"No Quarter, No Mercy": Understanding Pete Hegseth (Half the Answer #77, with Greg Sargent)

A bloodthirsty, homicidal maniac is in charge of our nation's military for some reason, and he just can't stop saying stuff that confirms that he deeply believes that extreme violence is awesome and God likes it a lot. Trent and Caitlin ask Greg Sargent of the New Republic what he learned from experts about the ideology that underpins Pete Hegseth's attitude toward violence.

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Resources:
https://newrepublic.com/article/208322/pete-hegseth-religion-war-iran-sadism-rage

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh7CFELPzz6ZOwhBZ4h7d84m8Lg1oTKKa

https://bsky.app/profile/gregsargent.bsky.social

"back to the stone age" tweet https://archive.ph/cWADP

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/14/analysts-say-us-threat-of-no-quarter-for-iran-violates-international-law

"Reign of Error" book https://bookshop.org/a/115699/9780345806352

"Creating the Credibility Gap" book https://bookshop.org/a/115699/9781249405627

Transcript

**Caitlin M. Green [00:00:30]**
Well, these are days, and we're sure having them, and this is Half the Answer. We're understanding a question is half the answer. I am your co-host, Caitlin Green. With me, as always, is Trent Nelson, and you've brought us a returning friend, have you not, Trent?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:00:47]**
By my calculations, Caitlin, dear Caitlin, this is number three. This is the third time that we have had the marvelous Greg Sargent, the New Republic. Well, you know what he does. He hosts the daily podcast that they do over there. He writes wonderful pieces. He is insightful. Sir, good day. How are you today? Well, you're too kind. You keep answering our emails, so that is a blessing, to be sure.

**Greg Sargent [00:01:10]**
You're too kind, guys. I appreciate it.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:18]**
Yeah, I don't know what that's about. Yeah, you should just be leaving us on read. You should be ignoring us, because we're gonna keep coming at you, that's the thing. Okay, listen. We're here. We're here for the real stuff. We're here for what's the latest in Pete Hegseth news, because this guy continues to impose himself on our consciousness, and we need to know, right? What's the deal with this dude? Why does he look and act and be like that?

In the latest Pete Hegseth news, of course, an Army helicopter did a flyby of Kid Rock's house for reasons, just to be like, "Kid Rock!" And then Kid Rock saluted it, and it was like, "Oh, so epic, bacon, sir." And then that Army helicopter pilot was suspended, and then Pete Hegseth said, "Excuse me, you may not discipline my precious boy. He was simply doing an epic cool thing for cool reasons." And so now the guy's like off the hook. Cool, cool. So cool. Yeah, you can do whatever you want if it makes Kid Rock happy, which, like, if you go through the list of things that make Kid Rock happy, I don't feel great about that. I don't want that to be happening.

**Greg Sargent [00:01:19]**
I knew I was doing something wrong.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:26]**
Really, really hurting my feelings, absolutely. Well, that'll be next time. But Caitlin, yes.

**Greg Sargent [00:01:29]**
I'm all for it.

**Greg Sargent [00:02:34]**
Well, Kid Rock is on the team, and that's all that counts, right? If you're on the team, exactly.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:02:38]**
I know.

**Greg Sargent [00:02:49]**
I think I saw him once on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. If I'm wrong about that, you can just cut this out. But he looked really unhappy with Guy Fieri there. Like, he was like, "I don't want to be here." And then he actually literally walked off at one point. But again, we should check those facts before -- it's worth it.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:02:56]**
I can believe it.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:03:04]**
Why wouldn't you want to be -- he's the mayor of Flavor Town. How could you walk away from that? He's good fun.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:03:08]**
I'll check that and maybe throw a clip in for good measure later.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:03:20]**
Yeah, but he's notoriously, famously, like, a pleasant guy, and that's unacceptable for Kid Rock, right? That's not the kind of person he wants to hang out with. Exactly. "I need these vibes ASAP," right?

**Greg Sargent [00:03:21]**
Right, right? There was too many good vibes going on. He had to get out of there. People were communicating across lines and stuff like that.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:03:35]**
Right, absolutely inappropriate. So --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:03:20]**
Yeah. So Pete Hegseth, he is in our government for reasons. He is our Secretary of Defense. He went to Princeton -- isn't that so fun? Go Tigers. And he served in Guantanamo. So the hits just keep coming. It's not going awesome in terms of this guy being a cool guy. And then he co-hosted Fox and Friends Weekend, which, as we know, was a favorite of Donald Trump's. And a totally different guy named John Barron used to call in there, right, who sounds a lot like Trump, but I'm sure that's a coincidence. And chat with them sometimes. Fox and Friends would say, like, "Oh, we should do this," and then suddenly there'd be, like, an executive order, the thing they said. All very, very cool. So basically what happened is Trump saw a guy on TV and liked him, and then put him in the government, which is a thing you can do, I guess.

