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THE AGE OF TRAGIFARCE (AND PETE HEGSETH’S RATIONAL KERNEL)  
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Tom Gallagher
November 21, 2025
The Stansbury Forum
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_ To contest the legitimacy of Trump/Hegseth initiatives we need to
intertwine empathy for rank and file members of the military placed in
situations they never should have been, with antipathy for those
decisions and decision-makers. _

Tragedy and Farce, painting by Lizza Littlewort/Creative Commons,

 

Philosophers have long since prepared us for the possibility of
history repeating itself – the first time as tragedy, the next
farce.  But they have seldom if ever spoken to the situation we now
experience – simultaneous tragedy and farce, the two seemingly
inextricably intertwined. Likewise, while the idea of tragicomedy has
been spoken of since the days of ancient Rome, it appears that up
until now we’ve been able to do without recognizing a step beyond
– to tragifarce.

How else to think about, for instance, the case of Defense Secretary
Pete Hegseth? While he may be running neck and neck with Secretary of
Homeland Security Kristi Noem for best comedy performance by a U.S.
Cabinet member in the twenty-first century (with apologies to RFK, Jr.
partisans), this obviously does not mean that we can dismiss his
activities as nothing more than the buffoonish episodes that they
often are. Which is to say that we can neither ignore the tragic
aspect of the rise to power of a man like that – the “lethal”
side of the tragifarce, as he himself might put it – nor fail to
consider how it is that he got there. 

Individually, the former “Fox and Friends” talking head rose to
prominence through his defense of members of the American military who
were charged with killing prisoners and civilians, but as Matthieu
Aikins emphasized in “America’s Vigilantes,”
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recent _New York Times Magazine _article on Trump Administration
foreign policy,  Hegseth is also representative of “a new attitude
toward the military … emerging on the political right: for the
troops, but against the generals.” 

The news media have certainly given substantial attention to what we
might sardonically call the “lighter side” of Pete Hegseth –
e.g., his inclusion of his wife, brother, lawyer and the Editor in
Chief of _The Atlantic _in highly confidential online group chats
about then upcoming (illegal but not unprecedented) bombings of Yemen;
berating a captive audience of military leaders about “beardos,”
and “fat generals,” etc. So far as the “more serious side” of
the Hegseth escapade goes, early coverage leaned toward his
contributions to the Administration’s overall assault on Diversity,
Equity and Inclusion, “wokeness,” and other forms of “political
correctness” – an understandable enough focus, given the potential
impact of his planned tear-downs upon substantial numbers of women and
minorities in the military.

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On November 10, 1799, in a move known as the Coup d’État of
Eighteenth Brumaire, Napoleon seized control of the French government
and installed himself as First Consul, thereafter governing as a
dictator. British satire shows Napoleon with his grenadiers driving
the members of the Council of Five Hundred from the Orangery at St.
Cloud at bayonet point.

 
But ultimately it’s the changes he advocates for U.S. conduct of war
that lie behind his appointment as Defense Secretary, a nomination so
out-there as to require transporting Vice President JD Vance over to
the Senate Chamber to cast the deciding vote to secure his
confirmation (for only the second time in the history of U.S. cabinet
appointments, the first having occurred in Trump’s first term.) To
put the principal Hegseth initiatives succinctly, we can say that he
favors the military embracing greater “lethality;” and opposes any
restraints placed upon that “lethality” by the Geneva conventions.
This, regardless of the fact that the U.S. is a signatory to the 1949
international agreement on protection of civilians, wounded, and
prisoners during the conduct of war, and is thereby committed to
upholding it. While this new stance has also had some immediate direct
effect on military personnel, thus far it’s mostly been a few judge
advocate generals and others perceived as potential roadblocks to the
planned new order. And given that this is a group generally not prone
to making a great deal of noise if they are eighty-sixed, this aspect
of the Trump/Hegseth military plan has at first been treated as less
impactful.

The audience that Hegseth most directly plays to, on the other hand,
is substantially larger. For a combination of reasons – including
the fact that the “wars on terror” – as they were once known –
never involved a military draft; were primarily fought at such great
distance from the U.S. – in Afghanistan and Iraq; increasingly
involved remote drone warfare; and “droned on” for over two
decades – it may come as a surprise to many that about 2 million
Americans have been deployed to those wars since 2001. And indeed,
apart from being perhaps over-represented in the ranks of
congressional candidacies, this group of veterans has had a
substantially lower public profile than their predecessors from the
Vietnam War. 

