War Fighters and the Enemy Within: Trump, Hegseth, and the Assault on the American People

At Quantico this Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump regaled a captive audience of America’s generals and admirals with their vision for our military’s future. 

That future is defined by a contempt for liberal democratic norms, an obsession with physique and physical presentation, and a willingness to apply the full force of the world’s strongest military on the American people. All of this is in service of molding a country that more closely resembles the MAGA ideal of white, straight, Christian patriots whose lives are set to the rhythms of traditional values and gender roles. 

I want to explore those themes below and outline why it is that, despite the obvious buffoonery, I find this all so chilling.  

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Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands, and an infinite scorn in our hearts.

We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.

The first quotation comes from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, the architect of fascism. The second comes from Pete Hegseth during his speech at Quantico. I don’t pair them to suggest Hegseth has read or is consciously borrowing in any way from Mussolini, but rather to highlight a kind of echo. This administration shares, with earlier iterations of fascist politics,  an obsession with action, with the kinetic application of power. 

Mussolini was obsessed with presenting fascism as a politics of action—a kind of lived politics that expressed its philosophies in flesh and blood. Consider this passage from “The Doctrine of Fascism”:

Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies; it wants him to be manfully aware of the difficulties besetting him and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle in which it behooves a man to win for himself a really worthy place, first of all by fitting himself (physically, morally, intellectually) to become the implement required for winning it.

I see action—frenetic, violent action—as a fixation of Hegseth’s. It’s there even in his constant framing of soldiers as “war fighters” and military engagement as “war fighting.” The individual, lethal action of each soldier is heightened, and Hegseth is clearly hankering for a chance to unleash it all. 

In that vein, I want to briefly focus first on the untethered bloodlust on display Tuesday. “We’re training warriors, not defenders,” Hegseth said. And he was eager to dispense with the idea that those warriors should fight with anything like restraint or rules. Those are for sissies, sissies like the women and LGBTQ+ soldiers Hegseth wants out of the uniform. 

Hegseth offers all this up as a kind of unwinding of politics, rather than the deeply ideological thing it is. “You are hereby liberated to be an apolitical, hard-charging, no-nonsense, constitutional leader that you joined the military to be," he told his audience. 

Let me put it another way, by once again quoting Mussolini:

A doctrine must therefore be a vital act and not a verbal display. Hence the pragmatic strain in Fascism, its will to power, its will to live, its attitude toward violence, and its value.

Hegseth embodies a far-right idea of military preparedness, one that is all pull-ups, talk of killing, and barely concealed rage. 

Spartan fantasies, white christian nationalist policies 

Hegseth clearly wants to remake the American military in the mold of a muscular, manly, demi-godlike warrior with no time for decadent concerns like diversity, equality, and dignity. 

Hegseth spent time in his speech obsessing over the bodies of soldiers. “Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations—or, really, any formation—and see fat troops,” he told the officers. But Hegseth also expressed his disdain for poor grooming, stressing that his new demand for excellence also means “No more beards, long hair, superficial individual expression.” 

And he insisted troops should be able to meet “highest male standards” for readiness, adding “I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape, or in combat units with females who can't meet the same combat arms physical standards as men…” 

As Hegseth put it Tuesday, the U.S. military is done with “weak men.” In short, he seems to think America should be a kind of 21st century Sparta—or rather, a 21st century version of an idea of Sparta. One can almost feel the rippling pectorals from here. 

References to Sparta are already common in the armed forces, with multiple units and training exercises featuring a “Spartan” monicker. Sparta is also a near-omnipresent allusion on parts of the right, especially those located deep in the toxic manosphere where bareknuckled savagery is prized. On the online right, “molon labe,” Leonidas’s supposed taunt at the Battle of Thermopylae, can be found on countless memes and a vast array of product lines. In New Hampshire, U.S. Senate candidate Don Bolduc celebrated his 2022 primary victory by brandishing a toy model Spartan shield from Zack Snyder’s film 300. It’s all part of a mentality that pits right-wing warrior men against liberal institutions and agents of decline. 

I offer this detour through Spartan imagery because I think it captures the preoccupation Hegseth and other MAGA types have with the need for hardness and even a certain brutality in America’s military. And I think that bleeds into their politics more generally. 

When I hear Hegseth talk endlesslessly about the need for trim, beardless military men doing pull-ups it’s that cartoonish image of Sparta that springs to mind. He wants to make soldiers that look and feel to him like timeless killing machines, extras from 300. But, additionally, he wants them equipped with his hard right view of America. It’s an America that only looks one way—white, masculine, and ready to do violence in service of the MAGA cause. 

But I don’t think this engineering ends with the armed forces. That’s only the beginning. The military has often been understood as a model for wider society. 

Civil rights leaders apprehended this. Frederick Douglass urged Lincoln to use free Black soldiers in the fight against the Confederacy because he knew it would be a powerful tool in making the case for Black citizenship. The NAACP successfully pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt to admit Black recruits at 10.6% of the armed forces, reflecting their position in the national population. Truman understood this as well when he integrated the military in 1948. His executive order made this plain, opening with the assertion that:

It is essential that there be maintained in the armed services of the United States the highest standards of democracy, with equality of treatment and opportunity for all those who serve in our country’s defense.