**Greg Sargent [00:04:35]**
He's done that with a lot of people. He's staffed his government with people he liked watching on TV, basically.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:04:38]**
Jeanine Pirro.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:52]**
Yeah, because he's 11 years old in his mind. So in the New Republic, Greg, you wrote a piece called "Pete Hegseth Just Revealed the Real Roots of His Sadism and Rage." And I think it does get down to the nitty gritty of what it is that makes this person so despicable. I think that we tend to kind of trick ourselves into thinking that the people in the government are, like, a regular amount of evil, but this person truly just loves the idea of blood and guts coming out of other people. Like, this is just something that he likes as a concept. And so, yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit about the piece that you wrote and what you thought was important to know about it.

**Greg Sargent [00:05:42]**
Well, I think the starting point is that I don't know if we've seen a senior military official who's so saturated in open bloodlust and sadism. This is somebody who absolutely telegraphs the bloodlust and sadism on a regular basis. In the piece, I compiled a few examples. I'll just read them. He enthuses about "raining death and destruction from the sky all day long." He talks about "punching the enemy while they're down." He talks about "liberating the military from stupid rules of engagement." He talks about "unleashing maximum lethality" and about "killing without hesitation," which is a nice way -- or not such a nice way -- of saying killing with no qualms, no moral qualms whatsoever.

And so I sort of started from that. I was listening to a wonderful podcast, Reign of Error, which I recommend. It's Sarah Posner's new podcast. She's a religious scholar, and she has done a lot of good work on the religious right and MAGA and that sort of stuff, and where all those things come from. And she had on a great guest, Julie Ingersoll, who talked about how Pete Hegseth is a devotee of something called Christian reconstructionism. It's a sect that essentially thinks that biblical law is supreme law -- state law and civil law are subservient to that -- and all of living existence, earthly existence, should be reordered around biblical law. That's the essence of it.

And I tried to put those things together and came to the conclusion -- I don't know if I'm right, but I think I might be, maybe you guys can tell me if I'm right -- but it seems to me that his bloodlust and sadism can be explained by that religious commitment, because, at least in some sense, he actually thinks that the war in Iran is being conducted in accordance with and in honor of biblical law, which he sees as supreme to U.S. law, American military codes, and of course international human rights law, which would be way down there. And so that's the piece. That's the argument I made, basically.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:06:31]**
Right. Yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:07:21]**
Right.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:07:41]**
Sure.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:07:53]**
Right.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:08:01]**
Yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:08:03]**
Yeah, I think, right. And I grew up in a family where some of the less central members believed in something quite similar. So this feels familiar to me. And if you look, in sort of the Old Testament, at some of the depictions of battles that happened, you're gonna find, in a lot of cases, a laundry list of war crimes done by the good guys. And it is this attitude of, like, there's actually virtue in creating maximum destruction. And it happens to dovetail really conveniently with the way that Donald Trump likes to talk about things, like winning, right? He likes to say, like, "We're gonna rain down fire like nobody's ever seen before, destruction on the level that nobody's ever seen." Like, he's also quite a hyperbolic speaker about this kind of stuff. So it all just -- oh, it's so cozy.

**Greg Sargent [00:08:32]**
Yes.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:08:32]**
Yeah, yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:09:01]**
So, sir, can you explain to our viewers, to our listeners, who may not fully understand what certain words and certain contexts mean? Pete Hegseth, who, as you noted, he's fully into this Christian reconstructionism -- I mean, reports have come out that folks in the military noted that he was using this overly and overtly Christianic and religious speak when talking about all of this. But what does "no quarter, no mercy" mean in the context of military, of war? Why is that such a red flag, a red alert?

**Greg Sargent [00:09:47]**
Because "no quarter" essentially means we will kill people who surrender. And that's a war crime. It violates the laws of war. And he openly said it, I believe, from the Pentagon podium.

And by the way, we should, to sort of get into a little more of how he's letting his religion color and infuse and shape military strategy -- he's been doing monthly prayer sessions from the Pentagon, and that's almost certainly a violation of church and state separation by itself. But even putting that aside, what he did the other day in his first monthly prayer service since the Iran war began, he actually said a prayer for divine assistance with maximal violence.

I'm going to read the key line. From the prayer, he claims to be paraphrasing or quoting a service that a chaplain -- or prayer that a chaplain -- had given before the Venezuela raid. But Pete Hegseth, during this monologue, very clearly and explicitly directed this to the people in Iran, the Americans serving in Iran. He said -- this is again appealing to God for assistance -- quote, "Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy." Close quote.

