What's Wrong with Pete Hegseth? [View all]

Esquire Opinion by Dave Holmes

“We are punching them while they are down, which is exactly how it should be” will surely echo throughout history, just maybe not in the way he thinks it will (and “throughout history” means “until late Friday morning, maximum,” because who can keep anything in their head anymore). “It was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight”

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So … what the hell is wrong with this guy? One word: insecurity. Pete Hegseth is the textbook definition of “overcompensation,” “fragile masculinity,” and “incomplete pull-up.” Hegseth’s words tell you this is a deeply insecure man, and if they don’t, his eyes sure do. Pete Hegseth is the face and the voice and the posture of the classic American man as imagined by the second Trump Administration. This is the way the men and women of the current Cabinet have to speak. They have been given notes on their roles, and the director wants them to sound tough, even when their words reveal that they’re terrified of things like cities and trans people and the Spanish language.

Hegseth’s words reveal him, the lot of them, as the last gasp of the white, male, patriarchal society we were finally just beginning to move past. He’s an extinction burst, he’s Skeet Ulrich popping up one last time at the end of Scream. Great things await us when he and the rest of them are out of the way. But again, he’s in control of the most powerful military in the history of the world, so there’s no guarantee we’ll get there. We will in fact be lucky to survive him.

Great hair though.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a70619766/whats-wrong-with-pete-hegseth/