The Pete Hegseth Rules for Dominating Your Way to Utter Failure
How to act alpha and look like you’re winning, even when you keep stepping on rakesThe Pete Hegseth Rules for Dominating Your Way to Utter Failure
How to act alpha and look like you’re winning, even when you keep stepping on rakes
Everyone who reads this column is going to agree with me. What a rush. What a truly incredible feeling. This may be the most excited I’ve ever been to start a piece of writing. I’m here to speak for the world. Not just Democrats. Not just Republicans. Everyone. Because even if you’re the most MAGA-positive, vaccine-resistant, torture prison–loving r/incel moderator who ever bought a blue check from Elon Musk, you intuitively understand that this man is a thermonuclear dork.
I know it. You know it. Cybertruck drivers know it. Some guys are so easy to see through that they expose their weaknesses in the very act of trying to hide them, and Pete Hegseth, our current U.S. secretary of defense—I’m not calling him the secretary of war; that’s dork shit—is one of those guys. The insecurity he radiates makes you vibrate on a cellular level. You could be bonesmashing in the bathroom with a hammer you paid for in $Trump, and if Hegseth walked in, you’d feel slightly embarrassed, not for yourself but for him. All that sweaty, crusty swagger, and all of it so empty and fake!
Look at this man. Think about how mercilessly you’d have ruined his life if he’d been an assistant principal at your high school.
I am certain of many things about Pete Hegseth, but nothing more than this: If he’d been your assistant principal, he would have had to park off-site to stop people from fucking with his car. Lot security would have made no difference. Guards, cameras, I don’t care. Your classmates would’ve found a way. He’d have been the biggest disciplinary hard-ass at the school, and if he still had four tires on his Mustang (late model, white, non-GT version) at 3 p.m., it would have been his best workday of the month. Senior year, your friend group’s entire inside-joke canon would have been built around the deranged comments he barked out at pep rallies while he was strutting around the stage, acting tough. He’d have given you two weeks of detention for trying to use “no fatties, beardos, or weirdos” as an ironic yearbook quote, but the principal would have thought it was funny and let you off. My God, I wish Pete Hegseth had been your assistant principal. It would have been so beautiful.
Instead, thanks to an unlikely spin of the malfunctioning slot machine that is life, he wound up in charge of the most powerful military in the history of the world. He is not doing a good job in this role, either morally or operationally. The target of his largest military campaign, the Iranian regime, is somehow more powerful than it was before he attacked it—surely the opposite of how it’s supposed to work? And the weaker the U.S. looks, the more angry posturing Hegseth does, like a hysterical shopper screaming at a sales associate while being escorted out of the store.
Six months after he first declared victory in the Middle East, Iran is still sinking ships in the Strait of Hormuz. High gas prices are spiking inflation, and the enemy Hegseth supposedly crushed in April is manipulating the global energy economy ahead of the midterm elections in November. He’s somehow made the U.S. both more brutally violent and less feared by its rivals, an incredible trick to pull off. He’s drained our stockpile of weapons to crisis levels—say this for Pete, he loves blowing shit up—with almost nothing to show for it.
If he were actually working for China, he would be their employee of the year.
This was all so predictable. From the moment JD Vance cast the deciding vote to break a 50-50 Senate tie and confirm Hegseth’s nomination, it was exhaustingly clear that he was going to stomp around with his chest thrust out, rant about wokeness, and make the sort of avoidable tactical blunders that get NFL coaches replaced by Grant Udinski. (Hegseth would have nodded admiringly at Dan Quinn’s management of the end of that Commanders-Giants game.) He’d never run a large organization before being handed this role, and the small organizations that he had run unceremoniously ousted him for misconduct. The Department of Defense has 2.8 million employees; Hegseth’s main qualification for leading it was cohosting a talk show on Fox News. He’d served on the ground in Iraq, sure, but then, I’ve done home-improvement projects. It doesn’t mean I should be hired as the CEO of Home Depot.
But it isn’t just inexperience that has doomed Hegseth’s DOD tenure, which may soon be coming to an end. It’s his approach to everything. He lives his life according to five simple rules, and the rules are optimized to wreck everything they touch apart from Pete’s own ego. Think of them as a bizarro guide to life: Together, they form a set of precepts that guarantee failure in every possible context. Well, every possible context except one. If your boss is a bullying, megalomaniacal TV addict who values big talk over results, they might help you get ahead. Fortunately, no such boss could ever acquire real power in the crucible of American meritocracy.