That is a direct and clear appeal for God's assistance in maximal violence and killing. And people I talked to, like, for instance, one historian of the military chaplaincy who wrote a book about the military chaplaincy -- you may have not known that there would be books about that. You go, right, there's always every single specialty accounted for in this world, right? So that person essentially told me, for the piece, that this was highly unusual. What's different about Hegseth is this kind of active statement that God openly and explicitly approves of maximal brutality and killing and violence. And that's not what you're supposed to be preaching from the Pentagon podium on the best of days, let alone letting the religion get tied up in it, right?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:11:20]**
Okay, yes.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:12:02]**
Right, yeah. And the overwhelming kind of consensus has been: if, in a civilized society, once somebody is at your mercy, then they deserve your mercy, right? Once you have neutralized some other force, or you have overtaken some army in a battle, those people, maybe they become prisoners of war, but you do not, now that you have beaten them, take them out completely. That would be over the top.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:12:45]**
And there are rules for handling that as well, right? There are rules for handling prisoners, for not mistreating them. We are people, right? And even our prisoners are people, and we treat them with respect, instead of this barbarism, which is they utilize the Old Testament to reconcile their own barbarism with the loving, peaceful religion of Christ. It's remarkable.

**Greg Sargent [00:12:48]**
Yes.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:12:56]**
Right, we're supposed to act like it.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:13:02]**
Yeah, right. As you point out, right, he quoted King David to support this, right? He said, "I pursued my enemies and overtook them. Those who hated me, I destroyed. They cried to the Lord, but he did not answer them." And that is -- he feels pretty confident about being able to reach into the Bible for these kinds of quotes, because they're there, right? But that's not the way we're supposed to be doing stuff.

**Greg Sargent [00:13:34]**
Right, I'm really glad you highlighted that quote, because I felt like that had particular resonance as well. Because Pete Hegseth very clearly believes that God answers him, right? When Pete Hegseth talks to God, God speaks back. Whereas, in Pete Hegseth's own quotation of this verse, Pete Hegseth is absolutely certain that when the enemy talks to God, he doesn't hear anything back, right? And so that justifies, or kind of explains maybe, how he can see this sort of maximal violence and killing of the enemy as being in accordance with biblical law. It's all a very sick and twisted vision, if you think about it.

I want to highlight something else, by the way. Reverend Brian Kaler, who writes a wonderful Substack and actually has been maybe kind of at the forefront of bringing people's attention to these monthly prayer services, told me that this sort of mashup of different verses and biblical sentiments -- well, he used that word. He called it a kind of "Mad Libs mashup of biblical violence," close quote, which was a good line. I thought it's just Pete Hegseth just reading the Old Testament for justifications for his bloodlust, basically.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:13:46]**
Right. So --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:14:04]**
Yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:14:48]**
Yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:14:55]**
Yeah, he's doing a scary sentence supercut of stuff from the Bible. Like, what's the creepiest, craziest stuff -- "Snap the rod of the oppressor, break the teeth of the ungodly" -- Jesus -- "so that wicked souls are delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them." Like, it is just whatever phrase he can grab from whatever part of the Bible that's about making people hurt.

**Greg Sargent [00:15:07]**
Exactly.

**Greg Sargent [00:15:22]**
Well, in fact, if you think about that phrase, I think what he might be saying -- and I don't want to be too confident in this -- but he might be saying that God is helping him dispatch these evildoers to eternal damnation faster. I think that's what he means.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:15:38]**
Yes, yeah. And this is extremely "death to the non-believer," right? The kind of thing that if you heard somebody of another faith -- let's say, perhaps Islam -- say something like that, right, he would be absolutely tripping over himself to freak out about that, right? And this is, again, the same class of people who are like, "Oh, we have to always be watching out, they're trying to bring Sharia law," right, which is just religious law, which is what he wants. He wants religious law.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:15:51]**
Yes, outraged.

**Greg Sargent [00:15:57]**
Right.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:16:05]**
Right, yes.

**Greg Sargent [00:16:10]**
Right. Only his religious law is actually in accordance with God's plan, whereas the enemy's religious law is not.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:16:16]**
Of course. I would suggest that perhaps any of these people just checks the New Testament. Just flip open the New Testament for a second and maybe read what it says in that one. Because I promise it's a lot less -- Jesus is actually in that one, if you're interested in him. Like, that's the one where he's the main character, and, believe it or not, they're not saying all that crazy stuff that's in the Old Testament about blood flows. Well, obviously, aren't we all --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:16:33]**
We love to forget about it.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:16:49]**
I'm just more of a King David head myself. Well, listen, as somebody who could be correctly categorized as ungodly, I would super prefer not to have my teeth broken. Like, I've actually already done one. I fainted during a choir concert in high school, and I took out one of my -- I took the tooth. And so actually, my teeth have already been broken, so I'm all good, Pete. You're good. You don't have to come after me.

