Pete Hegseth is not a coherent thinker. This was demonstrated yet again on the D-Day anniversary event in France, where the defense secretary gave a speech that was supposed to be anti-Nazi but ended up employing a metaphor that made the Nazis sound like the victims in WWII. Hegseth claims he wants military promotions based on merit, but has systematically blocked promotions of people that are more qualified than he’ll ever be, for no other seeming reason than they aren’t white men. And, of course, he keeps saying the U.S. has won the Iran war, which still has no end in sight, while also begging for more time and money to wage it.
So it’s no surprise that the famously incompetent Donald Trump appointee recently claimed to be “simplifying” the military’s religious coding system, but only ended up sowing unnecessary confusion and rancor. Even more entertainingly, the move backfired — which was obviously more about Hegseth’s Christian nationalist inclinations than efficiency anyway. In his eagerness to marginalize people of non-Christian faiths, Hegseth accidentally exposed a major MAGA myth: that there’s a coherent, much less peaceful, way to impose their theocratic views on the country. On the contrary, any effort to turn this into a “Christian nation” is destined to reveal the deep divisions between Christian factions, one which are only concealed now because of the secularism Hegseth so despises.
