Pete Hegseth's manly act is backfiring [View all]

Pete Hegseth’s manly act is backfiring
MAGA bros hoped the defense secretary would make them feel butch — with Iran war, he embarrasses them

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published March 13, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Pete Hegseth has an abnormal obsession with how he looks in photographs. This is not revelation: The defense secretary is well known for preening for the cameras with a level of self-regard that would embarrass most supermodels. But his fixation on striking a manly pose was confirmed in humiliating fashion this week when the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon banned news photographers for taking what was deemed “unflattering” photos of the former Fox News weekend host during a March 2 briefing about the Iran war.

The situation was a perfect synecdoche for Hegseth’s self-inflicted Sispyphean task of trying to be a big man. His efforts to butch himself up are so grasping that they inevitably backfire, revealing his vanity, insecurity and weakness — qualities that are very much the opposite of the John Wayne ideal of masculinity to which MAGA aspires. (Not that Wayne lived up to his own image either.) Liberals have always laughed at Hegseth and his self-owning, try-hard energy. But with the Iran war, even his fellow travelers in overcompensation, the MAGA bros, are starting to worry about the vicarious emasculation that is likely to come with his embarrassing failure to live up to his vaunted — and frequently espoused — “warrior ethos.”

Hegseth’s rhetoric is so alarming that it sometimes eclipses how he also can come across like an eight-year-old boy inventing dialogue for the villain in his G.I. Joe game. He likes to say things like, “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” and “violent effect, not politically correct.” It’s impossible to hear the secretary spout these rhymes and not picture how he must have practiced them in front of the mirror in his rumored makeup studio at the Pentagon, imagining himself the hero of an action movie, unable to realize that he’s making most listeners feel embarrassed on his behalf.

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To their slender credit, some MAGA dudes know that getting into a real war will backfire by disproving their fragile masculine fantasies. And with incompetent people like Hegseth and Donald Trump in charge, the odds of losing, which is experienced as emasculation on the right, is near 100%. So they’ve been trying to talk their leaders out of this foolhardy mission. Walsh called the war a “travesty.” Rogan said Trump voters feel “betrayed,” and he called the war “insane” as a political decision. Wilson, who has a personal relationship with Hegseth that likely tempers his typical inflammatory rhetoric, was more delicate. Still, he released a video expressing hope that the action would stay “limited” and advising Trump to get out quickly and avoid “the hubris of nation-building.” ........................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/03/13/pete-hegseths-manly-act-is-backfiring/