**Greg Sargent [00:16:53]**
Yeah. Oh, damn. Well.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:17:15]**
I chipped mine on a harmonica.

**Greg Sargent [00:17:15]**
The fact that it happened during your choir concert confirms the point that you're ungodly, right? Like --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:17:21]**
It was making music. It was in a church sanctuary. Is that allowed? Can I do that? I think God struck me down right then. Like, she doesn't believe.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:17:31]**
Yeah, get out of here.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:17:41]**
Five words long. Period.

**Greg Sargent [00:17:34]**
Also, we should talk about this tweet from Hegseth that just went out. Well, maybe it's 12 hours old or something. But after Donald Trump gave his -- yeah, after Donald Trump gave his completely deranged and absurd speech, Pete Hegseth tweeted the following, quote, "Back to the Stone Age." Close quote. Period. Yes, that's right. And what he seems to mean by that is he's at least quoting Trump having said it, right? And so he's essentially saying, "We are going to commit war crimes now."

I mean, they already have committed war crimes. Sorry, I don't want to confuse the issue. They've already committed what appear to be certain war crimes. They appear to have bombed an elementary school that killed at least 150 people or thereabouts, many of them children. There's been some reporting in the Times that there was a second bombing of a school -- it's a little bit murkier, but it looks like American forces might have done that too. The number of deaths is unclear. And by now, I think we know that as many as 1,500 civilians have been killed by the American-Israeli forces, or at least during the course of this war, as many as 1,500.

Now, I don't know if Pete Hegseth would admit to seeing them as the enemy, but I got to think that he, at the very least, doesn't think that they rank very high on the list of concerns, really, in his biblical --

**Trent R. Nelson [00:17:44]**
Insane.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:17:56]**
Period.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:18:12]**
Yeah, right. Well, as though we hadn't already started. Yeah, right. So --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:19:14]**
Yeah, right. And they're very desperate to have us be really excited about bombing little girls at their school. And the only way that he knows how to do that is to get all pulpity and fire and brimstony. So that's what he's doing, I guess.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:19:28]**
I just don't understand how we continue to go into conflicts and we continue to kill civilians year after year of my life, and somehow none of the big brains -- I mean, I've heard that they're calling Pete Hegseth "Dumb McNamara" now, which, by the way, I love that. That's hysterical. But I'm not 100% sure why we keep doing this without realizing that every civilian that gets killed by an American bomber, missile, or military men creates just a network of people who hate us forever. We are making enemies by our bloodlust and destruction.

It is counterintuitive for creating a peaceful international community or society, because even if you do reach these goals, which we allegedly have, for a regime change or for some type of innovation in that respect, you've still created masses of people who say, "The Americans killed my daughter. The Americans killed my aunt. The Americans killed my grandmother." These are unforgivable, and all we have to do in many instances is think of, well, how would an American person react to having their children killed by some type of allegedly freedom-inciting incursion? It's just madness. It's just madness. And it's madness over and over again.

**Greg Sargent [00:20:54]**
Right? Well, they see -- I think they probably see that as a feature, right, not a bug. They want to create enemies. That's the whole point of the framework, right? The world is divided into enemies and friends, and the more enemies there are, the more fun killing you can do. I mean, it's just plainly obvious. All you have to do is watch a video of the guy, and you can see that he's relishing the violence. He's relishing the killing. There's absolutely no doubt about it.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:21:02]**
Yeah. Right. So --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:21:16]**
Right. And if we did diplomacy, we wouldn't have anybody to fight. Then that would be no fun.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:21:30]**
Yeah, yeah. And I have to say, I don't watch SNL really regularly, but their Colin Jost depiction of Pete Hegseth is really good because it shows how, like, just low-level psychological functioning -- this is where he's excited about getting to talk about beating up the bad guys and doing all the violence. And if anybody goes, "Hey, hang on a second, is this what you're saying?" he immediately snaps to being so mad that anybody is trying to stop him from getting to his toy. It just feels very like a spoiled, angry, violent little boy is up there.

**Greg Sargent [00:22:13]**
It does feel a lot like that, for sure. There's another dimension to this worth discussing as well, which is the hypernationalism. This type of understanding -- violence and killing and antagonism with an enemy can be purifying and revitalizing. And well, you guys know this. You guys are political theory heads. You're the political theorists.

