There was no talk of “weirdos or beardos” – two among several categories whom Pete Hegseth has made it known are unwelcome in the US armed forces under his watch.
But a man with a beard had to be uppermost in his mind for him to meet journalists in the Pentagon at the ungodly hour of 8am on Tuesday.
Why else would he be addressing a group he commonly disses as the “fake news”? Consorting with the fourth estate is not the sort of thing this defense secretary does first thing in the morning – or indeed, any time of the day.
He had ostentatiously avoided holding a single press briefing in nearly six months – thus driving an armored personnel carrier through all normal notions of accountability as an unpopular war with Iran rumbled on during an election campaign.
Yet here he was summoning media attention at a time when he – and they – should have been having breakfast.
For this sudden departure from type, praise belongs to Thomas Massie, the outgoing – and lusciously hirsute – Republican representative from Kentucky, who has launched articles of impeachment against Hegseth, citing high crimes and misdemeanors in his scattergun stewardship of the US’s mighty military.
It was this that had driven the self-anointed secretary of war to call an unaccustomed news conference.
Hegseth, who has railed against beards and poor grooming in the military, presumably feels deep contempt for Massie’s facial follicles.
But he made no mention of them in a 25-minute appearance bristling with affronted indignation. In fact, he contrived to omit mention of Massie’s name at all.
Instead, Hegseth applied the adjective “disgruntled” to his nameless nemesis several times in an address that seemed to throb with his own feelings of disgruntlement – not least with the journalists he was meeting for the first time in months.
Syntactically, that probably represented an upgrade on Donald Trump’s description of Massie the day before as “a stone cold loser”.
Massie, a contrarian in Republican congressional ranks, has introduced eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth that are likely to find support from Democrats – and maybe some fellow Republicans.
Among them lie serious charges, including violating the US constitution and waging war against Iran without congressional authorization.
Hegseth also stands accused of violating Congress’s war powers resolution, which requires the withdrawal of US forces from unauthorized hostilities after 60 days.
There are also accusations of carrying out illegal military strikes against suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean, unlawfully capturing Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, unauthorized military strikes against Yemen and ignoring laws intended to minimize civilian casualties.
Finally, he is accused of abusing his power by retaliating against Mark Kelly, a Democratic senator, who had urged members of the military to disobey illegal orders.
For Hegseth, it was all a “farce and a stunt”.
“In the 250 years of our American republic, no secretary of war or secretary of defense has ever been impeached for carrying out lawful military operations, and in our case, successful ones at that,” he complained.
“Not once, war powers resolution or not, not under Reagan in Lebanon, not under Clinton in Kosovo, not under Obama in Iraq and Syria, not under Biden in Iraq and Syria. That’s the standard.”
But the “disgruntled” Massie wanted to turn all that upside down “over policy disagreements”.
“That’s what it is,” Hegseth said. “Not high crimes, not misdemeanors, not treason, not bribery, not the kinds of offenses the founders intended when they wrote the impeachment clause.”
They hadn’t done it to Lloyd Austin, his Democratic predecessor at the Pentagon after he oversaw a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and then disappeared for several days to undergo treatment for cancer, the defense secretary wailed.
But lest anyone thought he was playing the victim, he asserted the disclaimer “this isn’t about me”.
It was – at least partly – about America’s “brave warriors”.
“Put the secretary on trial today and the men and women who carry out the orders tomorrow,” Hegseth said. But be warned, if they want to go after the warriors, “they are going to have to come through me”.
But most of it all, it was about Trump, who was impeached twice in his first presidency and who Hegseth now said he was proud to serve as a proxy target.
“Now they’re trying a third time, this time against a member of his cabinet,” he said. “If standing with President Trump puts me in that company, I’ll take that company every day of the week.”
Then it was time to attack the very class of people he had reluctantly invited to the Pentagon. The media could not admit Trump’s military success against Iran, he claimed, “because they hate the president more than they love our country or our troops”.
It was at that point that it became clear the audience Hegseth was primarily addressing was not in the Pentagon briefing room, but in the White House.
By fervently defending Trump – who has so far stuck by Hegseth as a man who “won two wars” – he was shielding himself, all the more so amid rampant speculation that the president could still make him a fall guy for last week’s Republican midterm debacle.
Then it was to the hazardous territory of journalists’ questions. One was about Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief policy adviser and newly appointed chief of staff.
“An incredible American patriot,” Hegseth gushed, no doubt wisely, given his delicate predicament. “We’ve got no better friend at the department of war than Stephen Miller. He’ll be a fantastic chief of staff.”
The tone changed markedly when someone asked about Vice-President JD Vance, who has blamed the Iran war for the Republicans’ defeat, and who everyone assumes harbors fierce presidential ambitions.
“I respect the vice-president greatly, and I’m certainly not going to exchange any finger pointing,” Hegseth said.
And then, in an aside uttered so quickly it could almost have passed unnoticed were it not such a well-aimed blow, he added: “Thankfully, politics is not really my thing.”
The audience of one in the White House would surely have heard – and understood whose “thing” it was.
