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,” his 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.

 

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 were 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 respectively 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, “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 of 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,” as 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? Hey, 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 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.