Has there ever been a more ludicrous political character than Pete Hegseth, the US government’s so-called secretary of war, who makes Ronald Reagan look understated and urbane? Last week, Hegseth launched an attack on the American press for its coverage of Iran, which he called insufficiently “patriotic”. (A CNN commentator and former Republican congressman came back with “punk” and “cry baby” to describe Hegseth’s own demeanour.) When he stands at the podium with his Mr Incredible jaw and head extended, turtle-like, way out in front of his body, all you can think is this: which is a greater threat to American national security, Iran’s nuclear ambitions or Hegseth’s failure to meet even the most entry-level requirements for a person in his position?

The majority of Americans who know who he is – only about 70% of them, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center – don’t like the guy, and his petulant outbursts last week at the Pentagon can’t have helped. Since Donald Trump appointed him in January last year, what has become evident about Hegseth is that, like so many bullies, he backs down sharpish if he meets any significant pushback. “Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst,” snapped Hegseth to a Fox News reporter last June in a phrase we should all have had printed on T-shirts. (Jennifer Griffin elegantly countered “I take issue with that,” and Hegseth backed away and pivoted to another point.)

More recently, at a Pentagon briefing two weeks ago, he turned on a reporter who asked if he had a clear objective for the war with Iran. Hegseth cut his eyes at her like a child starting a fight in the playground and snarled, “Did you not hear my remarks?” This was several days before he made his bellicose remarks about the Iranian regime – “they are toast, and they know it” – all of which suggests the former Fox News host has two basic settings: upbeat, bomb-’em-back-to-the-stone-age Dr Strangelove, and surly sixth grader. It is sometimes remarked that Hegseth has a leading man outline, but the evidence points more in the direction of weird character-actor energy; a sort of Max Headroom, all angles and glitches, and eye contact that lasts slightly too long.

What makes Hegseth’s aspect more disturbing is the vast gap between his presentation as a straight-talking American hero, and the truth of the matter. Trump’s hiring policy has always been long on optics, short on detail, and so it’s hard not to see Hegseth through the lens of his backstory. Like a lot of Trump’s cabinet appointees, the “war secretary” has a full complement of lurid accusations, or leverage as Trump may see it, trailing behind him – financial mismanagement, personal misconduct, sexual impropriety, plus a history of alleged poor behaviour brought on by excessive drinking – all of which Trump presumably files under “maverick” and for which the rest of us supply other words. With exquisite understatement, the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate armed services committee, told the New Yorker in a 2024 profile of Hegseth, “Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure.” Well, quite.

Still, make do and mend; let’s see what we have to work with here. A former presenter on Fox News, Hegseth can at least talk in sentences that roughly follow on, one from another – not a given in Trump’s cabinet. Googling “Pete Hegseth drunk press conference” fields inconclusive results; that’s a win. If you go back far enough in his history, Hegseth has said at least a couple of honest-sounding things about the challenges of returning to civilian life after being deployed with the military on three overseas tours (Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo).

Meanwhile, the president’s calculation in hiring people such as Hegseth and, until recently, Kristi Noem, who Trump booted as head of homeland security earlier this month for low-key landing him in it during congressional hearings, is probably more devious than it seems. On paper, Hegseth is an odd combination of characteristics, a midwesterner who went to Princeton before joining the military; a man with some establishment credentials, in other words, but enough disastrous professional and personal episodes to appeal to Trump. If the president’s No 1 hiring priority is loyalty, then Hegseth is the absolute exemplar of someone Trump has fished out of the fire. When it comes to standing up to the president, he has no fight in him.