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If I were Pete Hegseth, I—
There are a lot of ways a sentence that begins that way could go, huh?
If I were Pete Hegseth, I’d be yammering aimlessly right now about “lethality” and “warfighters.” Or I’d be doing push-ups with the Marines to show how butch I am. Or I’d be making a video for Instagram.
Or, more likely, all three.
But here’s what I was going to say. If I were Pete Hegseth, I’d take full responsibility for the almost certainly illegal “double tap” strike on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean on September 2. His problem is that his deputies don’t respect him; an obvious way to earn their respect is to declare that the buck for that operation stops with him, not with the officers who carried it out.
I’m not Pete Hegseth, though.
On Monday the real Hegseth gave what might be described as a MAGA version of a buck-stops-here statement. “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support,” he said of the officer who ordered the strike on the two shipwrecked survivors of a Navy attack. “I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since. America is fortunate to have such men protecting us. When this [Department of War] says we have the back of our warriors—we mean it.”
The combat decisions he has made. The buck doesn’t stop with Pete Hegseth, apparently, it stops with Adm. Bradley. But the secretary sure is grateful for his service!
Needless to say, Pentagon staff are reportedly mortified by the White House’s effort to shift blame for the incident to uniformed personnel. (“This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls---,” one officer complained to the Washington Post.) The most one can say in Hegseth’s defense is that his “kill everybody” order to Bradley on September 2 before the operation began was ambiguous; allegedly he gave no instructions about what to do if anyone was left alive after the first strike on the targeted boat.
But he also said nothing to restrain Bradley as the incident unfolded despite watching it live via remote feed, per the New York Times. Nor is there any evidence that he’s disciplined Bradley or anyone else for the second strike in the months since it happened. Why would he? Hegseth has devoted himself as defense secretary to building a military culture that valorizes war crimes as evidence of bravado. Go figure that Bradley would respond in such a way to the incentives the secretary created.
And go figure that Hegseth, despite plainly yearning for the esteem of the men he leads, would resort instinctively to blame-shifting when under political fire. That’s the M.O. of his boss and the ethos of the movement of which he’s a loud-and-proud member: From the deep state to the fake news to the Democrats and RINOs to Adm. Mitch Bradley, there’s always a fall guy to be found when scandal makes trouble for the president or MAGA.
Buck-passing is a core pathology of Trumpism, so of course there would be some of it here. As commentator Charlie Sykes aptly and memorably put it in discussing the September 2 boat strike yesterday, “War crimes are Trumpism in full.”
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Trumpism in full.
One hallmark of Trumpism in full is gratuitous ruthlessness. For example: “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little.”
That quote comes from Megyn Kelly, who’s followed the Tucker Carlson path from semirespectable former Fox News host to cartoonishly “based” podcast chud. Whether Kelly honestly believes the things she says nowadays or says them because she’s a particularly unscrupulous panderer is as unclear, and ultimately as uninteresting, as it is with Carlson. Either way, she knows her audience—and with a Trumpist audience, you can never be too cruel to an enemy. Cruelty in service to the cause is a sign of virtue.
And so insofar as law, especially the law of war, is designed to restrain cruelty, it’s a natural irritant to Trumpism. Populists behave as if all social problems are failures of will, typified by the “woke” left’s reluctance to warehouse miscreants who really do pose a threat to public safety. They overcorrect for it by endorsing unrestrained brutality to deter the bad guys, which leads them to prefer extrajudicial violence. In the Trumpist view, law is an impediment to maintaining order. War crimes aren’t merely incidental to effective deterrence, they’re practically necessary.
Another hallmark of Trumpism is a preference for indiscriminate punishment. You won’t get anywhere toward building a safer society by targeting individual miscreants. If you want to maximize deterrence, you need to target groups—the more haphazardly, the better.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem showed how it’s done on Monday. “I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” she said, declining to specify. “Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”
She was referring (I think) to Afghans and Somalis. An Afghan national shot two National Guard members in Washington last week, killing one; inevitably, the White House has now frozen the entire Special Immigrant Visa program for Afghans who assisted U.S. personnel during the occupation of their country. Trump reacted similarly to a fraud scandal in Minnesota involving some Somalis, suspending temporary legal protections for Somali refugees and launching a new ICE operation aimed specifically at illegal Somali immigrants in Minneapolis.
There’s no sense in using a sharp object when a blunt one is available. That was also the logic of suspending due process for accused Venezuelan gang members before deporting them to El Salvador earlier this year: Why go to the trouble of figuring out who’s a criminal and who’s not when you could send a strong message about zero tolerance by shipping the guilty and innocent off en masse? Ditto for bombing, rather than interdicting, supposed drug smugglers in the Caribbean. What’s more likely to deter trafficking—arresting and trying individual smugglers, or blowing up survivors of wrecked vessels whose activity looked “suspicious” from a thousand miles away?
A third hallmark of Trumpism in the September 2 incident is the damage it will do to respect for yet another government institution.
For various reasons, the president seems more reluctant to demonize the military than most other arms of the federal leviathan. (Publicly, at least.) Maybe he fears antagonizing Americans, who admire the armed forces on balance. Or maybe he fears antagonizing the military itself at a moment when he’s lobbying them to get excited to fight “the enemy within” on his behalf. Probably, though, his reticence is a function of his authoritarian disposition. Someone who’s obsessed with strength and prone to threatening others to get his way won’t want to alienate the most intimidating “muscle” in his gang.
