Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has no idea he’s President Donald Trump’s “future victim,” British-American journalist Sarah Baxter writes in i Paper.
“We are beginning to see in real time what happens when a vain, looksmaxxing US secretary of war encounters death and destruction, and it isn’t pretty,” Baxter wrote Saturday. Looksmaxxing, as the New Yorker puts it, is “the practice of intensively optimizing one's appearance.” And for Baxter, who calls Hegseth a “cartoonish Johnny Bravo lookalike," the Pentagon chief is certainly a follower of the practice.
“With his ability to do 100 push-ups and 50 pull-ups in just over five minutes, he regards himself as the epitome of masculinity and bravery,” Baxter writes. “Instead of steeling the US public for the grit and sacrifice military action entails, the Pentagon chief has proffered a wham-bam caricature of the invincibility of untrammeled power[.]”
Listing numerous pitfalls that have emerged in the administration's ongoing war in Iran, Baxter argues “the war is playing out in an eerily similar way to events in Minneapolis, where masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol killed two American citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti.” Kristi Noem, outgoing Department of Homeland Security secretary who oversees the agencies responsible for those deaths, has already been fired by the Trump administration, the reporter notes. And she believes Hegseth could be next.
Noting that last September, Hegseth spoke with a number of top generals who were summoned to Quantico, VA, Baxter explains the defense chief promised no “endless nation building” under his leadership. Still, as Baxter writes, the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq revealed “the reason for nation-building”: “New threats would arise and gains would be lost unless enemy nations became allies.”
But, she warns, “Hegseth is too foolish to realize this.” And the president, “seeking someone to blame, may have found his future victim.”
Indeed, the Hill reports Saturday that Hegseth and Trump “face perilous options” in Iran as they face “a difficult set of options in attempting to reopen” the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping route currently slowed to a crawl as Iran carries out attacks on tankers in the strait.
Hegseth on Friday “downplayed concerns of Iranian attacks,” the Hill reports. The defense secretary insists the Pentagon “has been dealing with it.”
But as the Trump administration confronts a problem of its own creation, Baxter warns it could be knives out for Hegseth.