Let’s look at the Hegseth Rules, one by one.
1. What you call things matters more than what they are.
Like plenty of other dick-swinging, anti-intellectual populists, Peter Brian Hegseth was once a little smarty-pants. He was born in 1980 in Minnesota, where his dad was a high school basketball coach; Hegseth played point guard and broke school records for 3-point shooting, proving that he at least used to be able to direct a successful long-range attack. He was the valedictorian of his high school, went to college at Princeton, and led a conservative newspaper called The Princeton Tory. (Cute.) As publisher, he vowed to “defend the pillars of Western civilization,” which is code for “when I grow up, I want billionaires to pay my rent.”
There’s a certain type of student you run into around Ivy League politics departments: the hyper-ambitious narcissist who sees the world as a language game. Maybe he tells everyone he wants to be president or maybe he hides it, but either way, he has a very strong ego and a very weak sense of reality. He views words as levers to make other people do what he wants; whenever he meets someone who could be useful to him, he tries to reverse engineer their mind to figure out what sort of language they want to hear, what sort of tone they respond to. Under the old, pre-Trump political order, this guy—it’s usually a guy, though not always—learned to comb his hair like Executive Ken and speak in the smooth, pious, inoffensive cadences of State of the Union speeches, always with a glibness he couldn’t quite hide. Bill Clinton had this quality. Gavin Newsom is dripping with it, and his recent attempts to modernize into something more abrasive and seemingly authentic have only emphasized the calculating inauthenticity at his core.
Hegseth also has this quality—not the polished, old-fashioned West Wing iteration but the contemporary MAGA version, where the game is about sounding as unhinged and feral as you can every minute of the day. Never apologize. Never admit a mistake. Demand. Insult. Bully. Condemn. Wherever possible, swap out words for synonyms that make you seem like a badass. Change “Department of Defense” to “Department of War”; you don’t have the statutory authority to make the change, but that only makes you seem more badass. Change “soldier” to “warfighter”; it’s a ludicrous, made-up word, but it lets you jam two highly belligerent terms together and sounds cool in your head. After all, the whole problem of combat is that if you can attack other people, other people can also attack you, which makes you feel vulnerable. It makes you feel effeminate, which is the worst thing you can be in Hegseth’s universe. And “defense” makes it sound like you’re just waiting around for it to happen!
But “war” does the opposite. “Warfighter” makes it clear that you’re the aggressor. You’re not preserving the peace. You’re out there inflicting damage on other people regardless of whether they deserve it, which, in Hegseth’s universe, is what men do.
Keep going with it, and you soon realize that what happens doesn’t even matter. You have to pretend to care about reality because brass-tacks realism is the attitude of the hard-bitten cowboy you want other people to think you are. But reality doesn’t matter in the slightest. The only thing that matters is what you say about reality, which makes you effectively invincible: As long as you loudly and relentlessly claim victory at every turn, you can never lose. (Often what you’re claiming victory over is language itself: Hegseth has attempted to ban the use of preferred pronouns in the military, and he’s directed more fury at internal DEI initiatives than at U.S. military foes.)
Hegseth didn’t invent this strategy, but he’s embraced it with every fiber of his being. He’s a former TV talking head, after all. He wants to be a tough guy, and he’s found a way to corner the market on toughness through pure talk.
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2. Acting strong and losing is better than winning and acting weak.
Of course it is, because the world is a language game. You win if you say you won. (At least if you say it on TV.) Hegseth seems perfectly happy to weaken the military as a fighting force so long as doing so enhances his lunchroom-bully shtick. The reforms he’s pushed—eliminating DEI initiatives; attacking what he’s called “social justice, politically correct, toxic ideological garbage”; trying to push women out of combat roles (and probably out of the military altogether); abruptly firing prominent Black and female leaders who earned their stripes somewhere other than Fox & Friends—have been carried out in a spirit of pure theater. Firing proven and qualified commanders can’t possibly strengthen the country’s armed forces, but it isn’t meant to. It’s meant to change the way the armed forces look, to reassure anxious white guys that they still belong to the demographic of Call of Duty heroes and great leaders. It’s not about winning wars. It’s about giving his target audience of aging Gamergate trolls more emotionally reassuring parades.