Among those 2 million, of course, were substantial numbers who were
placed in harm’s way in situations that often neither they nor their
friends and family back home understood.  And there was solid reason
for this lack of understanding, in that neither the military leaders
who commanded these troops, nor the political leaders who sent them
really understood the why and wherefore of those situations all that
well themselves. As a result, when individuals like Army Captain
Matthew Golsteyn or Navy Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher were
charged with killing prisoners – in Afghanistan and Iraq
respectively – there were a lot of people questioning why they were
taking the fall when military higher-ups weren’t. 

As we know, Donald Trump moved to scoop up this constituency with his
pardons of both officers, angering many military leaders along the way
with this interference in the process. Hegseth has been even more
direct in his appeal, telling the military and naval commanders
corralled to the Quantico, Virginia Marine Corps Base on Sept. 30,
“We … don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement,” here
offering something of a tragifarcical echo of the Mel Brooks line from
the movie Blazing Saddles: “We don’t need no stinking badges.”
– itself a riff on the line in “The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre”. In their place Hegseth proposed, “just common sense,
maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.” 

Although he did not then specify which “stupid rules” he
disdained, in his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors: Behind the
Betrayal of the American Military,” he had posed the question,
“Should we follow the Geneva Conventions? 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?” He also answered his own
question: “Our boys should not fight by rules written by dignified
men in mahogany rooms 80 years ago.”

Here again, it will not serve us well to simply roll our eyes and
mutter about going backwards in history, without taking a penetrating
look at where and why our government has sent our military in this
millennium. And it is not to suggest any retreat on the principle that
personal responsibility for actions taken in the course of warfare
extends throughout the military – top to bottom – to also maintain
that the responsibility doesn’t stop there.  Any decision to limit
the discussion of American war crimes to whether it’s the grunts or
the brass that bear primary responsibility assures that we will pass
right by the point where that responsibility actually lies.  We
should also not allow the farcical aspects of Pete’s Great Defense
Department Adventure to prevent opponents of our military’s current
permanent-war standing from recognizing that there are some things
that we may actually agree with him on.

If Hegseth wants to argue that American soldiers have been placed in
situations they never should have been – I think we agree. If he
thinks that American soldiers were sent to fight wars they couldn’t
win – I think we agree. And in the unlikely event that he were to go
further and decide that American soldiers have been placed in wars
that the U.S. should never have entered – I also think we would
agree there too.

Give Hegseth – and his boss – credit for truth-telling at least in
their effort to rename the Defense Department the Department of War. 
As Hegseth told the silent military crowd in Quantico, “We have to
be prepared for war, not for defense. We’re training warriors, not
defenders. We fight wars to win, not to defend.” Yes, for some time
now, the U.S. Department of Defense has not primarily been true to its
name. As a rule both sides to a war will uniformly insist that they
are not the aggressors and are actually fighting in defense – of
something, and therefore justified, even though this clearly cannot be
the case for both sides. They do so because much of the world does at
least give lip service to the principle that wars that are not in fact
fought in defense are illegitimate. So here we have the man now
nominally in charge of pursuing U.S. military objectives acknowledging
– proclaiming really – their illegitimacy. We might logically
expect such a radical proclamation to be either hailed as
revolutionary or denounced as revolting – depending upon one’s
stance toward recent American foreign policy. The tragifarce of our
age lies in the fact that for the most part neither has occurred.
“The jester-in-charge just revealed the truth!” “So what? He’s
a joke, isn’t he?”

In his above mentioned book, Hegseth elaborated, “The key question
of our generation—of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—is way more
complicated: what do you do if your enemy does not honor the Geneva
conventions? We never got an answer. Only more war. More casualties.
And no victory.” He calls on the U.S. to ignore the 1949 agreements,
writing “Would that not be an incentive for the other side to
reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: if you surrender, we might
spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed
them to hogs.” (And you know, by now, that I’m not making this
up.)

Again, while it can be difficult to offer a serious response to such
Hegseth-talk, we can acknowledge the individual horrors of soldiers
dealing with ambushes, improvised explosive devices, and everything
else that goes with being sent to invade a foreign nation, while still
insisting upon considering the larger overall situation. For instance,
if we were to consider how many American civilians were killed by
Iraqi or Afghani bombs – delivered either by plane or drone – 
compared with how many civilians of those two nations were killed by
American bombs, we might have a very different take as to who’s
guilty of barbarism – exactly the take that the populations of those
countries have. It might even be enough to provide a glimmer of
understanding of how some of the more extreme among them might decide
that, “We will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.”

