Like Richard Nixon Before Him, Pete Hegseth Learned All the Wrong Lessons from 1970's Patton
When he wrote and directed The Godfather in 1972, Francis Ford Coppola had achieved only modest success as a director. He was much more successful as a screenwriter, having won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for co-writing 1970’s Patton.
Coincidentally, George C. Scott declined the Academy Award he won for Best Actor for Patton because he found the idea of artists competing against each other for a fancy trophy ridiculous and compared the awards show itself to “a goddamn meat parade.”
A few years later, Marlon Brando also turned down an Academy Award he won for a movie that won Francis Ford Coppola an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for more overtly political reasons.
Patton was a massive pop culture phenomenon at the time of its release. It dominated the Academy Awards, scored boffo box office, and inspired myriad parodies of its iconic central image: Scott’s Patton sternly delivering a speech to the troops with a giant American flag as a backdrop.
Patton also had a much darker legacy. Coppola co-wrote an anti-war film that presented the legendary general as a rigid, unyielding sadist and all-around weirdo who would have gotten us into World War III if given a chance. He was notorious for slapping soldiers in a fit of anger and said that soldiers who die in battle are “frequently a fool”, a line that echoes Trump’s famous insistence that John McCain was considered “a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured, okay?”
Nixon was so inspired by Patton, a movie he watched repeatedly in the White House, that it convinced him that he had to be more aggressive and extend the fighting to Cambodia.
Coppola’s anti-war movie inspired Nixon to be even more pro-war. It led to an escalation of the Vietnam War rather than promoting peace.
As a film character and historical figure, Patton continues to inspire the worst people.
When Secretary of WAR Pete Hegseth forced hundreds of senior military officers from all around the world to come to Quantico to insult them and elevate himself, he was trying to channel Patton.
“Out with the Chiarelli, the McKenzies, and the Milleys and in with the Stockdales, the Schwartzkopfs, and the Pattons.” Hegseth angrily insisted.
Hegesth does everything angrily. Earlier in the same rant, he lashed out against “fat generals”, apparently forgetting that Schwartzkopf and Patton weren’t exactly slender or ripped.
The Secretary of War wants a military made up entirely of people like himself: rage-poisoned alcoholics with Narcissistic personality disorder who feel handcuffed by oppressive, “woke” rules against brutally hazing cadets, sexually assaulting women, war crimes, or calling Black soldiers racial slurs.
He posited himself as a liberator who would free the warrior from the prison of political correctness and the tyranny of diversity and cultural sensitivity.
Anything that might keep the military from achieving its sacred goal of maximum legality was posited as an unwanted distraction. These include the Geneva Convention, sexual harassment and racism claims, trans men and women in uniform, rules against torture and biological warfare, and global warming, apparently. Also, beards. When Hegseth rails against beards on enlisted men, he sounds less like a badass warrior than the famously racist, facial hair-hating Cincinnatti Reds owner Marge Schott or Mr. Burns in the baseball episode of The Simpsons. Alternately, when he screeches about how much he hates beards and fatties but loves buff men who can compete with him in ragingly homoerotic push-up and pull-up contests, it sounds like he’s making a Grindr profile rather than leading the military.
Hegseth grudgingly has to tolerate women in the military, but clearly sees sexual harassment claims as distractions that keep the military from being all that it can be, in terms of killing as many brown people as possible. If a female soldier is sexually harassed or assaulted, Hegseth would obviously blame the victim and insist that the guilty party was not the sexual harasser, but rather woke feminist radicals intent on women serving in places where they can only be unwelcome, unwanted distractions, with their breasts and vaginas and butts and whatnot.
Trump loves to talk about hiring people “straight out of central casting.” That means that the reality television bozos likes employees who look like they belong in movies. Hegseth looks like the bad guy in an Asylum Top Gun knockoff. That’s why he was named Secretary of Defense.
Hegseth had a strong jawline, was full of hate, and said nice things about Trump on television. That’s all it took to win Trump's undying loyalty. For the time being, at least.
Veteran soldiers who saw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan know the difference between a deadly war zone and hippies protesting outside an ICE facility in Oregon. They know damn well that what Trump posits as the enemy within that must be dealt with, swiftly and with no mercy, are merely people the president disagrees with.
Trump loves the idea of a military beholden to him and him alone, that holds him in the same God-like regard as his cultists. He has a much harder time dealing with the reality that people like John Kelly and John McCain see him as a clown, a lightweight, and a draft dodger who has said horrible things about veterans in private, and sometimes in public, rather than a savior who will free them from woke, DEI, climate change, and having to exhibit basic sensitivity.
Trump and Hegseth angrily demand respect that they have not earned. They demand to be treated seriously by serious people, despite behaving like children playing war games rather than genuine warriors.
To that end, they both invite anyone who disagrees with their vision of a crazily homoerotic military full of clean-shaven, ripped white dudes with a single-minded emphasis on being as lethal as possible to resign immediately.
Trump wants a military that is loyal to him rather than a government he depicts as weak, woke, and full of agents of the Deep State being paid off by radical far-left radicals.
Trump describes the left as an "enemy within” whose cities have value as “training grounds" for troops.
The president has crowned himself the Prince of Peace, dedicated to avoiding and/or ending foreign wars, so it sure feels like the war that they would be training for would be one pitting a police state against dissidents whose greatest and only crime lies in opposing Donald Trump and his policies.
Trump never got over Mike Pence doing the decent, legal, and moral thing and confirming that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election despite Trump’s non-existent evidence that he had won in a sacred landslide.
The president’s cabinet is made up exclusively of loyalists who, if put in the same place as Pence on January 6th, 2021, wouldn’t hesitate to insist that, due to the Democrats’ rampant cheating, they had no choice but to overturn the election and declare Trump the victor.
Out of arrogance and ignorance, Trump assumed that people who knew better would buy into his narrative that the military, like all American institutions, was a pathetic disgrace under Biden but became the envy of the world as soon as Trump assumed office.
These are serious men and women with serious jobs. They know that the military didn’t magically go from the worst to the best once Trump moved back into the White House.
In his second term, Trump has gotten what he wants through bullying and threats and flagrant abuse of power. He obviously thought he could win over the military with delusional boasts, ugly personal attacks against figures he assumes everyone hates as much as he does, like Joe Biden, and threats.
If Trump wants the military to be loyal to him when, and if, he declares martial law, rather than the country or the constitution, he made a terrible sales pitch born of ignorance, arrogance, and a stubborn belief that a man who can’t do much of anything, can do everything, and can consequently lecture lifelong military officers on how they should look, act, think and behave.
Trump may view the military as his personal army. They clearly do not see themselves that way.
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