But seriously, this is where the whole vision kind of comes into this big mishmash of disgustingness. And there's a weird coherence to it, I guess, as well, which is that this kind of Schmittian enemy -- violence against the enemy becomes this purifying thing for the nation. And here's the thing, right? If you watch Hegseth talk about the precision bombing and the "punching down" and the unbelievable, awesome technological power of our killing machine, and then you also watch the Department of Defense's Twitter feed -- or the White House's, especially -- which is celebrating these moments of violence and turning them almost into a form of entertainment, you can see that they are very motivated by this idea that this kind of really successful and hyper, technologically brilliant and highly accomplished ability to kill is supposed to be revitalizing our supposedly decadent civilization, in some sense. Like, it all comes back to that kind of underlying set of ideas, I think, as well.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:23:00]**
Yes.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:23:54]**
Well, and the White House, the Defense Department -- to continue your Schmittian take, right, they wish for us to see Iran as that enemy image which actually bonds us all together, makes us forget that the president is committing war crimes, is taking billions of dollars from us, is destroying our health care, is destroying -- anything. They want us, as perhaps the last Republican president in 2000 wanted us, to forget all of these things in our passion to protect the homeland, to protect the country. We're all bonded together in this very nice, romantic way.

But this time, sir, it doesn't seem as though the people are taking the hint. In America, this is one of the least popular conflicts that polling has information regarding.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:24:22]**
Yeah. Yep.

**Greg Sargent [00:24:52]**
Yes, well, I think that's a really important point, and I'd add a little tweak to it, which is that they don't want all Americans to bond together, right? It's just MAGA, right? It's just MAGA America. And so I think they very explicitly understand there being some kind of continuity between the Iranian enemy and the enemy in Minnesota, in Minneapolis.

Because if you look at the way they do their imagery of the ICE raids and kidnappings and violence, it's absolutely celebratory in that exact same way. They show ICE goons rappelling down from helicopters and breaking into buildings and kicking down doors, and they show them in slow motion, I believe, with their hyper-military weaponry and stuff like that. And they show the big military vehicles outside, massed outside buildings. And then they just emerge with, like, a five-year-old in a bunny hat. Like, these great American heroes who are kicking down doors and being so heroic are just arresting kids and grandmas.

Yeah, absolutely. And then they try to make those people look menacing by taking shots of them with their hands zip-tied behind their back and crouched over as if they're criminals. But nobody sees it that way -- no non-MAGA people see it that way.

But the point is that they recognize the continuity, I think, very clearly, between the Iranian enemy and the Minneapolis enemy. And there's this sort of same kind of vibe of rejuvenating violence in the imagery that they peddle and pump out to the MAGA masses of the ICE violence.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:25:17]**
Right.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:26:02]**
Yeah, yeah. Kids and grandpas and -- yeah. Like, Mom, Grandpa's in their boxers.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:26:06]**
Abducting autistic children. Yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:26:28]**
Yeah, it just looks bad.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:26:57]**
Yeah, I also think, in general, the sales pitch of the right has just been, like, "We're gonna give you a reason to feel morally good about doing awful, awful things," right? "We're gonna give you that. We're gonna tell you why you're saving Western civilization, actually, or you're protecting the children, or you're protecting women," right? These are -- it's actually that that you're doing when you're victimizing people who are less powerful than you are. Whoa, hang on a minute.

**Greg Sargent [00:27:22]**
It's almost as if that's one of our Western inheritances. Well, but that actually gets into some other stuff, right? Because, as I tried to argue in this piece -- and I really hope your people will check it out -- Pete Hegseth positions himself as this heroic defender of Western civilization, in the same way that Stephen Miller talks about the West, and in the same way a lot of these MAGA figures do. But you can actually dig into our Western inheritances and find elements of and contributions to the just war tradition and to the laws of armed conflict.

And I mean, Matt McManus, who's a wonderful political theorist -- I don't know if you've had him on -- but I think he might have --

**Trent R. Nelson [00:27:32]**
Yes.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:27:39]**
Yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:28:20]**
Oh, yes. He's a friend of the program, too.

**Greg Sargent [00:27:22]**
Yeah, he's the best. And he is awesome. And so he gave me a pretty good quote where he said, it's kind of interesting, because Pete Hegseth is a defender of Western civilization and he sees himself as a Christian warrior, but Augustine made major contributions to the just war doctrine as a Christian imperative. And so the version of Western civilization that Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller are operating off of is pretty highly selective, and they're taking the worst and discarding the good stuff, in my view.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:28:13]**
Yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:28:46]**
Right.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:28:56]**
Yes, yes. Yeah. Well, it is, yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:28:59]**
Yeah, and calling it stupid, right? Like, "Oh, those rules of engagement that are in my Western civilization canon -- so stupid."

**Greg Sargent [00:29:06]**
Right, he's casting out those very inheritances. Now, obviously the West has not lived up to those ideals, I don't think, right? But the answer isn't to say, "Well, that's good. We shouldn't."

