Chicago (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth prosecutes Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran as a Holy War of brute force, vengeance, and self-righteousness. A religious zealot, Hegseth has rapidly transformed the Pentagon into the staging ground for an ideological and Christian crusade. He has rejected the seriousness of war in favor of the strutting, sanctimonious posturing of a MAGA evangelist preaching violence as divine will.
A Former Fox News weekend host who gained notoriety for defending war crimes, Hegseth has become the hateful, scowling face of Trump‘s war. With contrived machismo, theocratic bluster, and callousness toward the lives of Muslims as well as U.S. troops, Hegseth peddles puerile displays on TV, aimed at sating Trump’s desire for a war cheerleader crass enough for the manosphere.
“We negotiate with bombs,” warned a chest-thumping Hegseth, on Tuesday, performing as Trump’s testosterone-fueled attack monkey. He asserted that his war fighters “will destroy the enemy as viciously as possible from moment one.”
Standing next to the cartoon bully, Trump distanced himself. Painting Hegseth as a warmonger, Trump — the fake FIFA peace prize recipient — said that Hegseth, along with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine, was “disappointed” in the cease-fire talks: “I think this thing’s going to be settled very soon and they go, ‘Oh, that’s too bad.’ Pete didn’t want it to be settled,” Trump said. He was “interested in just winning this thing.”
In his next typically self-contradicting bromide, Trump claimed — as he has from the first hour of the war, ”We’ve won this, because this war has been won, the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”
A war that has been won does not need more bombing, or more warships, or the $200 billion more that Trump is requesting from Congress, or the five to ten thousand more troops that presage a potentially catastrophic ground invasion to seize Kharg Island — the hub of Iran’s oil infrastructure — or the dire Strait of Hormuz.
Passing the war buck to Hegseth, Trump on Thursday recalled his decision to start bombing Iran and turned to the Secretary of War Crimes and said, “Pete, I think you were the first to speak up, and you said, ‘Let’s do it.’” Trump may be experiencing bomber‘s remorse: When things are going well, he never shares credit.
The cravenly Commander-in-Chief refused U.S. responsibility for the massacre of almost 200 children and teachers when the U.S. struck a school on the first day of the illegal war. He first blamed Iran. After a U.S. investigation attributed the bombing to America, Trump lied, as always, and claimed to know nothing about it.
Hegseth cut 90 percent of the Pentagon workforce whose job it was to ensure that the U.S. doesn’t accidentally harm civilians. Given that, it is no surprise that the horrific school bombing occurred. Such despicable acts help shore up support for an Iranian regime whose greatest weakness has long been the contempt it inspires in its own people.
Aroused by explosions, Hegseth revels in the devastating carnage of long-distance aerial bombardment. With lustful intoxication, he boasted that B-2 bombers as well as Predator drones will rain “death and destruction from the sky all day long. Our rules of engagement are designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” These are the words of a psychopath.
“Long live death” or “Viva La Muerte” was a nihilistic fascist slogan attributed to the extreme nationalist, Spanish group Falange Española that made the exaltation of violence central to its propaganda. Likewise, Hegseth and company promote a nihilist cult of death that fetishizes killing and wanton devastation.
This was reinforced by lurid, violence-glorifying social media snuff videos that celebrated the extra-judicial boat killings on the open seas, near Venezuela, that have taken 163 lives. For the current war, the Defense Department produces many lowest-common-denominator propaganda videos that, for example, intersperse clips from Hollywood blockbusters such as Braveheart, Gladiator, Superman and Top Gun with that he-man movie legend Hegseth and, crassly, real kill-shot footage of the attacks in Iran.
For Hegseth and Trump, the war is a video game, a spectator sport, a social media festival of slam dunking over a weak opponent linked to the explosive shredding of anonymous victims. Politics at home and abroad is about scoring, winning, and humiliating the other side.
