Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary: Perfect symbol of phony MAGA masculinity

When considering the reasons why Donald Trump picked a Fox News blowhard to run the near-trillion-dollar U.S. military, it's important to remember that our TV-addicted president-elect favors a strong jawline over concerns like skills or experience. Pete Hegseth may be "the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history," as the founder of Independent Veterans of America said on Twitter. He may not "have any background whatsoever" in defense policy, as Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told Politico. But Hegseth, with his heavily gelled hair and impressive bone structure, looks a lot like a movie star of Trump's 1950s childhood. CNN reporter Alayna Tree confirmed that those cheekbones were a major factor in this pick: “Trump also thinks he has the look,” one source told her. 

Trump's contempt for the actual work of the military is well documented. One does not need to be a big fan of war to find it disgusting that Trump calls people "suckers and losers" for the hard, often thankless work of serving in the military. It's no surprise that he'd rather give a key Cabinet seat to someone he likes to look at, rather than someone who can serve the interests of military personnel. It also appears that Hegseth is one of a long list of flat-out trolling nominations for Trump's second term, which also includes Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida as attorney general or Fox News substitute host (and onetime Hawaii congresswoman) Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. The goal here seems to be finding people who are uniquely unfit for these jobs, both to rile up liberals and to flush out any Republicans with remaining loyalties to the concept of responsible governance. 

But while being handsome and totally unqualified got Hegseth the job, it's unfair to say those are the only things he brings to the table. He also embodies the type of masculinity Trump and the MAGA movement loves: One that desperately wants to appear strong, but reveals itself to be weak and brittle given a moment's investigation. Hegseth is the ultimate in cubic zirconia manhood. 

Reporting suggests that Trump was especially enamored with Hegseth's skill at whining, and especially about how easily threatened he is by women, people who are different, and any demands that he learn stuff or reckon with new ideas. Hegseth served in the Army, a history he has channeled into endless moaning about the supposedly "woke" military. He has complained about military recruitment ads that feature diverse service members, arguing that the threat of being exposed to different kinds of people would scare off "guys in Kentucky and Colorado and Ohio." It's a drum he beats repeatedly, arguing that "patriots" — meaning, of course, white men — are unwilling to serve lest they be exposed to "CRT, DEI nonsense, all the gender nonsense." All those words function as right-wing euphemisms for workplaces where people of color, LGBTQ people and women are treated equally. 

While he's oblique about the reasons, it appears Hegseth couldn't hack it in the Army, either. He complained in his book that the Army "spit me out," adding, "I didn’t want this Army anymore either." It is reminiscent of every guy who says "you're not that hot" when a woman turns him down. 

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Hegseth envisions the military as a safe space for straight white men, where their fantasy of inherent superiority is carefully protected from real-world evidence that other people are strong, smart and capable. It's reminiscent of Elon Musk's Texas compound, where he can play out his fantasies of being a feudal king behind walls that shield him from the scary real world. Or Peter Thiel's "seasteading" dream of an island nation where he and his buddies could be lordlings, carefully separated from the ordinary people who frighten them. For that matter, it's like Trump talking big while hiding out in Mar-a-Lago. MAGA leaders are  bunch of men whose notion of masculine strength amounts to small children playing cops-and-robbers under a nanny's supervision. 

With Hegseth, this is obvious in his longing to kick women out of combat roles. He falsely claims that "standards have lowered" to let women in, and that "men in those positions are more capable." The truth, however, is the opposite. As Barack Obama explained when the military first opened up combat roles for women, the urban and guerrilla nature of most modern warfare means that female service members were already "in a war theater" and "at great risk." But while many women were performing the duties of combat soldiers, they weren't getting the promotions or pay that go with that status. 

Banning women from combat roles epitomizes the MAGA version of manhood, where weakness gets reskinned as "toughness," mostly through aesthetic trickery. Women will keep on doing the work of combat jobs, but will be denied the titles, honors and rewards of doing so, just to prop up the illusion that only men have the toughness to handle it. The real purpose here is to insulate the snowflake-fragile egos of men who cannot feel mighty unless a woman pretends — or is forced to pretend — that she's weak. It's a direct substitution of fool's gold for the real thing. 

Of course, valuing the fake over the real is Donald Trump's modus operandi. In the real world, he's a failed businessman who repeatedly filed for bankruptcy after losses so huge that even decades of fraud and two cash infusions amounting to nearly a billion dollars couldn't safeguard him. But on TV, he plays a successful rich guy because he has all the props, from fancy cars to private jets to a boardroom that was actually a set built for his "reality" TV show. His idea of what makes someone a "Christian" is waving a Bible around, but never reading it. As president, he loved the pomp of a military parade, but hated facing the real people who serve — and are sometimes hurt or killed in real-world combat. Trump isn't just a simulacrum, but one that feels nothing but contempt for the real thing, which often has less surface glamour than his gold-painted fakes. 

In that spirit, it's no surprise that Hegseth's model for the ideal military man is not a real person from history or even someone he knows, but a movie character. In his typically whiny book "The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free," Hegseth writes, "Our ‘elites’ are like the feckless drug-addled businessmen at Nakatomi Plaza, looking down on Bruce Willis’s John McClane in ‘Die Hard,’" adding, "But there will come a day when they realize they need John McClane."

No one "needs" John McClane. He is a make-believe tough guy, built out of special effects and the comedic acting skills of Bruce Willis. But this kind of ludicrous fantasy allows Hegseth to elide the deep paradox of his argument. He wants us to imagine straight male American soldiers are "honorable, powerful and deadly," but also portrays them as too feeble to handle the diverse modern military. He believes they must be sheltered from any evidence that people with different identities can be strong, too. So he retreats to this phony masculine idea of "strength," constructed through Hollywood magic. It's like a little boy's dream, created to avoid the underwhelming reality of MAGA manhood.