But Hegseth, with his heavily gelled hair and impressive bone structure, looks a lot like a movie star of Trump's 1950s childhood. CNN reporter Alayna Tree confirmed that those cheekbones were a major factor in this pick: “Trump also thinks he has the look,” one source told her.
Yes, really.
Hegseth served in the Army, a history he has channeled into endless moaning about the supposedly "woke" military. He has complained about military recruitment ads that feature diverse service members, arguing that the threat of being exposed to different kinds of people would scare off "guys in Kentucky and Colorado and Ohio." It's a drum he beats repeatedly, arguing that "patriots" — meaning, of course, white men — are unwilling to serve lest they be exposed to "CRT, DEI nonsense, all the gender nonsense." All those words function as right-wing euphemisms for workplaces where people of color, LGBTQ people and women are treated equally.
Welcome to historically low recruitment levels. And it's apparently because he's bitter:
While he's oblique about the reasons, it appears Hegseth couldn't hack it in the Army, either. He complained in his book that the Army "spit me out," adding, "I didn’t want this Army anymore either." It is reminiscent of every guy who says "you're not that hot" when a woman turns him down.
With Hegseth, this is obvious in his longing to kick women out of combat roles. He falsely claims that "standards have lowered" to let women in, and that "men in those positions are more capable." The truth, however, is the opposite. As Barack Obama explained when the military first opened up combat roles for women, the urban and guerrilla nature of most modern warfare means that female service members were already "in a war theater" and "at great risk." But while many women were performing the duties of combat soldiers, they weren't getting the promotions or pay that go with that status.
Banning women from combat roles epitomizes the MAGA version of manhood, where weakness gets reskinned as "toughness," mostly through aesthetic trickery. Women will keep on doing the work of combat jobs, but will be denied the titles, honors and rewards of doing so, just to prop up the illusion that only men have the toughness to handle it. The real purpose here is to insulate the snowflake-fragile egos of men who cannot feel mighty unless a woman pretends — or is forced to pretend — that she's weak. It's a direct substitution of fool's gold for the real thing.
These people all live in a fantasy world.
Hegseth's model for the ideal military man is not a real person from history or even someone he knows, but a movie character. In his typically whiny book "The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free," Hegseth writes, "Our ‘elites’ are like the feckless drug-addled businessmen at Nakatomi Plaza, looking down on Bruce Willis’s John McClane in ‘Die Hard,’" adding, "But there will come a day when they realize they need John McClane."
No one "needs" John McClane. He is a make-believe tough guy, built out of special effects and the comedic acting skills of Bruce Willis. But this kind of ludicrous fantasy allows Hegseth to elide the deep paradox of his argument. He wants us to imagine straight male American soldiers are "honorable, powerful and deadly," but also portrays them as too feeble to handle the diverse modern military. He believes they must be sheltered from any evidence that people with different identities can be strong, too. So he retreats to this phony masculine idea of "strength," constructed through Hollywood magic. It's like a little boy's dream, created to avoid the underwhelming reality of MAGA manhood.