Oh to Be Pete Hegseth’s Speechwriter

I envy that coked up teenager

Photo by Brendan Smalowski via Getty.

Being a speechwriter is like being a drummer: You want to show off, but the key to doing the job well is to not show off. Drum solos and flowery speech-ifying wankery both went out of style generations ago. If you’re a speechwriter for anyone other than a 17th century duke seeking to coax favors from the court at Versailles, my advice is to ditch the artsy crap and use words that a human might actually speak out of their mouth hole.

My bosses always vetoed my attempts at fanciness; I remember one boss striking the word “eschew” and saying “In America, we say ‘avoid’.” My bosses did this because they were smart. They knew that decorating speeches with allegedly witty turns of phrase would achieve nothing except to make them look like The Lord Of The Douchebags.

But alas: The Lord Of The Douchebags walks amongst us, and his name is Pete Hegseth. Hegseth’s public appearances are becoming can’t-miss events if you enjoy stunning displays of public ineptitude like The Room or that video of the lady falling while stomping grapes. And the specific element that — in my humble opinion — elevates Hegseth’s appearances from run-of-the-mill Trump administration incompetence to a Louvre-quality display of idiocy is Hegseth’s grand rhetorical choices.

Consider this gem:

He sounds like a cross between Robocop and Dr. Seuss. “Maximum effect, not politically correct” is the dumbest rhyming couplet I’ve heard since Limp Bizkit broke up. If I was on a speechwriting team and someone pitched “maximum effect, not politically correct”, I’d ask “Whose nephew are you?” and then force them to take a drug test on the spot. Also: “Not tepid legality” straightforwardly says that you don’t plan to follow the law. Which is clear to anyone who is even half paying attention, but I’m sure Hegseth’s lawyers would appreciate it if he didn’t blurt out his planned lawlessness in front of a bank of TV cameras.

And then there’s this line, which is already infamous:

“Bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power” is a great tagline for DeWalt tools or Cialis, but as a descriptor of rules of engagement, it’s confusing: “Precise” fights with “bold” and “unleash”. Fortunately — or maybe unfortunately — Hegseth clears up the ambiguity by declaring his abiding love for fighting dirty. This is a departure from past administrations who emphasized that they waged war only reluctantly and for moral reasons — losers like Lincoln and Eisenhower spoke like this. I honestly don’t know if Hegseth has a speechwriting team or if he plays Call of Duty online and writes down the sickest burns that he hears from adderall-popping 14 year-olds.

And here’s Hegseth attempting a metaphor:

The point of a metaphor is to illustrate a little-known thing by likening it to something common. Instead, Hegseth takes something everyone knows — that war is hard to plan, a phenomenon described by several famous aphorisms¹ — and likens it to an obscure and unimportant bit of football strategy. One problem with the metaphor is that when teams finish their scripted plays, that’s fine; they just call new plays. If Iran can’t call new plays — if they can’t “get in the huddle”, which ignores the fact that plays are called first from the sidelines, but whatever — that makes them unlike a football team. But Hegseth also says that they “don’t know which plays to call”, which makes the inability to huddle irrelevant. The metaphor is muddled and it’s also untrue, because somebody closed the Strait of Hormuz, and it was probably Iran.

Hegseth’s speechwriters clearly have the green light to pitch the grandest, splashiest, colorful-as-Rainbow-Brite’s-stool turns of phrase they can imagine. And they have a boss dumb enough to say those things in public and think that he looks really cool. I kind of wish I was on the team; it would be fun to pound Red Bull, pop weed gummies, and think I was fashioning a new Gettysburg Address by pitching “Revolutionary Guard? More like Revolutionary TARD!”

But I’m merely a citizen forced to live with the fact that the same awful decision-making that Hegseth shows in his speeches is surely reflected his war planning. Concern about the administration’s competence is so severe that none other than John Bolton has expressed misgivings about the war, which is like Snoop Dogg saying “No marijuana for me, thank you — it’s a school night!” Clearly, I’m not the only person whose confidence evaporates every time Hegseth opens his mouth. I just wish I was the guy penning the dumbass faux-macho teen-speak instead of a person forced to contemplate what its existence implies.

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1. Three that come immediately to mind: “The fog of war”, “battle plans don’t survive first contact with the enemy”, and “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.