This promotes massive overkill that is justified not with strategic objectives, which Hegseth is utterly incapable of articulating, but with seemingly titanic emotions — an uncontrollable “epic fury” and a thirst for vengeance that inflicts maximum destruction and excruciating pain.
All of this excessive brutality is accompanied by a shameless, even boastful, admission that the minimum human and moral constraints of warfare will be broken as if this connotes manliness. A case study in masculine sublimated anxiety, Hegseth has vowed to “unleash overwhelming and punishing violence” on enemies and promised to dispense with “stupid rules of engagement” – rules designed to restrict attacks on civilian populations.
“Pete Hegseth is a very dangerous person,” said Janessa Goldbeck, chief executive of Vet Voice Foundation, a non-profit advocacy organization. “He’s a white Christian nationalist and has the arsenal of the United States government at his disposal and a permission slip from President Trump to deploy carnage wherever he wishes against whomever he wishes.”
For years, Hegseth cultivated a hyper-masculine caricature that appealed to Trump’s sense of male inadequacy and played to the rightwing media ecosystem. Now, faced with a geopolitical crisis that demands nuance and strategic foresight, he is completely out of his depth, acting as if he is auditioning for a RAM Truck commercial.
Faithful to his master’s desire for total domination and extermination, Hegseth encourages gratuitous cruelty and announces future war crimes on live TV, saying: “We will keep pushing, keep advancing, No quarter. No mercy for our victims.” No quarter is the practice of refusing to take prisoners and killing surrendering enemy combatants — a war crime prohibited by U.S. law and the Geneva Convention.
“I wish I could say how cavalier, obtuse and hopeless Secretary Hegseth is at leading the Pentagon, wrote Goldbeck, a Marine Corps veteran. “I can’t even muster the words to describe his self-adulation, matched only in scope by his apparent moral depravity.”
Hegseth wants to create a fantasy world of Trump adulation inside the Pentagon itself. Instead of press conferences with critical questions and genuine answers, there is gentle back-and-forth between “the secretary of war” – a fantasy name, and “journalists” from Trump-loving media such as Newsmax, Epoch Times, and LindellTV which promises the world according to “the MyPillow guy.”
Even with this extra layer of insulation from reality, Hegseth insisted that the press was not being positive enough about U.S. attacks on Iran while banning photographers over unflattering pictures of him. Hegseth‘s fragile ego is incapable of facing up to the reality of what has been unleashed so thoughtlessly. Like one of his hated woke snowflakes, Hegseth — if confronted with tough questions from The Guardian or CNN — whines and deflates into a fetal position.
He bashed “fake news” while addressing the six U.S. army reservists killed in an Iranian attack on an operations center in Kuwait. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad.” The comments reflect a total lack of empathy for America’s fallen as Hegseth risibly views all reporting on the negative consequences of the war as Trump-bashing.
His petulant, contemptuous behavior was evident at his confirmation hearings last year. Senators raised serious questions about his record of disparaging remarks about women, claims of sexual assault, and on-the-job drunkenness. An affidavit by a former spouse cited him for abusive behavior. He was also accused of rape and, though not charged by the police, Hegseth paid to silence the accusation. His own mother even accused him, in an email, of a long record of abusing women.
Reflecting his antipathy toward women as well as people of color, Hegseth last week blocked the military promotion of four “exemplary” officers, two women and two Black men. He apparently acted without the authority to do so. Reportedly, he was told that Trump did not want to stand next to a female Black officer at military events.
At the time of the Senate confirmation hearings, The New Yorker reported that a colleague at Concerned Veterans for America complained that he and another man, during a drunken episode at a bar, repeatedly shouted “Kill all Muslims!”
His body even shouts the anti-Muslim, Crusader’s vow. The Latin phrase ”Deus Vult,” or “God wills it,” is tattooed on Hegseth’s right bicep. This “battle cry” of the Crusades has been revived in recent years by various far-right groups. It appeared on clothing and flags carried by some participants in the January 6 Capitol attack.
