A Few Bad Men
The Hegseth murder-on-the-high-seas scandal is only part of the story. This administration has put sadism at the heart of its policy and its politics.
If Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ever testifies before Congress again, there’s a non-zero chance that, like Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men,” he’ll wind up snarling “You’re goddamn right I ordered the second strike!”
Hegseth is quite clearly a genuine and proud sadist, which is why it’s a little strange to see him scurrying around trying to avoid responsibility for an incident in which the military sent a missile at a boat allegedly carrying drugs, then when it was clear that some of the people on the boat somehow survived that strike and were clinging to the wreckage, sent a second missile to kill them. This is who Hegseth has always been; in fact, he would not be a part of this administration were it not for his public and private advocacy on behalf of a collection of war criminals, which cemented his relationship with Donald Trump (more on that in a moment).
In this, Hegseth is much like the rest of this administration, from Trump on down. This is a government that is not only full of sadists, but has elevated sadism to a place of honor in politics and policy. If you’re one of Trump’s underlings and you aren’t publicly expressing glee at the prospect of punishing and abusing those with less power, then you won’t really fit in. That’s the context in which we have to view this event.
The scramble at the White House
We should start by acknowledging that the administration is engaged in an illegal campaign of murder on the high seas, killing over 80 people (so far) on what they claim are boats carrying drugs, though they have never provided any evidence to show that’s what they are. But even if you accepted their ludicrous claim that the United States is engaged in a literal war against “narcoterrorists,” the double-strike now at issue would be a violation of both U.S. and international law.
This also intersects with the controversy over a video recorded by a group of congressional Democrats with military and intelligence backgrounds reminding servicemembers that they have the right and obligation to refuse illegal orders, a video that sent Trump into such a rage that he has repeatedly called for those members of Congress to be executed. The Defense Department’s Law of War Manual states that “The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
On Friday, the Washington Post reported that Hegseth did indeed give a verbal instruction to make sure everyone on the boat was killed: “The order was to kill everybody,” said one anonymous source. Over the weekend, Hegseth reacted the way members of the administration usually do, characterizing the killings as not an unfortunate necessity or a grim responsibility, but something fun and funny:
By the next day, the White House got worried that this probable war crime was becoming a controversy, so administration officials began talking a lot about Special Operations commander Adm. Frank Bradley, who oversaw the strike. While “supporting” him in their statements, the very fact that they were drawing the spotlight in the direction of this previously unknown figure was pretty good evidence that they were setting him up to take the fall if the scandal grows. Then five unnamed officials told the New York Times that while Hegseth ordered the strike, he never said anything about what should happen if there were survivors. Which might be true, or it might be a coordinated attempt to protect Hegseth.
As the controversy grew, some of the administration’s allies decided to get in on the bloodlust:
If Hegseth really does try to worm his way out of responsibility for this particular crime, it’s important to remember who he is and why he’s here. He went from weekend Fox & Friends co-host to leading the Pentagon in no small part because he built a relationship with Trump through his advocacy for those accused and convicted war criminals. The most notorious of them was Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, whose entire unit turned him in, describing him as practically a serial killer in desert camo, regularly murdering civilians for fun. (Gallagher was acquitted of the most serious charge in a bizarre trial, and Trump restored his rank. You can now pay to train with him and buy his merch.)
Hegseth also wrote a book called The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. And yes, it’s just the men; apparently the 225,000 women currently serving in the military, including thousands in combat units, aren’t keeping us free. In the book, he lamented the fact that Americans have to follow rules of engagement and international agreements to which their country is a party. “Should we follow the Geneva Conventions?” he wrote. “What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism?”
Apart from the simple fact that Trump saw Hegseth on his teevee, this was doubtless what attracted him: Hegseth pretended to be a tough guy who would turn the military away from wimpy stuff like logistics and cyberdefense and back to manly “warfighting.” Private Bone Spurs couldn’t get enough.
