There are two versions of Pete Hegseth. There is the one who comes to press conferences, where questions are brief, interruptions are plentiful, and confidence is easily mistaken for competence. And then there is the one who appears before Congress, where the questions are longer, the pauses are quieter, and someone will, eventually, ask him to try again.
The second version is much harder to watch. We saw it with the House on Wednesday, when he got sweaty and angry at the harsh words of the lawmakers pressing him on inconvenient issues like the actual cost of the Iran war, the projected amount of time it might continue, and the effects on both the national and international economies. At one, embarrassing point, he really tried to shut a congressman’s questioning down with: “Whose side are you cheering for?!”
Today, in the Senate, it looked a little different. The talk was slower and the questions were more probing. Once again, however, Hegseth came up short.
At the beginning of proceedings, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) said that Trump had “no coherent strategy” when he “unilaterally” decided to begin a war with Iran. We are now, Reed said — in his signature, slightly bored tone — “in a worse strategic position” than before, with wounded and dead soldiers, “significant damage” to Middle East bases, the expensive loss of bombs and missiles, lowered morale, gasoline and fertilizer prices across the world skyrocketing, and American families paying for “a war they have nothing to do with” and that does not benefit them.
“I have concerns you have been telling the president what he wants to hear instead of what he needs to hear,” Reed said, adding that Hegseth had proven himself to be deeply unserious during the war, “boasting about ‘no stupid rules of engagement’” after accidentally killing dozens of schoolgirls in a missile strike and taking Kid Rock “for a joyride in an Apache helicopter.”
Hegseth responded with his usual bombast, clutching his emotional support words (“WAR FIGHTERS!”, “LETHALITY!”) and hoping they might protect him from an onslaught of logic. He talked about “great business deals” (his latest fave) and he repeated his foolish line from the day before about how America’s “biggest adversaries” are unbelieving Democrats and Republicans in Congress, “defeatists from the cheap seats” who can’t accept that Trump has “the courage no other president has had”.
In other words, he didn’t learn from yesterday. He came with his canned lines and by God, was he going to repeat them, whether or not they made sense any longer and whether or not they had already been publicly proven to be meaningless.
When asked by Reed about why he fired the decorated General George, Hegseth talked himself into a hole: the military is going in a new direction and we need generals who are “running in that direction as fast as possible”, he said, but also he won’t clarify which direction that actually is or what that means.
Reed said that it seemed to him, from hearing Hegseth speak, that it was going in a direct of “an intense interest in Christianity” and “in nationalism”. Pete had a Pavlovian response to the brief mention of Christianity.
“I am not ashamed of my faith in Jesus Christ and if you want to shame me for that, go ahead,” he projected loudly, even as Reed said calmly that he should never be ashamed of that, and that wasn’t the point of the question.
“I’ve heard the likes of things people like you suggest,” Hegseth continued, bafflingly, and then refused to answer whether he tolerates and accepts other religions. Needless to say, trying to paint this very old, very slow-speaking expert as a crazy zealot didn’t really work.
Reed finished with, “I think that’s rhetorical, not factual. Thank you,” which could also serve as a neat summary of the Secretary of War’s answers over the next couple of hours.
For example: Pressed by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen about why funds the Senate had earmarked intended for Ukraine don’t seem to have actually been used for Ukraine, Hegseth talked so ridiculously around the question that Shaheen eventually asked his financial officer to answer instead. The response was: “We’ll get back to you,” which — it was noted — had already been said a number of times during the meeting in response to simply budgetary questions Hegseth and his team really should’ve known the answers to.
During an exchange with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Hegseth — who really struggles during conversation with women, and seems to have a knee-jerk need to patronize — tried telling her not to read “whatever you’re reading” in the news any longer.
“Why do you continue to prosecute a war that the American people aren't behind?” Gillibrand asked, to which Hegseth simply replied that he didn’t believe her numbers on US support for the war are real, and that “the troops” tell him they’re absolutely behind it. When she asked about costs, Hegseth reeled out another one of his canned statements: “What is the cost of a nuclear armed Iran?!”
“We know this is a rhetorical question you ask everywhere,” she said, adding that “there is no evidence we are safer because of this war.”
It was a painful exchange to watch, as Hegseth tried his own hype again — “Do you not believe them when they say ‘Death to America’?!” — and Gillibrand once again reminded him that there’s a difference between rhetoric and action. He then pivoted to his “IT’S ONLY BEEN TWO MONTHS” routine, where he mentions how long Iraq and Afghanistan went on, as if that’s at all a reassuring comparison. This is a man who has never heard about what it means when one doth protests too much.
And once he’d started down that route, he couldn’t stop. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) went back to costs, and Hegseth responded that the real problem is “the negative nature in which you see” the war. He repeated his absurd allegory about the press being Pharisees and added, “It’s defeatist Democrats like you who cloud the minds of the American people who otherwise would support us!” Which did seem to somewhat undermine his earlier assertion that the American people do support him.
Most alarmingly, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed him about the possibility of insider trading around Trump’s announcements on Iran, he could only stutter slightly and then end up announcing that he was able to keep Operation Midnight Hammer secret. Congrats, Secretary!
Warren clearly got under Hegseth’s skin. He started sighing, rolling his eyes, and at one point kept shouting, “Big, fat negative!” in response to her extremely critical questioning. It was a physical manifestation of what he appears to think: that he should be above question (especially by women); that Americans should simply trust that his vibes are right and stop bugging him every single day about every little bomb that lands on a girls’ school.
Watching Hegseth come under proper scrutiny like this is a bit like watching Buzz Lightyear realize he’s not a real astronaut. At first he comes in fighting, and then, over time, you see the denial and the anger set in. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a heartwarming buddy story on the horizon to make things right: just more war, more heel-digging, more insistence that President Trump is the most courageous man on the planet (bone spurs be damned!)
Ultimately, this was a case of a fundamental mismatch: senators were asking for details and timelines, and Hegseth was able to offer adjectives. The pattern was unmistakable: a question asked, a question avoided, a slogan deployed, a voice raised, and then, eventually, a quiet yielding of time. Over and over again, until the shape of it became impossible to ignore.
The strategy is so perfect that it cannot be elucidated. The president is so beyond reproach that we should not have to explain his decision-making. The war is going so well that nobody should believe what their own eyes and ears are telling them.
Needless to say, a lot is riding on the answers that Pete Hegseth cannot give. And — behind the exhausting, unrelenting hyperbole — he gave us no cause for confidence today.
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