**Trent R. Nelson [00:29:20]**
Correct, correct, correct. But I mean, as I sort of alluded to earlier, and as much of this conversation alludes to, this Christian nationalism -- it needs to be said -- this is a Protestant Christian nationalism. And this is a very hyper-specific Protestant Christian nationalism, whereby people like St. Augustine are disregarded. Though folks like Martin Luther wouldn't have agreed to that deal, right? But as you noted, we sort of remove all that is holy to keep the barbarous, and to pretend as though this is our heritage. When, as has been noted here, that is not our heritage. Our heritage is much more complex and nuanced, and surely it has some gross and disgusting bits to it. But we don't need to, as you said, acquiesce to those when there are so many other positive ones that we can look to carry forward.

**Greg Sargent [00:29:32]**
Right.

**Greg Sargent [00:30:02]**
Yeah, right. And they very actively are trying to appropriate the morally grotesque inheritances. That's -- I think -- they wouldn't use those words, obviously, but anyone can see that they're the direct descendants of people who have, in the Western tradition, committed atrocities.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:30:50]**
Well, Greg, I know we need to let you go sooner rather than later. Is there anything else that you wanted to bring to our audience before we do so? Trent, I said your line -- "sooner rather than later" -- you're rubbing off on me.

Oh, I actually had something I wanted to bring up. Just looking through your recent work, I have noticed personally that there has been a real overarching pattern of Trump, Hegseth, his other cabinet members feeling out of control, like there's a lot of panic and a lot of rage happening lately. And I wonder, do you feel like that is an indicator of sort of bad things to come for them, good things to come for us?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:31:06]**
You are too --

**Greg Sargent [00:31:07]**
Well, maybe we can --

**Greg Sargent [00:31:31]**
Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because I really do think that we overestimate their competence in some ways. And I think that as part of their fascist project, they want us to be afraid. And maybe you guys could talk about this -- I'd be curious to know what you guys think of this as political theory types -- but they seem to be very deliberately trying to get people like us and the people in Minneapolis who very heroically risked their lives, in some cases, and in a couple of cases lost their lives, to fight these people. They seem to be very devoted to getting us to demobilize.

And a big part of that effort, I think, is the explicit and overt talk about law-breaking. And so "back to the Stone Age," right? We could just look at it as him being a goon and an asshole, or a war criminal, right? But we could also look at it as kind of strategic messaging, in some sense. I don't want to give them too much credit, but I think in some general way they think that they benefit politically by essentially telegraphing the violence and the lawlessness.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:33:06]**
Our president admires those authoritarians across the world who are able to step up at the microphone and in some cases hint, and in other cases blatantly state, their purposes, and that they get a reaction. He loves that. Because if we really conceive of him as the businessman that he so longs to be, that is the same type of result that he would wish in the conference room, in the auditorium, speaking to the rest of the group, right? "We're doing this. This is it." And everyone reacts to that. Except that America isn't built that way, and our people do not respond in that same way.

We don't hear somebody say "Jump!" and grab the trampoline. In many instances, we are ponderous, curious, and obstinate in some cases, people. And that is one of our strengths -- that there is always some grouping or constituency in the country willing to say, "I'm not so sure about that," right? For good or for bad, there's always some group that says, "Well, pump the brakes here for a second. We got to think about this." And he hates that, because it doesn't go with that autocrat or with that dictate that he presumes to have by eking out another election victory.

**Greg Sargent [00:33:12]**
Right.

**Greg Sargent [00:33:21]**
Yes.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:34:39]**
Right. As you pointed out in your piece about his "no new wars" statement, it is showing people that they made a mistake by throwing their lot in with him, that they actually cannot trust him. And we've got now footage on the news of MAGA voters being like, "I feel so stupid. I cannot believe that he sold me out like this. I feel bad." And that's good. I think that's -- I'm sure they represent more people.

**Greg Sargent [00:34:20]**
Going to go.

**Greg Sargent [00:35:11]**
Oh yeah. Oh, big time. And there's been a sort of media take out there, which is a little offensive and annoying, which sort of says, "Well, LOL, anyone who thinks MAGA is splitting over this is just wrong. MAGA is tightly behind Trump no matter what." And I think that instinct for certain types of reporters and commentators to say that kind of thing is really rooted in their sort of undying frame for everything, which is: we always have to try and make liberals look delusional in some way, like they're missing something, right? They're not really tuned into how people really tick, right? They don't have their grasp on the volkisch sentiments of the American people the way Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth and JD Vance do.

But it's a stupid way to think about it, right? Because the question shouldn't be, "Are Trump's most die-hard supporters with him on this?" Because of course they are, right. The question should be, "What's happening to the Trump 2024 coalition around this stuff?" And that's a very different question, right?

