Hegseth Hoping His Media Minions Can Smooth His Way to the White House

Washington Post (8/17/26): “Hegseth will take a US-funded military aircraft to Iowa,” due to what the Pentagon calls “the continuous need for secure communications.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth keeps popping up on the campaign trail, fueling speculation he may run for president in 2028. His travel last month to Iowa, “a presidential campaign proving ground, fits that pattern,” the Washington Post (8/17/26) reported, citing an official familiar with Hegseth’s thinking.

Like so much about Hegseth’s tenure as self-styled “secretary of war,” this isn’t normal. “It is highly unusual for a current defense secretary to campaign for candidates,” noted CBS News (8/17/26). “Previous secretaries rarely if ever attended events for candidates while defense secretary.”

Hegseth’s stumping for fellow Republicans has alarmed at least three of his predecessors, who spoke with NBC News (8/28/26). “My God, we’re at war,” said former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. “What are you doing going to Iowa and campaigning when you should be paying attention to your job?”

It’s this very war, with Iran, that may waylay Hegseth’s White House dreams. Unable to change the realities on the ground, Hegseth is taking the next-best approach by trying to change the way the war is reported.

‘Right out of central casting’

Jeet Heer (The Nation, 8/31/26): “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that taxpayer money allocated to the Pentagon was used by the executive branch to influence a congressional election, a direct attack on the principle of keeping the military out of domestic politics.”

Hegseth (like Donald Trump) is living proof that a strong TV persona can compensate for a lack of competence. Understanding this is key to making sense of Hegseth’s otherwise inexplicable tenure as defense secretary.

Amid his years reportedly spent abusing women and alcohol (New Yorker, 12/1/24), Hegseth still managed to appear bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as a co-host on Fox News, where he voiced full-throated support for Trump, as well as for US soldiers accused of war crimes (New Yorker, 11/22/24). Watching the telegenic Hegseth hold forth on his favorite channel, Trump was impressed. (“Right out of central casting,” he later said.)

And now Hegseth—whose thin resume includes being forced to resign from the two veterans organizations he led (New Yorker, 12/1/24)—has failed his way up to defense secretary, with his sights set on the Oval Office. To get there, Hegseth will have to paper over his rocky tenure in office.

Things began on a positive note, with Hegseth successfully installing a TV makeup studio in the Pentagon (CBS, 4/23/25). But when it comes to actual warfighting, Hegseth has proved less capable, accidentally texting a reporter top-secret war plans to bomb Yemen last year (Atlantic, 3/24/25), and suffering a humiliating defeat in Iran this year (New York Times, 8/28/26).

“Losing a war with Iran would tarnish Hegseth politically, but he has developed a simple solution,” wrote Jeet Heer in the Nation (8/31/26):

using the resources of the Pentagon to create a troll army of social-media influencers who could create an alternate reality where all his actions were brilliant victories.

‘Pentagon troll army’

Will Sommer (Bulwark, 8/27/26): “Secretly employing a shadowy, rabidly online personality for the apparent purpose of going after your enemies is a remarkable illustration of the kind of steps Hegseth appears willing to take to fight internecine political wars.”

While foreign enemies have posed a challenge, Hegseth has had better luck with domestic ones, purging many of his own generals (New York Times, 8/25/26), and nearly all of the Pentagon press corps (FAIR.org, 9/23/25).

Hegseth’s replacement press corps—who dutifully signed his loyalty oath that binds them to report only information “authorized” by the government—hailed from right-wing propaganda outlets like One America News, Gateway Pundit and LindellTV, which is “MyPillow Guy” Mike Lindell’s pet project.

Among the newbies was Jennica Pounds, a Utah influencer known as DataRepublican, who three months after receiving her press pass would transition from covering the Pentagon to working for it—while still posting regularly. “What Pounds didn’t reveal as she grew her social media presence was that she was secretly working at the Department of Defense,” Will Sommer reported for the Bulwark (8/27/26):

Pounds’ secret work for the Pentagon calls into question the motivations of several of her posts, such as when she took a jab at then–Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a Hegseth nemesis. It also raises serious questions about Secretary Pete Hegseth’s cozy relationship with outspoken conservative social media influencers, and whether it breaches serious ethical norms.

The Bulwark story—headlined “Pete Hegseth Is Building a Pentagon Troll Army”—noted that “Pounds appears to be just one of several people enlisted in such a task.”

Secret influencers

One member of Hegseth’s influencer squad argued that such “special government employees” are often “prohibited from revealing their status because of the sensitive nature of their work” (Washington Post, 8/30/26).

Three days later, the Washington Post (8/30/26) followed up with a story that began:

The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.

One of those secret hires was Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel and Townhall columnist who has over 600,000 social media followers. Above a video of Hegseth, Schlichter posted on X, “We are lucky to have @PeteHegseth.”

