Even the losers get lucky sometimes

Erik quoted at some length from Suzy Hansen’s great essay in the NYRB about Pete Hegseth, which I’ve now read in full and I wish everyone else would as well (it’s behind a paywall unfortunately).

Hansen has read all six of of the books Hegseth has written, or at least “written” — a figure that makes him a towering intellectual in the Trumpian universe. I found this passage from her essay particularly revealing:

Hegseth did not fully fit in at Princeton, and not because of woke-ism or even the type of globalist elitism he despises but because of class in the most mundane sense. One day Hegseth ventured inside Ivy, Princeton’s most exclusive social club, “where all the Manhattan blue bloods congregated,” he writes in his 2020 book American Crusade. “I immediately sensed that I was not welcome. They looked at me sideways, like What are you doing here?” Hegseth goes so far as to call his experience “a glimpse of how blacks must have felt during segregation.” It is always telling when a white person makes this kind of analogy; it reflects how badly they desire a legitimate claim to suffering—and how little they ultimately understand of the black American experience.

This vignette says so much about the psychological roots of Trumpism. First, the absolute luxuriating of wildly over-privileged white people in a pervasive sense of victimization. To feel uncomfortable at a Princeton social club — this is what it must have been like to be a black person protesting in Selma in 1965. Second, the implicit identification of the most hyper-elite institutions and cultural settings in American life with the idea of what “the left” in America actually is. (Apparently, the left is a Princeton eating club).

Behold the endless oppression of the white man in America:

Hegseth came home from Iraq and started drinking. He was married to his high school sweetheart, and he had affairs. They divorced in 2009, and he fathered his first child, Gunner, with a woman named Samantha Deering before marrying her in 2010. Hegseth met Deering at Vets for Freedom, the first of two nonprofit groups where he worked on behalf of his fellow soldiers. It was not a cause he took seriously. In 2024, before Hegseth was confirmed as secretary of defense, Jane Mayer detailed in The New Yorker the way he grossly mismanaged the organizations’ finances. He incurred almost $500,000 in debts at Vets for Freedom. At the second nonprofit, Concerned Veterans for America, Hegseth was “repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity,” Mayer writes, “to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events.” Whistleblowers reported that Hegseth “treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account—for partying, drinking, and using CVA events as little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on the road.” According to Mayer, Hegseth was essentially forced out of both organizations.

But again the elite institutions of America made space for Hegseth. After he returned from a brief tour training Afghan soldiers, he finished a graduate degree at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Instead of embarking on a policy career, Hegseth got a job as a contributor at Fox News in 2014, becoming a cohost of Fox and Friends three years later. There he remained, marinating in the propagandistic and fame-hungry culture of the network, until—despite never having risen above the midcareer rank of major in the Army National Guard—he was confirmed as secretary of defense. By then he had perfected the garish, preening caricature of himself that he plays on TV, his squinting, threatening eyes always searching for the camera.

And he was still drinking: NBC News spoke with multiple Fox employees who recalled instances in which Hegseth showed up to set hungover or smelling of alcohol. “He had a kind of what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas kind of attitude, while his wife and kids were in Minnesota,” one of his Fox colleagues told Mayer. “He was a huge drinker. I can’t say if he had a problem, but he was very handsy with women, too.” In 2017, while still married to Deering, he fathered a child with a Fox producer named Jennifer Rauchet, whom he married in 2019. During his divorce from Deering, her lawyers produced an email in which Pete’s steely mother, Penny, called him “an abuser of women” and a man who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” (She later said she regretted writing it.)

All this sounds more than vaguely familiar, and Hegseth himself hasn’t missed the significance of a certain striking biographical parallel:

Like those fundamentalist Islamic fighters, Hegseth experienced a radical conversion. Before 2017 he was a Rubio guy. Then he saw the light. He joined Trump’s “holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom,” which he understands as the historical continuation of two previous world-shaking events: the original Crusades (against “conquering Muslim hordes”) and the American Revolution. “Surrounded by the Left, with the odds stacked against us, only a crusade will do,” he writes. The left and the entire religion of Islam offer Hegseth something he seems to have craved at least since he walked into a Waspy eating club: a righteous claim to victimhood.

Trump, meanwhile, offers him absolution from his sins by proving that a debased, sleazy criminal can ascend to the highest office in the land. “Part of the reason that Donald Trump resonated with millions of Americans so quickly is that he didn’t—and couldn’t—hide his personal failings,” Hegseth writes in American Crusade. “As it turns out, with God and with regular people, the reservoir of forgiveness is deep.” The secretary of defense who stepped up to the Pentagon TV podium in 2025 seemed energized by his redemption. He cut a quintessentially American figure: “a pastless futureless man,” in Lasch’s terms, a born-again zealot, finally dispatched to the holy arena of his dreams.

Washed in the blood of the lamb . . . Remember, Trump too is a “baby Christian,” being forgiven constantly for all his past and for that matter present lying, cheating, stealing, whoring, raping, etc. etc., because the extraordinarily debased version of evangelical Christianity that has rotted into maturity in America in 2026 consists of the proposition that once you’re “saved” you’re saved . . . Jesus’s forgiveness is quite literally endless.

I’m struck by the resemblance to another nationwide cult:

Reading World War II-era authors such as Arendt and Russell today, it’s difficult to avoid being struck by how many top Nazis and Trumpists share the same basic social profile, which is to say they were and are lifelong catastrophic failures, who failed upwards under conditions that turned out to be ripe for such people to ascend to positions for which they were farcically unqualified.  This description fits people like Eichmann, Himmler, and many other Nazis to a tee, with the very best example being, of course, Adolf Hitler himself.

On the Trumpist side the examples are equally plentiful, from Hegseth, to Robert F. Kennedy the Lesser to, most crucially, Trump himself:  a man who spent decades managing to be a human disaster of astonishing proportions, despite inheriting hundreds of millions of dollars, and all the immense privilege that goes with such good fortune in our society.

The Triumph of Stupidity

. . . should have mentioned that all this reminded me of the very odd opening passage of The Sun Also Rises (I’ve always had a vague suspicion this was actually about F. Scott Fitzgerald):

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.