Hegseth: Comedy, Controversy, and Lethal Strikes in the Caribbean

Pete Hegseth BioSnap a weekly updated Biography.

Pete Hegseth has been aggressively commanding headlines, controversy, and social media alike in the past few days, largely as the Secretary of War in the Trump administration. On Thursday night, he made a public return to his broadcasting roots as a featured guest at Fox’s annual Patriot Awards, rolling out a comedy set full of bravado and pointed jabs. The room’s mood flipped between tense and riotous when Hegseth quipped about “Signalgate”—the infamous scandal where he discussed bombing plans for Yemen in an unsecured Signal app chat, which included not just national security officials but also his wife and The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. The joke, reported by both Mediaite and The Daily Beast, didn’t land well with everyone, serving as a not-so-subtle reminder of a lapse that once spurred calls for his resignation and led to a shakeup in Trump’s security team. Former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who was in the audience and got a direct shoutout, later departed his advisor role but landed the U.N. Ambassador nomination, per The Daily Beast and presidential statements on Truth Social.

Meanwhile, outside of the media echo chamber, Hegseth has continued to drive the Trump administration’s direct-action doctrine. ABC7 Chicago, Fox News, and Hegseth’s own posts on X confirm he announced the U.S.’s 17th lethal military strike on a narco-terrorist vessel in the Caribbean, killing all three onboard without any U.S. casualties. He defended the escalating campaign bluntly on social media, vowing, “If you keep trafficking deadly drugs—we will kill you.” Fox News characterized his posture as a hard-line extension of Trump’s declared aim to treat drug cartels as terrorism, underscoring the stakes and signaling that these kinetic operations are both a policy and a public spectacle, with video footage of the strikes regularly posted online.

His anti-bureaucratic rhetoric is also making noise in policy circles. National Defense Magazine and Fox News highlighted his blistering speech to defense industry leaders where he compared Pentagon red tape to Soviet-era central planning, warning contractors to “adapt or fade away” and openly attacking the entrenched acquisition system and what he calls the Pentagon’s culture of stifling innovation.

On the institutional front, Hegseth made a lengthy address at the National War College, introduced by Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg, as archived on the Department of War’s official media. Video from the event shows him doubling down on the administration’s militant philosophy and invoking the need for a revived “warrior ethos.”

Social media remains a favored platform: he and Trump jointly posted a video of a past lethal strike on Truth Social—an act some outlets like The Tufts Daily argue is part of a troubling trend toward public displays of state violence, sparking criticism about the normalization of brutality and the political calculus behind whom the admini