Consider, for instance, his latest idea: his plan to fire one out of every five generals and admirals in the service. Who do you think will be targeted by this directive? What do you think he meant when he said that he’d axe generals who “clung to the woke department”? The move, if it’s allowed to go through—even Republican senators don’t love it—will create a military leadership more personally loyal to Trump, but I think that’s only a fringe benefit for Hegseth. The real imperative is to make sure no one who looks like him ever has to salute anyone who doesn’t. Dread of that possibility is the emotional motor driving the order, and it’s a far deeper dread than the fear of being shown up by a distant adversary like Iran.
Instances of pure incompetence work more or less the same way. Remember last year, when he used a civilian app to plan a military strike in Yemen over group chat? And remember when the group accidentally added the editor in chief of The Atlantic to the chat and thus literally texted a prominent journalist its secret war plans? Apart from being the funniest thing that has ever happened in the history of the world, it didn’t mean a thing from Hegseth’s perspective. The danger to the personnel involved in the attack didn’t matter. The catastrophic failure of responsibility didn’t matter. Even the likely illegality of the chat itself was irrelevant. He just lied about it and blamed other people.
As long as you look mean and bluster, you’re winning. Even when you’re spraying bullets into your own foot.
3. Everything is a performance, and every performance is about gender.
Hegseth may be more obsessed with gender than anyone else on earth. There are drag queens who think about it less. Judith Butler thinks about it less! I lack the clinical expertise to delve into the psychosexual depths of Hegseth’s mind, but I do have two eyes and a brain, and when I look at him, I see someone so terrified of seeming unmasculine that he’s warped his entire personality into a kind of comically supersized parody of how Real Men act. It would be high camp if it weren’t so totally devoid of fun. He’s like a John Wayne impersonator trying to stay in character through a full-blown existential crisis.
Watch two minutes of a Hegseth press conference. Now tell me you aren’t absolutely positive he copies his mannerisms from alpha dudes he spies on at the gym. Tell me he doesn’t practice that beady-eyed glower in the mirror, and probably in the windows of every parked car he walks past. At Princeton, Hegseth joined the ROTC program—entering the military through an Ivy League extracurricular, like Rambo before him—then went to work as an equity-markets analyst at Bear Stearns. And while it’s possible that he just loves guns and money, I’d bet that he loves guns and money because they’re the ultimate cultural signifiers of the sort of manhood he’s desperate to emulate. He literally won a Bronze Star in Iraq, and even that didn’t help him relax. He’s still jutting out his chin and saying ugly things about trans people, probably because anyone who’s lived with the concept of gender fluidity could easily see through his act. When he shows up on TV, the fear pheromones seep out through the screen.
Everywhere he’s gone, from Vets for Freedom to Fox News, people have talked about how much he drinks. Hard drinking is a masculine signifier, and also a way to self-medicate for the spiritually annihilating terror that you’re going to be found out.
All the testosterone stuff? The mandatory testing for troops aged 30 and over? Part of the same all-consuming fear. He wants a metric to measure manhood, and he wants to set himself up as the ultimate authority on the metric, because that way he can’t possibly be found lacking by anyone else. Numbers don’t lie. (Unless you want them to.)
Of course I’m speculating here, but this all seems so obvious that Hegseth might as well walk around with it written on his T-shirt. He’s embraced symbols of white nationalism—as a National Guardsman in D.C., he was banned from serving at the 2021 presidential inauguration due to the problematic tattoo situation on his chest and biceps—and while this may be a leap, I suspect that even here, part of the draw is that being at the top of a reinstated racial hierarchy would reassure him about his manhood. More people who’d have to respect and obey him!
