Pete Hegseth may have terrible judgment, but his timing is undeniably vaudevillian.
The former TV host who bills himself as America’s “secretary of war” chose the perfect moment – as his enraged presidential boss resumes the fruitless bombing of Iran – to announce an ambitious new Pentagon program of testosterone injections for our troops. Announcing that all male service members will be tested annually for possible deficiency, he said that remedial steroid shots will be optional.
“While we invest heavily in our weapons systems platforms and gear, our most decisive tactical advantage will always be the individual warfighter,” noted the defense secretary in a video captioned “High T Department of War.
“We have a sacred duty to maintain that advantage, which is why we must constantly look for new ways to optimize your performance, your resilience and your long-term health,” he continued. “And to meet that commitment today, I’m authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members, ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best.”
As the nation confronts the dismal prospect of President Trump’s continued warmaking, his dim but hotheaded “warrior-in-chief” is again busily imposing a solution where there is no problem. Hegseth cited no evidence that our soldiers, sailors and airmen suffer from “low-T,” as the TV ads put it – a suggestion that many of them would probably find insulting. But there is, unfortunately, a hefty catalog of posts, photos, policies, and remarks that indicates Hegseth’s own insecurity about his male status – a neurosis he appears to share with other members of the Trump administration, not least the president himself.
If a satirist wrote a script featuring a defense chief who urges a program of testosterone therapy amid a failing war, nobody would believe it. Much too Dr. Strangelove! Only in the reality of the Trump regime are such outlandish plot points even imaginable.
America’s nasty predicament in the Persian Gulf assuredly did not arise from insufficient aggressiveness on the part of the Trump war cabinet, let alone our officers and troops. Our country is again on the cusp of a “forever war,” as the veteran New York Times correspondent Steven Erlanger warns today, most likely due to an excess of macho hostility and a dearth of impulse control in the Trump White House. Those characteristics are typical, as any doctor will confirm, of an excess of testosterone, all too often the result of self-administered injections by men hoping to feel more manly.
Which calls to mind a strange remark not so long ago by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another public figure whose shirtless displays and constant reckless behavior provoke suspicion of what feminists sometimes call testosterone poisoning. On a podcast last spring, the health secretary reported that “Dr. Oz looked at [Trump’s} medical records and said he’s got the highest testosterone levels that he’s ever seen for an individual over 70 years old.
“I know the president will be happy that I repeat that,” he added obsequiously.
Without testing administered by qualified physicians, of course, there is no way to be sure that Trump – or Kennedy, or Hegseth, or any other MAGA cartoon characters – are examples of testosterone overdose. But the president does show clinical symptoms: apparent insomnia, with those endless predawn posting sprees; an enlarged prostate and spreading bald spot, indicated by his use of finasteride, a drug prescribed for those conditions; and most of all his irrepressible impulsivity, aggression, and fluctuating moods -- which lurk behind his wild swings in war policy and jut-jawed, blundering diplomacy.
Reaching an honorable end to this ruinous war will require less blustering and clearer thinking. With all due respect to Pentagon Pete, his testosterone obsession won’t help.
Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.
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