And so the military is a rare example of an institution he’s not trying to diminish in hopes of transferring Americans’ loyalties from that institution to him. Yet he’s having that effect, isn’t he? He put a clown like Hegseth in charge; he banished the mainstream press from the Pentagon and replaced them with prostrate MAGA propagandists; he’s massing troops for an attack on Venezuela that Americans don’t understand and broadly oppose; and now he has Navy SEAL Team 6 committing what looks an awful lot like murder of seemingly unarmed people in the Caribbean.
Eventually that will spoil public opinion about the military the same way the White House’s transformation of ICE into a secret police force has spoiled opinion about that agency or its enlistment of the FCC to threaten critics has turned voters against that outfit. Teaching Americans to fear those who are tasked with protecting them: That’s Trumpism in full.
Kids these days.
The deeper truth in Sykes’ point is that Trumpism is a fundamentally juvenile mindset of transgression, more attitude than ideology, which is why its solutions to problems like the drug epidemic tend to reduce to bumper-sticker stuff like, “What if we blew up drug dealers instead of arresting them?” It’s mismatched with serious business like running a government (“What if we replaced the income tax with tariffs?”) and really mismatched with deadly serious business like attacking manned vessels in compliance with the laws and norms of war. Transgressive mindsets tend not to be sticklers about rule-following, by definition.
“War crimes are Trumpism in full” is just another way of saying, “What did you think would happen when you put a group of unusually boorish teenagers in charge of the military?” Pete Hegseth’s defiant tweet on Sunday reducing the “double tap” controversy to a joke involving a cartoon turtle illustrated the point perfectly. It’s precisely how we’d expect a bratty adolescent eager to show how “based” he is to react to complaints that he’d sent defenseless men to their deaths.
“He runs around on a stage like he’s a 12-year-old playing army,” Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly said on Monday of the defense secretary (an opinion the White House might quietly share given how it’s cut Hegseth out of major decisions like the attack on Iran and negotiations with Ukraine). Adults explain themselves. Kids snarl and meme.
Kids are also less accountable for their actions than adults are, and while the president hasn’t yet pardoned anyone involved in the September 2 incident, it’s a cinch that he will. It’d be a scandal if he didn’t, frankly: Imagine if he dished out clemency to cretins like these while hanging a decorated officer like Mitch Bradley out to dry. War crimes are the ne plus ultra of offenses that Trump should want to immunize, one would think, since the act of pardoning might induce other soldiers to behave ruthlessly on his orders in the same way that pardoning the January 6 goons should induce future coup-enablers to help keep him in office in 2028 if he sets his mind to that.
That is, Trumpism in full is less a matter of unaccountability than anti-accountability. It’s not about absolving the crimes of the past, it’s about encouraging the crimes of the future by assuring those tempted to commit them that they won’t be punished for doing so. That’s why, I suspect, congressional Republicans were surprisingly quick to say that they’ll investigate the “double tap” strike: America might be transitioning from a first-world society to a third-world one but anti-accountability in matters of war is waaaaay too typical of the latter for the comparatively normal adults of the House and Senate to feel entirely comfortable with it. Yet.
There’s one more way in which “war crimes are Trumpism in full.” Despite the fact that atrocities dishonor the generally admirable legacy of the U.S. military, Americans almost certainly don’t give a fig about them in the abstract.
Americans give a fig about the economy and are willing to let a president slide on damned near everything else if they have reason to believe he’ll fatten their wallets. That’s the great shining lesson of last year’s election and a lesser takeaway of last month’s off-year results. Voters thought Trump would restore the cost of living circa 2019 and were willing to forgive him everything toward that end—a coup plot, a months-long national security breach at Mar-a-Lago, four criminal indictments, various personality disorders. There’s no reason to believe there’d be an outcry right now over war crimes, especially among Republicans in Congress, if the president were rocking a 53 percent approval rating and inflation was on ice.
“Trumpism in full” is the idea, now confirmed by two presidential elections, that America is not so exceptional a country that its people will punish leaders who commit or endorse civic travesties. As such, it was perfectly reasonable for the White House to assume that the public would tolerate its wildly dubious undeclared “war” in the Caribbean and even more dubious summary executions of sailors for maybe possibly allegedly smuggling drugs.
But it became much less reasonable after a lengthy government shutdown, ongoing inflation that’s sent Trump’s rating on the issue into the toilet, and a job approval that’s turned downright ugly in some polls. He’s no longer keeping up his end of the devil’s bargain he made with voters—a strong economy for you in exchange for civic unaccountability for me—and so, perhaps, they’re growing less inclined to keep up their end of it as well. War crimes are acceptable when beef is cheap. When it isn’t, they aren’t.
In the end, maybe that’s Pete Hegseth’s best defense: Americans voted for this. They knew what they were getting into. If some Trump voters are momentarily miffed that they haven’t been properly compensated for entrusting the constitutional order to a group of morally challenged adolescent edgelords, well, you know how the old joke goes. We’ve already established what you are, madam. Now we’re merely haggling over the price.
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