The Trump 2024 coalition includes a lot of young people who voted on the economy, a lot of non-white working-class people who also voted on the economy and were sort of in the grip of this cultural picture of Trump that's wrong, but I think runs very deep in the culture -- of him as a successful businessman, or the guy who fires people on TV and makes things happen, right? And those people -- I actually asked Quinnipiac for some polling on this -- those people are quite against Trump right now. The young people, the non-white working class -- the Trump 2024 coalition really has fractured pretty badly over the war. And that's a big story, and it's really important.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:35:48]**
Yes, yes.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:36:18]**
Of course.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:36:54]**
Right, right.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:37:15]**
Absolutely. I mean, there was a piece in the New York Times. I know we love to mock the New York Times as best we can, but there was a piece recently outlining how CPAC 2026 was. And for any of our listeners or viewers who read that piece, you'll find some really interesting quotes and really interesting takes from, as you just noted, Greg, the very same people who made up part of this 2024 coalition. Who, in some cases -- I'll paraphrase here -- "Like, many of my friends, we align more with these liberal ideas now than Trump." And how did that happen?

Well, I think you just sort of outlined it, Greg. The betrayal on one footing leads to a sort of frustration on other footings. Well, if he's lying here and he's lying here, why wouldn't he be lying elsewhere, right? And something called a credibility gap is emerging, and we haven't really spoken about a credibility gap in American politics, although there has been one since the Johnson-Nixon era often gets associated most with that term.

But sir, do you find that the credibility gap is a real threat to the president and his movement now?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:38:11]**
Yeah, it turns out they remember what they thought they were going to get from him when they voted for him, and it's not what they're getting.

**Greg Sargent [00:38:48]**
Well, I do think it is, in some sense, because all these voters that we're talking about -- the young people, the non-white working class, the types who sort of drifted to Trump in 2024 -- their commitment to him was never at all deep. They were voting against the party in power. They were voting against the status quo. This was the post-COVID shock took down incumbent parties around the world.

And there was, I think, a tendency on the part of a lot of our pundits and commentators to over-read the meaning of the 2024 win, in the sense that they ascribed this shift to something durable, right? To something ideologically meaningful, like a real cultural move toward Trumpism in the country. And that was especially prevalent on immigration.

But what we've seen is that, very interestingly, these voters have been at the forefront of rejecting, really, all the big tenets of right-wing populism, right? The tariffs were very quickly unpopular with these voters -- the young people and the non-white working class, especially the working class, I would say -- because they get hit by them. And so that sort of indicates right up front that there was never this commitment to some sort of populist, nationalist idea that I think a lot of pundits mistakenly read into the 2024 results.

And so the same happened with immigration as well, which I think surprised a lot of pundits. You may recall that when Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to a gulag abroad, the insta-take was, "Well, no Democrat dares mention this in public because it will automatically play in Trump's favor, because anyone who talks about an immigrant anywhere is automatically helping Trump." And -- exactly -- raise the salience, right? And that's just hocus pocus. It's just a buzzword. It's not a real understanding of how public opinion is working in the Trump era.

And lo and behold, when Democrats actually engaged -- which Chris Van Hollen did quite heroically and bravely by going to El Salvador to try to find Kilmar Abrego Garcia -- Trump's approval on immigration slid during those moments when the public focus was very intensely trained on this stuff. And so there again, you see that there was not a durable shift towards a kind of anti-immigrant right-wing populism of any kind. It was all a mirage.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:39:40]**
You raise the salience of immigration, heaven forbid.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:39:51]**
Yeah. Right.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:40:34]**
Right. Yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:40:58]**
Yes.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:41:06]**
Yes.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:41:20]**
Yes.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:41:31]**
Yeah, yeah, it raised the salience. And this buzzword of "it's an 80-20 issue" that I keep hearing these -- that same kind of pundit say -- which is so silly. You're referring to a number that is contingent on so many things and that is so ephemeral, as a hard-and-fast rule for why you shouldn't talk about how the party in power is totally messing up right now and doing evil, evil things that nobody likes. Wild.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:41:48]**
Yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:41:59]**
Yeah, right.

**Greg Sargent [00:42:00]**
And the 80-20 thing is a fantasy number too, because the exit polls in 2024 -- nobody talks about these numbers -- but in fact, there was an exit poll finding which showed a majority supporting a path to legalization over mass deportations. I swear it's in there. You can go look it up.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:42:17]**
Right, right, right. The Trump administration -- they wish for us to indulge in their brutality and indulge in their anti-human -- but as you noted, they and the pundit class which has reported this misconstrued the reality. And the reality is that most people want a government that they perceive works, right? And if that means a path to citizenship, then that's good. But when we start to highlight the grotesque and the disgusting, people don't want to be associated with that. They don't want to be associated with "we sent some person to a gulag in El Salvador or Ugandan prison."