Such sentiments are less common among those who don’t work for Hegseth. “The Pentagon is using your tax dollars to hire influencers on X to put out partisan talking points,” Adam Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran and former Republican congressmember, posted in a video (X, 8/26/26). “In any other administration, this would be the biggest scandal of the century,” Kinzinger said, questioning how many other influencers the Trump administration is secretly paying to push its agenda.

Wyatt Reed (Grayzone, 9/16/26): “This incredibly unusual arrangement saw a Trump advocate being given credentials to cover Pentagon affairs up close as a nominally independent reporter, before being brought on board to defend US military conduct as an official government employee just one month later.”

There could be a lot. The US military budget, all in, is at least $1.5 trillion—a number Trump wants to increase by $500 billion, despite the Pentagon never having passed an audit (POGO, 6/9/26). So much money, accompanied by so little oversight, can buy a lot of influencers.

“The revelations about paid Pentagon propaganda posters come as the US military pursues a flurry of murky partnerships with prominent conservative influencers,” reported Grayzone’s Wyatt Reed (9/16/26). Among those is proud bigot Laura Loomer,

who is producing de facto press releases for self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, enjoying Pentagon press credentials, and earning references as an “informal advisor to the Department of War.”

The Pentagon’s secret propaganda operation, Reed noted,

appears to be in breach of two federal laws, the Hatch Act and the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibit government employees from engaging in political activities while on the clock, and forbid them from directing their propaganda efforts at the US population, respectively.

‘The soldiers’ newspaper’

This Stars & Stripes report (8/21/26) about military families forced to evacuate from Bahrain illustrates the paper’s grunt’s-eye view of military conflict.

Hegseth’s media manipulation doesn’t stop there; other recent reports revealed his efforts to kneecap Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-sponsored military newspaper. Stars and Stripes has a long track record of independent journalism, despite a third or more of its funding coming from the Department of Defense.

During World War II, famed Gen. George Patton sought to ban Stars and Stripes, and even threatened to jail cartoonist Bill Mauldin for mocking him (Wall Street Journal, 4/5/26; FAIR.org, 4/9/26). But Gen. Dwight Eisenhower told Patton to stand down (Pulitzer Center, 2/6/26), saying: “Stars and Stripes is the soldiers’ newspaper. We will not interfere.”

In the intervening decades, Stars and Stripes, which reaches 1.4 million daily users, has investigated (as Poynter notes—8/26/26)

the horrific conditions endured by Iraq and Afghanistan casualties at Walter Reed Medical Center, the crappy M16 rifles that jammed in Vietnam and the families caught in a bureaucratic hell after a chaotic evacuation from a naval base in Bahrain.

The Bahrain evacuation story (Stars and Stripes, 8/21/26), published just last month, exposed the hollowness of Hegseth’s flowery talk about the Iran War when it came to military families. It began:

Nearly six months after the US Navy evacuated 1,300 family members from Bahrain at the start of the Iran War…. Some evacuees say they have spent tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket for basic living expenses. Others are sleeping on the floors of temporary housing.

The repeated displacements have caused trauma for children, a spouse told Stars and Stripes. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s bumbling response to the pleas of soldiers and families included inadvertently directing them to the National Bank of Canada for relief assistance, according to a spouse.

‘Smells like censorship’

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) (Washington Post, 8/27/26): “This shameless censorship will only continue to erode veteran and servicemember credibility and trust in the newspaper, whose independence is essential.”

It’s one thing for Hegseth’s dirty laundry to be aired by what he calls the “fake news.” It’s quite another for it to be aired by the Pentagon’s own newspaper. Especially when Hegseth is desperate to craft a flattering—even presidential—narrative for himself.

The very day the Stars and Stripes story was published, the bylined reporter, Lara Korte, was fired for “insubordination,” she wrote on X (8/21/26).

To be clear, Korte was already on the chopping block, having publicly aired her concerns over the Pentagon’s push to exercise control over her newspaper the month before (Guardian, 8/27/26). “I’m working for Stars and Stripes,” Korte defiantly told CBS News (7/5/26) in July, “not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. I’m here to cover the military community.”

Five weeks after the CBS interview—and the day after another damning Stars and Stripes expose (8/11/26), this one about the deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which quoted a spouse as saying her sailor husband “hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow”—Pentagon official Andrew Brey “ordered” Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer to fire Korte, as well as editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, who also spoke with CBS, according to a lawsuit.

The suit against the Pentagon was filed by Korte and Slavin, as well as Lederer, who refused the order to fire the duo, and promptly was fired alongside them (Washington Post, 8/27/26).

Also suing the Pentagon is Stars and Stripes’ former ombud, who was fired in April, despite her position being congressionally mandated (Washington Post, 6/25/26). In her final column (4/8/26) before getting axed, Jacqueline Smith highlighted readers’ overwhelming opposition to Hegseth’s overhaul of the newspaper, including a retired Navy veteran, who wrote that it “smells like censorship.”

Originally reported by FAIR by Pete Tucker. Read the full story at the source.