One of the actual key questions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is
just how the U.S. government managed to forget or choose to ignore a
central lesson of the Vietnam War: While the U.S. is capable of
unleashing overwhelming “lethal” force and inflicting immense
suffering upon our chosen enemies, both military and civilian
population alike – and has quite regularly done so – we simply
cannot conquer and occupy a country of any size half a globe away –
and should not attempt to. 

Granted, dealing after the fact with the recognition that entering a
particular war was not a good or just idea can be very difficult
process, people naturally being extremely reluctant to conclude that
they fought, or that their relatives or friends died for an unjust or
unwise cause. And yet somehow, many do.  By now it is widely
acknowledged that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was conducted under false
pretenses (although less widely acknowledged that the invasion would
still have been illegitimate even if Iraq actually had the weapons it
was accused of having.) By 2022, Gallup’s pollsters 
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finding only 16% of Americans retaining favorable views of that war. 
 

So far as the war that came to be considered the not-so-stupid one –
the twenty-year invasion of Afghanistan, perhaps the most generous
interpretation possible would be to say that our government – along
with much of the population – was suckered into it by the September
11, 2001 Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks. But here too the public
eventually did come around. By 2021, polls conducted by Associated
Press, Pew Research, and NPR/PBS 
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reported 62%, 69% and 71% of respondents having turned against that
war. In both cases the people have been way ahead of their political
leaders, so many of whom still won’t acknowledge what is widely
understood – in some cases because they themselves believed in
and/or participated in authorizing these wars, in others so as not to
be accused of being unpatriotic or “un-American” for speaking the
truth. Hence the relative lack of Capitol Hill reaction to Hegseth’s
truth-telling.

All of this should bring home the fact that the fundamental question
of American foreign policy is not one of choosing sides between troops
or generals. The elephant so often lurking in the room of American
public discussion is the frequent illegitimacy and foolishness of the
combat to which our government commits our troops. If we hope to
fundamentally contest the legitimacy of the Trump/Hegseth initiatives
we need to intertwine empathy for rank and file members of the
military who are placed in situations that they never should have
been, with antipathy for those decisions – and the decision makers
who placed them there. Failure to confront the faulty premises of
American foreign policy dooms us to eternal recurrence of debate
limited to the question of who bears responsibility for the faulty
results of the last war. Unfortunately, we cannot realistically expect
such an initiative to come from the current leadership of either of
the two main parties. 

THE BUCK STOPS THERE

Referring to the White House, President Harry Truman once famously
declared that so far as political decisions go, “The buck stops
here.” The adage has now come true in an additional pecuniary sense,
with the bucks passing along to the current White House occupant to a
degree that the thirty-third president could never have imagined. But
his words also remain true in the conventional sense of “passing the
buck” that Truman intended. As central as Hegseth, Noem, Kennedy and
all of the rest of the lurid crew have been to the development of the
ongoing Amercan Tragifarce, no recent presidential administration has
so blatantly adopted a unified line as Trump II. There’s only one
mic that matters here and Donald Trump is always on it – THE MASTER
OF TRAGIFARCE.

Now to be fair, even Donald Trump’s harshest critics will largely
admit that everyone must have their least-bad side. And in his case
there’s always been a strong argument that it was foreign policy. 
Remember, we’re talking “least-bad,” not “good.” The reason
for such a judgement is that although there has almost always been
some congressional opposition to our government’s worst military
operations – opposition of widely varying extent to be sure,
sometimes substantial among Democrats and generally lightly sprinkled,
if that, among Republicans – the fact is that Washington’s highest
level Democrats, i.e. presidents and congressional leaders, have
usually marched in lockstep with Republicans in these matters. Trump
continued the Afghanistan War previously overseen by George Bush and
Barack Obama; Obama’s previous criticisms did not prevent him from
continuing the Iraq War. And while Joe Biden finally oversaw an
American withdrawal from Afghanistan – with the then out-of-power
Trump criticizing the withdrawal he had pledged but not carried
through on – the Biden Administration’s full-on support for the
relentless Israeli retribution for the October, 2022 Hamas attacks
restored foreign policy harmony between the two party leaderships. 
On the whole, Trump foreign policy fit into the Washington mainstream.
In this realm he was no worse.