It's just because we have not had that moral decay to the point that they wish for us to have. They wish for us to be at the whims of the personalist leader, and we are just unwilling to totally immerse ourselves in that. And I think that does speak positively for the future of the country and for the pushback that we're going to see in the midterm election.

I am a large optimist in this. I think we're going to get wonderful numbers, the best numbers. I think we're going to get rules-of-Roosevelt numbers, Reagan-esque numbers, Johnson numbers. I think numbers like you've never seen before.

**Greg Sargent [00:42:32]**
Right.

**Greg Sargent [00:43:27]**
Yes.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:43:42]**
Yep, numbers like nobody's ever seen. You're going to be sick of winning.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:44:21]**
They don't have the juice.

I mean, and I read this, I think, six months ago -- the swap over the last 10 years of high-intensity voters and low-intensity voters, in which both sides shared relative equal portions at one point. And yet now we've seen this switch to where Democrats are these high-intensity voters who are hyper-focused on, "We got to fix immigration. We got to go out here and vote this person in so that MAGA -- so that Mar-a-Lago doesn't have a Republican representative anymore," right? "We've got to do all these things." Whereas the Republican voters are, "Call me when Trump is back, right? Call me when we can vote for Donnie again and I'll be there, but until then, no. Like, I've got stuff to do."

**Greg Sargent [00:43:51]**
Wow, really.

**Greg Sargent [00:44:38]**
Absolutely. Just to tie this back to what we were talking about before, I think it's a big tell that the bro podcasters, like Joe Rogan, were among the earliest to turn on the mass deportations. So to tie this back to what we were talking about, the fascist imagery of the ICE raids and the paramilitary stuff that the administration has pumped out in its propaganda -- they very clearly thought that it was going to be extremely thrilling to young men to witness this kind of cleansing, rejuvenating violence. And they thought young men would get kind of caught up in that project, right?

And we have seen that that hasn't happened. Young men are, via these podcasts, really turning against this kind of stuff. For some reason, they don't have this vision of masculinity which lionizes rappelling down from a Black Hawk helicopter to arrest a five-year-old in a bunny hat. Like, it's sort of surprising.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:45:53]**
Right.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:46:25]**
Weird. It's funny that that doesn't appeal to them. It's almost like bullies think they look so cool, and everybody else just sees a bully.

**Greg Sargent [00:46:35]**
Exactly, right, right? Like, they think -- in MAGA's head and Stephen Miller's head -- they think that ICE is akin to Charles Martel stopping the Arab invasion, or the Athenians stopping the Persians, right? But everybody else just looks at them and sees some goon bullying grandma.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:46:52]**
Yes, yes.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:46:58]**
Yeah, we're just seeing Biff Tannen, if we want to really keep the -- it's my opinion that Back to the Future is actually a documentary of the future. Because they did actually parody Trump in it, right? The Biff Tannen, when he's old, is just Trump. He's got his tower, he's got his gold everything, he's got his girl. Like, it's all -- yeah. So I think that, ultimately, is what we all see. It's just a sad, loser weirdo who likes to hurt people. And that's just not inspiring.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:47:20]**
Right.

**Greg Sargent [00:47:20]**
Right.

**Greg Sargent [00:47:32]**
Right, and that is who Pete Hegseth is, very plain with his tattoo glorifying the Crusades. He thinks he's a crusader. I think he should read the history a little more carefully.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:47:35]**
No, no.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:47:44]**
Right, yeah. Yeah, famous good guys, the Crusaders.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:47:55]**
Well, much like the Crusade to Nicopolis, which our listeners and viewers can read about, I suspect that this current administration will end with a lot of nice clothing and no on-field success. But sir -- well, we know -- the clothing won't fit.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:48:12]**
And the clothing won't even fit.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:47:55]**
Why did you bring silks and drinks to a siege? You should have brought siege equipment. But in any event, sir, we've got to let you go. You are too kind to us, and we appreciate you always finding time to come back onto the program. Before we let you go, will you remind all of our listeners of all of your wonderful work, the pieces that we just referenced, as well as your Daily Blast?

**Greg Sargent [00:48:21]**
Sure. Well, you can find me on Twitter once in a while, although I probably shouldn't be admitting that. On Bluesky at Greg Sargent dot bsky dot social, and I'm at TNR.com. You can find my stuff there. And we have a daily podcast, the Daily Blast, which runs every day -- or five days a week anyway -- and it's a labor of love. It's short, it's 20-25 minutes, and you'll get a quick blast of news and insight from our good guests. And that's where you can find me.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:49:02]**
Amazing. Thank you, Greg. Well, this has been Half the Answer. We're understanding a question is half the answer. Thank you, and goodbye.