Hegseth lionizes those ruthless medieval wars during which Christian warriors massacred Muslims to take over Jerusalem as perhaps the most formative moment in the history of the free world. He even titled his 2020 book American Crusade. Hegseth described the Crusades as “bloody” and “full of unspeakable tragedy,” but asserts that they were justified because they saved a Christian Europe from the “onslaught” of Islam.
On his chest is a tattoo of the Jerusalem cross — a cluster of five crosses long associated with medieval Crusader iconography. The symbol is linked to the Knights Templar. This Crusader army of warrior monks was founded in occupied Jerusalem in 1119 and established its headquarters at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a site of profound significance in Islam. Its use as a foreign military headquarters constituted a desecration of the sacred place.
These are not merely tattoos, these are declarations — fragments of a sick worldview in which politics becomes a crusade and the modern world becomes a permanent battlefield clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. Hegseth wrote, in American Crusade, that those who benefit from “western civilization” should “thank a Crusader.”
Hegseth has pledged to reprogram the military with a Christian nationalist ideology that fuses religious identity with national identity. Military chaplains are supposed to minister to all religions, but Hegseth wants to rewrite their manual to reinsert the Christian God. On X, he said, “War fighters of faith have been alienated by secular humanism in the military.”
Hosting a monthly Christian prayer service that is live-streamed throughout the Pentagon, Hegseth last week called for “overwhelming violence of action” against those who “deserve no mercy.” He read a prayer that asked God to “let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.”
In February, Hegseth invited his pastor — Christian nationalist Doug Wilson — to address the U.S. military. Wilson believes homosexuality is a crime, wants to repeal the women’s vote, and works to make the U.S. a Christian theocracy.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a nonprofit activist organization that seeks to defend the rights of service members, said it has received more than 200 complaints from service members about military commanders invoking extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical “end times” to justify involvement in the Iran war. According to MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force attorney, Hegseth’s language casts the Iran war as a holy war of a Christian nation against a Muslim one.
“We look exactly like a ninth version of the eight prior Crusades, from the 11th through the 13th century,” Weinstein said. “We’re just attacking a huge Muslim nation, and all this does is serve as an immeasurable propaganda bonanza for those that we are fighting.” Hegseth treats the military as his personal army to carry out his self-styled, anti-Muslim notion of God’s agenda.
This reflects Trump’s expressed feelings about the Iranian people: “They really are a nation of terror and hate.” He claimed he would like to help Iranians if “they can behave, but they‘ve been very menacing.” It gets worse. On Untruth Social, he wrote, with apocalyptic relish, “We will take out easily destroyable targets that will make it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again — Death, Fire, and Fury will reign (sic) upon them.
File. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivers remarks during an 82nd Airborne Division Review at Fort Bragg, N.C., May 22, 2025. (DoD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander Kubitza). Color altered. Public Domain. Via Picryl.
This is an attitude that Pete Hegseth obviously shares. Opposition to Islamists has been a motivating influence in Hegseth’s public life. He wrote that the U.S. faces a “crusade moment” that echoes the 11th-century Christian invasion of the Holy Land. “We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must.”
He predicted that the U.S. would wage war side-by-side with Israel. “We Christians — alongside our Jewish friends and their remarkable army in Israel — need to pick up the sword of unapologetic Americanism and defend ourselves. We must push Islamism back — culturally, politically, geographically, and militarily.”
Hegseth personifies the thuggish, sycophantic, Islamaphobic power-drunk administration in which domination is the only language. Militarism, civilizational arrogance, and Crusader fantasies are no longer at the margins but at the center of power. Hegseth is not a fringe figure. He commands fleets, armies, bombers, missiles, and he speaks like a religious fanatic. Boastful, taunting, and intoxicated by violence, Hegseth claims a divinely-sanctioned mandate to kill anyone who does not align with his White Christian nationalist dogma, the Zionist agenda, or the ever-conflicting decrees of his Supreme Misleader.
© 2026 All Rights Reserved