In the same vein, Hegseth’s white, heterosexual, six-pack vision of the military is also about MAGA’s ideal notion of American society at large. When he declared that “Transgender people should never be allowed to serve,” what he was also saying was that transgender people should never—will never—be full members of American society. When he denigrates diversity programs or suggests minority officers achieved their rank without merit, he is also implicitly making wider statements about American life: diversity is our weakness, not our strength, and the ascent of minorities inherently comes at the cost of deserving whites. The military, reflecting America at its best, is a mirror for MAGA. 

It is not accidental that, as Jamelle Bouie reminded us this week, one of Hegseth’s first decisions after being confirmed was to end the Department of Defense’s recognition of Black History Month. Under Hegseth, the Pentagon has removed books about diversity and various minority groups from libraries across America’s military academies. Titles removed include What Was Stonewall?, Your Rights as an LGBTQ+ Teen (The LGBTQ+ Guide to Beating Bullying), Ta Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.

Right-wing commentators have praised these shifts in tone and policy. Replaying a clip from Hegseth’s speech in which he declares “no more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses…we are done with that shit,” podcaster and commentator Megyn Kelly beamed with delight and exclaimed “Oh my god! I love him!”

Of course she does. And yet, while Hegseth is done with one particular set of identity concerns and DEI promotions, he’s certainly set about promoting beliefs he sees as having been marginalized in the past. In November of 2024, responding to coverage about his controversial “Deus Vult” tattoo, Hegseth warned that “…this type of targeting of Christians, conservatives, patriots and everyday Americans will stop on DAY ONE at DJT’s DoD.”

Hegseth, an evangelical with ties to extremist pastor Doug Wilson, has followed through on that promise. In addition to his targeting of minorities and LGBTQ+ soldiers, Hegseth’s DoD has put out explicitly religious content. One video produced for the Pentagon’s social media plays footage overlaid with a text quotation of Psalm 18:37: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them. I did not turn back till they were destroyed.”

The thing is, recruitment is growing. The question is, who is joining? Surely, many new recruits will be those who like what they hear when the Pentagon talks about doing away with men in dresses; dispensing with the rules of engagement; getting rid of Black History Month; and unleashing the warrior spirit of America’s toned, shaved killing machines. As Kristofer Goldsmith, CEO of Task Force Butler, told The Guardian’s Ben Makuch, "We're gonna see a lot of christian nationalists join the military."

The military is often a model for society and, in liberal democratic countries, we should want our society and our democratic values reflected in our armed forces. What Trump, Hegseth, and MAGA are hoping to build is a military that instead reflects the violent, racist nationalism they espouse. It’s a project that, despite its cartoonish excesses, is nonetheless a direct and dire threat to our freedom. 

Domestic violence 

For Mussolini, war was an essential part of fascist politics. He believed the fascist state needed conflict, required constant combat and expansion. Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey write in their book, Fascism: The Story of an Idea, “[Mussolini] came to believe that only conflict could replenish fascism's energies.”

But commentators like Jonathan V. Last have noted that this administration keeps promising not to get involved in foreign wars. So, as Last also argues, that only leaves one other place to direct all this war fighting energy: inward. 

Trump and Hegseth have declared their intentions to turn America’s military might on the American people. Hegseth has promised to unleash America’s “warfighters” on its enemies. But, as President Trump made clear in his own speech, that doesn’t have to mean fighting wars abroad:

America is under invasion from within. We're under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don't wear uniforms. At least when they're wearing a uniform you can take them out.

The message is unmistakable: they aim to wage war on the streets of American cities against immigrants, non-whites, and liberals. 

Turning the military into aggro war fighters and then turning those men on the American people is a means of conditioning the country in and through violence. But it’s also a means of conditioning the military and its members. 

By sending the National Guard into the streets of Washington, D.C. and now Portland, the administration is attempting to cultivate a military that accepts its terms, that sees liberals and minorities as enemies to be fought and is willing to follow orders to do so. Here’s another excerpt from Trump’s speech:

The Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape…what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out. This is going to be a major part for some people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.

This should make our blood run cold. Consider Trump’s words alongside Hegseth’s declaration that “You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong, always, in polite society.”

The military he and Trump have in mind is full of barely contained killing machines who chafe at liberal sentimentality and need to be unleashed to do their worst to Americans enemies, foreign and especially domestic. That this isn’t a truthful image of the current American military shouldn’t lessen our horror that this is the military they want. 

Will Trump and Hegseth succeed in this transformation? I don’t know. So far, defense officials seem unimpressed and fairly unmoved by the Quantico event. Current and former officials told Politico that the event was variously a waste of time and money. 

But they will try. As Hegseth said to his audience on Tuesday, “…if the words I'm speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”

Featured image is Mussolini demonstrating the goose step