4. Nothing is more important than power, and power is about hurting other people.
Hegseth really seems to like killing people. Whenever he talks about it, he gets a cheery little glow. Currently, he’s very excited to bring executions by firing squad back to the military for the first time since 1945, and he was extremely excited to livestream his first firing-squad execution over the internet, which is scheduled for December 3. He went a little too far with that one—Trump, a much more instinctive showman, canceled the livestream plan, probably sensing it wouldn’t land with the public—but you can’t blame a guy for getting carried away by his passions. Earlier this year, his illegal strikes on presumed drug boats took out an innocent fisherman. “Kill them all,” he reportedly ordered after learning that one of the strikes had left survivors behind. And here his boss was entirely on board.
Power, even more than high T, is the greatest measure of masculinity. You know you have power when other people are weaker than you, and you know they’re weaker than you when you can hurt them with impunity. The goal is to be admired so that you can feel superior to the people who admire you. The only way to be admired by the whole world would be to destroy it.
There is also Hegseth’s treatment of women. After Trump nominated him to run the Department of Defense in 2024, Vanity Fair reported that he’d been investigated by police for sexual assault during a 2017 convention of the California Federation of Republican Women, where he was a speaker. He reportedly paid a woman $50,000 to stay silent. Around the same time, his former sister-in-law told senators in a sworn affidavit that he’d terrorized his ex-wife to the point that she made an escape plan. And The New York Times got hold of an email Hegseth’s own mother had sent him in 2018, calling him “an abuser of women,” someone who uses women “for his own power and ego.” She urged him to “get some help and take an honest look at yourself.”
Despite all of this, the Senate confirmed him in January 2025—although some senators, heroically, expressed grave concerns.
5. God is the biggest asshole in the universe.
This has to be true, because God is the most powerful being in existence, and we know how power works. Hegseth belongs to the ultraconservative Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), whose most influential leader, the Idaho-based pastor Doug Wilson, wants to end the separation of church and state, establish a theocratic government, and impose an explicitly patriarchal social structure on the nation, whether the nation wants it or not. Wilson believes that the decline of masculinity is destroying American culture—he loves to go after men who “simper and lisp,” which is clearly the sort of thing men who are very confident in their own identities need to worry about—and his idea of manhood tracks with Hegseth’s: To them, masculinity seems to be the abstract quality that legitimizes violent behavior in those who possess it.
Wilson’s view of sex, for instance, is based strictly on “authority and submission.” “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” he wrote in Fidelity, his 1999 book on how not to cheat on your wife. (Hegseth has repeatedly cheated on his wives.) “A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” This is so fucking puerile that my own hands hate me for making them type it, but it’s the sort of theology that appeals to scared little boys. Somehow, it also appeals to Hegseth.
In any case, Hegseth has opened the armed forces for Wilson to penetrate, conquer, colonize, and plant the seed of his ideas among the troops. In February, Hegseth invited the CREC boss to give a prayer service at the Pentagon. Wilson’s remarks—like everything Wilson says—were deeply incoherent, but they attempted to establish the notion that American military members are the army of Wilson’s personal version of God. Hegseth echoes the idea that American soldiers are doing God’s work—not by protecting the nation or working for peace, as pastors normally claim, but by bringing violence to people who deserve it. “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” Hegseth said at a prayer service shortly after the start of the Iran war, asking God to grant American soldiers “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Inspiring stuff. If I had to summarize the teachings of Jesus in 10 words or fewer, I’d say “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Put all five of these tenets together, and you get a worldview in which the divine order of creation both entitles and requires you to inflict devastating harm on the world around you. Your only task is to establish your virile authority, which—geopolitically as well as personally—can be done only by forcing others to submit to abusive behavior. You can say anything to get what you want, because nothing that happens is as real as the performance you’re desperately staging, a performance whose aim is to impress others, including the people you want to mistreat. (Mistreating them, in fact, is the best way of impressing them.) It doesn’t matter whether you’re good at what you do. It matters only that you make the right gestures and smirk in the right ways and curse at the right times while doing it.
This is, of course, an approach to life that guarantees you will make a catastrophic mess of everything you try to do. You’ll make other people miserable. You’ll create problems rather than solve them. You’ll be so in thrall to your own act that you become your own, as well as everyone else’s, worst enemy. But you’ll never show weakness, which is the main thing. You may dominate your way to total defeat, but so what? You’re dominating.
Is it any wonder that someone who thinks this way would arrive at the idea that it would be cool to execute someone in cold blood live on the internet?
Sorry, Pete! I beat you to it.