But in the Commander in Chief’s insatiable desire to convince
himself and anyone else gullible enough – or on the payroll – that
he is more everything than everyone, Trump, with the invaluable
assistance of his Man of War Hegseth, has now managed to distinguish
himself even on this front with his campaign of assassinating unknown
individuals in international waters, claiming justification on the
basis of unproved claims that they were transporting drugs. As the
president summed up the campaign with his customary dry wit
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“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs
into our country. OK? We’re going to kill them. You know, they’re
going to be, like, dead.” Here lending even assassination that
distinctive Trump tragifarcical twist, while compelling the rest of us
to concede: “Okay, Mr. President! Uncle! You win! You’re worse in
every way!”

Dispatching the military to American cities – as training for
foreign wars! Declaring a non-existent organization – Antifa –
terrorist, thereby creating a “Go to Jail” card for anyone of us,
since if an organization actually doesn’t exist, there can be no way
for anyone to prove that they’re not a member! The list could
seemingly go on forever and it grows by the day. Everyone’s got
their own individual chronicle of the times, some leaning more to the
tragic, others toward the farce.  

PYNCHONESQUE?

With the release of “One battle after another,” a major Hollywood
movie loosely based on one of his books, along with the publication of
“Shadow Ticket,” his first new novel in twelve years, the name of
Thomas Pynchon now comes up more frequently than at any previous time
during the Trump experience.  Since the 1960s, Pynchon has been
writing with such a consistently bizarre point of view, inventiveness,
and depth of description that some readers and critics have come to
describe certain real world situations as Pynchonesque, thereby adding
him to the select but varied group of writers whose names have become
adjectives. Pynchonesque also belongs to a smaller group of
author-inspired adjectives used to describe warped visions of reality
– or, if you prefer, visions of a warped reality – the best known
of which is Kafkaesque. 

Pynchon’s reemergence on the scene (in print, not in person, Pynchon
being famously reclusive) could hardly have been more timely. Anyone
who’s seen White House Communication Director Steven Cheung’s X
post of an  AI video
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Donald Trump dressed as a jet pilot wearing a crown and “Shitting
all over these No Kings losers!” (participants in anti-Trump “No
Kings” rallies), only to later be troubled by a gnawing sense of
deja’vu, may want to search their memories for any long-ago read and
forgotten Pynchon novels. Reviewers of his new book have
understandably found it difficult not to note the degree to which the
absurdities emanating from the White House rhyme with those of
Pynchon’s writing. Some even wonder if the idea of something
being Pynchonesque has become passé – perhaps subsumed by the
larger Trumpian reality.

But for the moment, whether one thinks of the second Trump
administration as Pynchonesque, or simply “cartoonishly evil,”
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the daughter of a New Mexico Republican state senator recently
described it, it seems eminently reasonable to conclude that there
have never been more Americans thinking or saying, “I can’t
believe this is happening” or “I can’t believe he said that”
than at any time in the past. And, with Trump now having access to
higher intelligence – albeit artificial – in his second term, they
likewise can’t believe that they’re seeing things like the above
mentioned presidential fantasy. In our current audio/video/internet
saturated, and often questionable “reality,” where anyone can
seemingly present anything as anything, the line between fact and
fiction can often seem to melt into air.  _Barack Obama arrested and
handcuffed in the White House?_
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I saw it on the Internet._

Simply put, for many (most?) people what is occurring now is epochal:
not previously seen; not previously envisioned – except on the
fictional level. What comes with that, of course – or more properly
speaking what doesn’t come with it is any clear sense of how to
respond. We often find ourselves simply flummoxed.

So the serious idea behind this literary diversion and the suggestion
of thinking in terms of a concept such as a “tragifarce” – or
some other synonym – is something akin to the political equivalent
of psychiatrists proposing a new listing in the “DSM” (Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the presumption in both
cases being that the act of recognizing, acknowledging, and naming a
syndrome of new symptoms is a necessary first step toward
understanding how to deal with it. 

Politically, it has become absolutely clear that we are actually
experiencing something new – a synthesis of tragedy and farce,
something the old philosophers might have expected to develop over
time. It would seem to stand to reason then, that the more clearly we
can come to recognize the degree to which the current political
situation has literally become “killer comedy,” the clearer we may
become in developing the antidote.  The Project 2025 people have
understood how to create the political rapids of our time. The urgency
of our understanding how to negotiate those rapids could hardly be
greater.

 

_Tom Gallagher_ [[link removed]]_ is the
author of The Primary Route: How the 99% Takes On the Military
Industrial Complex._

 

_The Stansbury Forum is a website for discussion by writers, activists
and scholars on the topics that Jeff focused his life on: labor,
politics, immigration, the environment, and world affairs._

* Pete Hegseth
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* Department of War
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* U.S. militarism
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* Project 2025
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* Thomas Pynchon
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