'God wills it'

I don’t think you can blame her loss on it¹ , but one of Kamala Harris’s cringier missteps in the final weeks of the campaign was her roadshow with Liz Cheney. I understood the theory: Cheney and her more famous² father were the most prominent Republicans openly endorsing the Democratic ticket, and there was a slim hope that some number of anti-Trump conservatives might defect. It turned out to be a stupid theory for three reasons: 1) betting on Republican defectors hasn’t worked for a second in the Trump era; 2) the Cheneys may be the most hated political family in America, on all sides of the aisle; and 3) it helped solidify the narrative in many voters’ minds that the Democrats were the war party, which by the law of political opposites made Donald Trump somehow the peace candidate.

I did my best to explode the latter myth before the election — pointing to Trump’s bloody and reckless war record in his first term. Alas. Now the likely president-elect and his acolytes are busy assembling their next cabinet. And, sure as it’s a day that ends in Y, Trump has announced a slate of Islamophobic wackjobs, supposedly reformed neoconservatives, and open war crimes enthusiasts to head up his end of the Military-Industrial Complex.

This is a group, including Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, that has spent years beating the war drums against countries like Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea — even promoting plans to bomb Mexico. Some, such as “border czar” designate Tom Homan, are openly announcing plans to use the U.S. military against citizens at home. There are so many other unhinged picks to choose from: Tulsi Gabbard (pre-compromised Director of National Intelligence), Kristi Noem (Homeland Security), Elise Stefanik (U.N. ambassador), RFK Jr. (Department of Raw Milk and Ivermectin) and Matt Gaetz (lol), among them. (None of these nominees are a sure thing, though Trump in his first term showed no qualms about keeping secretaries in “acting” roles, thus avoiding the need for Senate confirmation.)

But possibly the most unhinged nomination came Wednesday when Trump announced that 44-year-old Pete Hegseth was his choice as Secretary of Defense. Until now, Hegseth has been a minor figure, a co-host of the weekday program Fox & Friends, of which Trump has long been a noted superfan. A former National Guardsman, Hegseth recently described himself as “a recovering neocon for six years now.” And his resume confirms it: In 2004, he embarked on his first overseas deployment: as a prison guard at the Guantánamo Bay detention center. (In his 2016 memoir, a love letter to Teddy Roosevelt’s and George W. Bush’s brands of imperialism titled In the Arena, Hegseth wrote: “My initial education on the differences between Islamist groups came over many nights in the guard tower at Guantanamo Bay.”) He later deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a counterinsurgency instructor and civil-military operations officer. In true Gangster of Capitalism fashion, Hegseth combined his self-avowedly ideological post-9/11 deployment with a job as an equity markets analyst at Bear Stearns.

Hegseth left the National Guard as a major in 2021³ , meaning the largest number of troops he’s likely been responsible for as a staff officer is a couple hundred (if that). If put in the job, Hegseth would suddenly find himself in charge of roughly 2.9 million people, and a department that, if incoming Republican Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker gets his way, will soon have a $1.5 trillion budget.

But it isn’t just a lack of experience that makes Hegseth uniquely unqualified for the job of running the world’s largest and deadliest bureaucracy. Some of Hegseth’s more noxious views have garnered attention, from his opposition to allowing women in combat roles or trans people in the military at all, to his insinuation that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., who is Black, got the job “because of his skin color.” (“We’ll never know …,” Hepseth wrote, “but since [Brown] has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn't really much matter.”) But there’s even worse out there.

In 2017, the day after neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, members of the Proud Boys and others rampaged through Charlottesville, Va., Hegseth said on Fox News that he understood the reasons the white nationalists “were out there.” Likening them to Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrating against police brutality, Hegseth said the Nazis were “young white men, who feel like, ‘Hey, I’m treated differently in this country than I feel like I should have [been], I’ve become a second-class citizen. They tell me I have white privilege.’ None of that justifies racial preferences or violence at all, but there’s a grievance underneath it that’s worth talking about.”

Hegseth has also claimed that in 2021, in the aftermath of the January 6 coup attempt, he volunteered to provide security at Joe Biden’s inauguration. But his request was turned down because, as he told right-wing podcaster Shawn Ryan, “someone inside the D.C. Guard trolled your social media, found a tattoo, used it an excuse to call you a white nationalist, an extremist.” The tat in question, he said, was the Jerusalem cross on his chest, a design that he explained, innocently, was “just a Christian symbol.”

It is that, but it is also a Crusades-era design that has been appropriated by modern far-right extremists, especially those with an anti-Muslim bent. Nor was the cross the only — or even most likely — tattoo that may have raised alarms. Inside Hegseth’s right bicep, he had tattooed the words “Deus Vult,” a Latin slogan, also borrowed from the First Crusade, that means “God wills it.” That slogan, which Hegseth chose to depict in Gothic Blackletter, is even more directly associated with white nationalists. It was the slogan, for instance, of the Proud Boys affiliate calling itself the Order of the Alt-Knights, which wore it while fighting in the streets of Charlottesville. The neo-Nazi incel who shot 15 people at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, last year also had a “Deus Vult” along with Swastika and SS tattoos. And at least one “Deus Vult” flag was spotted on Jan. 6, 2021, during the storming of the Capitol.

Hegseth captioned the 2020 Instagram post featuring that tattoo: “‘Deus Vult’ are the last two words of my book — out TODAY … Join the #AmericanCrusade.’”