How this administration communicates its sadism
The initial response of both Hegseth and the administration to this issue — releasing all those videos of the missile strikes, and also adopting a gleeful tone on social media — is characteristic of the administration’s PR strategy when it comes to brutality, as it fashions content that crosses platforms, formats, and genres. For instance, in promoting immigration raids and recruiting for its army of thugs, the Department of Homeland Security creates hype videos of raids, complete with first-person perspective shot from officers’ body cams. This creates a view that is familiar to anyone who has ever played Call of Duty or any of a hundred other “first-person shooter” video games:
Alongside those videos are meme-ified messages like this one, an AI-generated cartoon (in Studio Ghibli style) of an immigrant weeping as she’s being arrested by an ICE goon. Har har!
We’re meant to thrill to the savagery of the raids and laugh at the suffering of the immigrants, who after all are a bunch of criminal, disease-carrying subhumans, which only justifies the enthusiasm with which we brutalize them:
The sadism, of course, begins at the top. For the entirety of his career, Trump has talked about the violence he yearns to inflict on those who oppose him (“I’d like to punch him in the face”). Like many an insecure man with unresolved rage issues, he loves going to mixed martial arts contests, and he is even planning to set up an octagon on the White House lawn so he can hold an MMA event right there in front of the people’s house. (As I have said before: Yes, mixed martial artists are skilled athletes who perform complex and sometimes subtle techniques, but the reason people watch MMA is because they want to see two guys try to beat each other to death.)
The politics of sadism
This administration is offering a daily instruction in what happens when you take the most morally despicable people in the country and give them power (and I haven’t even mentioned Stephen Miller, the guiding hand behind Trump’s domestic policy, who probably grew up torturing small animals). Unfortunately, there is clearly a market for the sadism they embody; millions of people delight in watching Trump punch down on their behalf. It won’t give them economic opportunity or secure health care or a good education for their kids, but in a chaotic world where injustice is rampant, watching those you hate suffer is at least something.
But we can draw some hope from the fact that the political power of sadism seems limited. The vast majority of successful politicians throughout our history labored to convince us that they were compassionate, restrained, and morally admirable (even when they weren’t). Most of us don’t actually want our presidents and those who work for them to be motivated by malevolent cruelty.
That’s true even if we are sometimes drawn to that darker side of our natures. All those post-apocalyptic stories gain audiences in part because of the fantasy of a world with all rules and constraints removed, where even mild-mannered folks come to deal in violence and death. We feel a rush of adrenaline at combat sports, violent video games, and movies where the beefy and righteous give the bad guys the pummeling they deserve.
But even if we all feel those impulses from time to time, most of us don’t want our leaders to embody our worst selves. That’s what Trump has always been, and what those who work for him want to be: the worst of us. Not only that, they want us to cheer them for it, to not just give them free reign but to debase ourselves in the process.
In “A Few Good Men,” Jack Nicholson famously says to Tom Cruise, “You can’t handle the truth!”, the truth being that “my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.” His character Colonel Jessup’s argument is that a secure society requires violent men unrestrained by rules and laws who will do what is necessary, including murder the innocent from time to time.
But the point of the story is that Jessup is wrong. His contempt for the law, not the supposedly weak servicemember under his command whom he ordered to be killed, is the real threat. That’s why, at the end of that scene, he’s arrested and taken away.
I’d like to think that when this era is over, the country will arrive at a collective understanding that we can be something better than what people like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth want us to be. That understanding may already be forming.
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It seems undeniable that MAGA's fuel is indeed sadism. It is their chief delight in life.
Of all the presidents we have elected, none has been further from being motivated by "malevolent cruelty" than Joe Biden. Yet we, the American people collectively, replaced him with the very cruelest, after we had had every chance, over four long years, to take his measure. If the American people finally recoil, it's long overdue.
Thanks TCS for calling out the [disturbing] reality. 2 distressing notes: 1] why didn't credible voices call this out years ago, given the available info?? 2] What happens, should we reach "the other side", when the many, many bloodlusting supporters of personal and state sadism are no longer sated??