. It wasn’t all funny. In one episode, the administration performed a version of “We Are the World,” but the lyrics went, “We fuck the world! We fuck the children! We fuck the world, the forest, and the sea, so let us doing [sic].” When the refrain came—“There are people dying”—one of the Stallones gave the camera the finger.
After the Iraq War and the “war on terror,” the liberal establishment never properly grappled with its support of those who wanted to fuck the world. It hid behind banalities about America’s resilient institutions and exalted position in the international order. Today the leaders of other countries speak of the need to guide the United States out of its war with Iran as one would help a senile old person cross a street. “The question for friends of America is simple,” the Omani foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, wrote in The Economist. “What can we do to extricate the superpower from this unwanted entanglement?” Such language reflects not only the insanity of the Trump administration but also the reality that the Democratic Party has given the rest of the globe little reason to hope that it will confront the primacy of Hegseth’s violent worldview in American life.
Instead Americans have allowed ridiculous, savage men, the dumb puppets of Les Guignols, to retain the sheen of respectability. “You have to see it,” Trump intoned on March 27. “It’s very cool. Missiles launched, missiles launched, missiles launching. They’re launching…. Then at seven seconds, fire, fire, fire. The most unbelievable thing. Fire, boom, fire, boom.”