You might notice the other tattoos on that arm: a broadsword in a metallic cross⁴ , an AR-15 built into a simplified American flag, and two Revolutionary War symbols: crossed muskets and the “Join or Die” flag (a symbol also used in Charlottesville at Unite the Right). He also got Hebrew letters that are definitely supposed to spell Jesus’ name in Hebrew (but don’t).⁵ As Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, those indicate Hegseth belongs to “a fringe denomination known as Reformed Reconstructionism, which believes in applying biblical Christian law to society, exclusively male leadership, and actively preparing the world for the prophesied return of Jesus.”

In other words, Hegseth may not be a Robert McNamara, but we could be getting a far more on-the-nose remake of “Apocalypse Now.”

Perhaps most worrying in a future Defense Secretary is Hegseth’s love of war crimes. While he brags in his memoir about having helped convince George W. Bush to embark on the 2006 Iraq “surge” with a Wall Street Journal op-ed (titled, winningly, “More Troops, Please”), his first real foray into public policy came in 2019. That’s when he successfully lobbied Trump to pardon two convicted war criminals — Lt. Clint Lorance and Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, each of whom had been convicted of murdering Afghan civilians — and to reverse the demotion of a third, the disgraced Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who was charged with shooting Iraqi civilians, stabbing an Islamic State prisoner, and threatening to kill other SEALs if they reported him.

He also defended the four Blackwater contractors who massacred fourteen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, who were convicted of murder and manslaughter in U.S. courts. Hegseth blamed “Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton” for having “stepped in” to seek their convictions. Trump pardoned all four in 2020.

As Media Matters has compiled, Hegseth devoted several on-air segments to defending these war criminals, in which he and his guests insisted that the people they killed were “bad guys” and “terrorists.” They further argued that they were being treated unfairly while immigrants, murderers in “Chicago,” and people who incite “race riots” were treated with kid gloves. Other soldiers, he said, “weren’t killing the enemy in the right way. They’re killing compassionately.” He further argued that the rules of war — rules instituted after two world wars to prevent the worst atrocities in human history from being repeated — were “academic rules of engagement” that have been “tying the hands of our warfighters for too long.”

Gen. Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, tried to argue to Trump that pardoning war criminals would “would damage U.S. relationships around the world,” as the Washington Post reported at the time But Hegseth’s argument — that these criminals were in fact heroes — carried the day.

What we are seeing here, with Hegseth as well as Rubio, Gabbard, and other alumni of the Bush-era GOP and War on Terror, is a group of people who have internalized that the Iraq (and possibly Afghanistan) wars were a mistake. As Hegseth told the podcaster Shawn Ryan: “The foolishness with which we ricocheted around the world intervening think it was in our best interests when really we just overturned the table and created something worse in almost every single scenario.”

But the defense of people who murdered civilians for no reason — and their supposed right to do so — gives away the game. This crew believes that the perpetrators were their commanders and presidents; the real victims — the only victims, really — were the American people, above all the servicemembers who did the killing.⁶ Hegseth may want to pull the Pentagon out of the war in Ukraine (he told the podcaster Shawn Ryan that he doesn’t want his “son deploying to the Donbas to defend Eastern Ukraine” and that “[Putin] probably not going much further than Ukraine.”) But he, like Marco Rubio, is a booster for war with Iran and a dogged supporter of Israel. His recent tattoos affirm that he is still fighting the War on Terror in his mind (“we are in a generational struggle against radical Islam,” he said during Trump’s first term). And judging by his writing and recent interviews, he is more than ready to move toward a world war with China.

In replacing neoconservative adventurism with “America First-ism,” then, hawks like Hegseth are simply shifting the logic of the Bush years to an older form of unilateralism: Going abroad in search of riches and monsters to slay, without even the pretense of spreading democracy, or helping anyone else at all.

1  As I hinted at last week, the most apparent cause of Harris’ defeat was a worldwide anti-incumbency trend, fueled in part most likely by post-COVID inflation, global migration, and a general sense of unease about everything from war to climate change. Maybe I’ll do a longer newsletter about it soon. For now you can watch this video I did on TikTok.

2  That is to say notorious.

3  Normally a lower-ranking officer who retired within the last seven years would need a waiver from Congress to lead the Pentagon in a civilian role. But as Military.com reported today, citing a former judge advocate and current associate professor of law at Ohio Northern University: "This doesn't apply. It's about active duty and the whole reason why we have the requirement is to ensure effective civilian control over the military, so the more distant you are from active, day-to-day service, the stronger the presumed protection is for civilian control … If you're a reservist or National Guard ... you are already a civilian, primarily."

4  Hegseth told the magazine Media Ink in 2020 that one is supposed to represent Matthew 10:34, which reads in the New International Version: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

5  Hegseth told Media Ink that was supposed to read “Yehweh,” which in turn is a butchering of one attempt at pronouncing the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton — the name of God. Except the artist got it wrong too: Instead of ישוע (Yeshua), they wrote ”ישרע.” That isn’t a word. But if you put a space between the second and third letters, it would be a grammatical sentence: יש רע, yesh ra, or, “there is evil.” Hegseth said he got that ink done by the “only tattoo artist in Bethlehem” during a reporting trip for Fox Nation. If this was an intentional joke by a Palestinian tattooist, it was a funny one.

6  I wrote about Americans’ general failure to explain, or even understand, why the Iraq War was a mistake on the 20th anniversary of the invasion.