President Donald Trump arrives from the Blue Room to speak about the Iran war from the Cross Hall of the White House on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. Alex Brandon/Pool via REUTERS
Guardian writer Steven Poole said President Donald Trump and his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth conduct war like a couple of teenage boys reading comic books, all while getting rich on the viscera and violence.
In March, Trump said if things didn’t go to his liking in Iran, “we just keep bombing our little hearts out”. A week later he told journalists: “You never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.” That same month, weeks after bombing an Iranian girl’s school and killing nearly 200 people (mostly children), Hegseth bragged of delivering “death and destruction from the sky all day long.”
Later, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags [Iranians] today. They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”
“The crudity, here, is the point,” said Poole. “Sociolinguists say that the use of dysphemism violates social norms and taboos, and Trump is nothing if not the taboo-buster-in-chief. Do I endorse war crimes by threatening to bomb Iran’s desalination plants? Very well then, I endorse war crimes. Who cares? Hegseth, meanwhile, announced a policy of giving ‘no quarter’ to the enemy, ie refusing to take prisoners, which is itself another war crime.”
Poole notes that Hegseth’s favorite term is “lethality,” and he adores telling the armed forces how “lethal” they are.
“‘We are not defenders anymore,’ he announced gleefully. ‘We are warriors: trained to kill the enemy and break their will.’ (It might seem excessive to break their will after killing them, but why settle for half measures?) He seemed to experience a sadistic pleasure in announcing the sinking of an Iranian warship by a US torpedo, enjoying the idea of the doomed crew’s ‘quiet death.’”
The “unabashed viciousness” is part of the appeal of the MAGA administration for its fans, said Poole. “But while this maniacal, no-bulls—— posturing, this chest-beating fiesta of blood and guts, takes center stage, the real bulls—— of geopolitical miscalculation and cynical profiteering seems to be simply swept under the carpet.”
Pool cites the Financial Times reporting that Hegseth’s broker sought to invest in US military companies directly before the war. Trump told the same paper, while Trump openly admitted “My favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran.”
“What do Trump and Hegseth really want? One answer is: to enrich Trump and Hegseth,” said Poole.