Trump’s team has learned a useful lesson in the years since Trump was forced into the wilderness: Do not try to make the media like you, because it cannot be done. Do not apologize for your positions. And do attack the media. Most recently, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who is second only to Trump as the most reviled man in the administration, showed that he’s learned this lesson. However, in addition to praising him for a lesson well learned, it’s worthwhile considering why the media despise him so much.
Pete Hegseth went back to his old stomping grounds of Fox News and appeared on the Will Cain show. Will Cain made an interesting observation: “One hundred percent of the coverage of you from the mainstream record has been negative.” Hegseth, to his credit, actually guffawed, rather than getting ruffled.
Then, he explained that the media’s hatred for him has nothing to do with him and everything to do with their transferring to him their hatred for Donald Trump:
"Bring it on!" ????@SecDef Pete Hegseth just blasted the press for the negative coverage of him — & revealed that the men and women of the military have his back.
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) May 19, 2025
"Forget the press! The notes I get from privates, and from captains, and from new recruits — THAT'S what fuels us!" pic.twitter.com/c4PbapZjiT
That’s a record. I mean, I should get a medal for that. You know what I attribute it to? They’re going after President Trump, just like they did from the minute he came down the escalator in his first term, and now, they want to tear him down, his agenda down, and his voters down. Because I support him fully, and I’m willing to be strong and bold in that proclamation, they’re gonna come at me in any way possible. To that I say, bring it on. To that, I say, it’s not going to deter me. It only fuels what we’re doing at the Pentagon on behalf of the warfighter, on behalf of the commander-in-chief, on behalf of restoring it back to basics and lethality.
The notes I get, forget the press, the notes I get from privates and from captains and from new recruits, that’s what fuels us. They’re like, thank goodness President Trump showed up, and you showed up, and restored it to what we always wanted it to be. We’re back to training. we’re back to basic standards. I can be a commander again. I can focus on the enemy. That was not the case. We had our troops being called extremists, or being forced to take an experimental vaccine, or being judged by the color of their skin, or their gender. That’s not the focus anymore.
Hegseth is correct that the people in the military matter a great deal more than the media talking heads. The media have hated the military since the Vietnam War, so that’s not going to change. What is changing is that, since Trump won the election and Hegseth promised to turn the military into a fighting machine, military recruitment has soared:
The Army is poised to easily hit its recruiting target this year as the service has made enormous gains in filling the ranks ahead of its traditional summer rush of new enlistments.
As of last week [the week ending April 18] , the Army had enlisted 51,837 recruits, or 85% of its 61,000 target for fiscal 2025, according service data provided to Military.com. A significant portion of that total -- roughly 14,000 -- comes from the service's delayed-entry program, or DEP, which is composed of recruits who signed up last year but are only now shipping out to basic training. The Army has the rest of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, to hit its recruiting quota.
Despite the DEP, the numbers still represent an upswing compared to last year. At this point in 2024, the Army had reached just 63% of its goal, pulling in 34,512 recruits -- including only 5,000 from the DEP. The surge in delayed entries this year is largely attributed to the Army's aggressive recruiting pace in 2024, which outstripped available training capacity.
After missing its recruiting goals in multiple recent years, the Army hit its target last year for the first time since 2021 -- a fragile success following a decade of downward trends on enlistment numbers.
What’s interesting is why the media hate the military so much and, especially, hate Hegseth so much. And I think Hegseth touched on the issue at the very end of his response, when he mentioned that troops were no longer “being judged by the color of their skin, or their gender.”
The left is invested in race and non-standard sexuality as a way to destroy America. In the last issue of the American Thinker Members’ Weekly Newsletter, a subscriber-only newsletter with editorials from American Thinker’s editors, I commented on the ramifications of something Bryan Burrough revealed in his superb Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.
He explains that the fuel that powered the underground’s rage was an obsessive focus on race, along with the white middle-class radicals’ desperate desire to curry favor with black radicals, such as the Black Panther crowd. “What the underground movement was truly about—what it was always about—was the plight of black Americans.”
That’s still true, even though black Americans no longer have a plight akin to the Jim Crow days of the 1950s and early 1960s. Additionally, leftists have added to that fuel mixture transgenderism. As I posited long ago, transgenderism and other deviant sexualities teach children that their bodies are disconnected from biological reality. If you can convince people of that fact, you own them, because you define all aspects of their reality.
To the extent that the American military is America’s first and last line of defense against enemies both foreign and domestic, nothing matters more to the left than bringing to the military the revolutionary fervor of race and the physical disassociation of transgenderism. It’s great to turn children into self-loathing people who are defined by race (whether victim or predator) and incapable of recognizing the reality of their bodies, but the real win is to destroy the military from within.
Secretary Hegseth, by aggressively attacking the leftists’ radicalism within the military—something he promised to do in the run-up to his nomination—undercut leftism’s ability to disarm the American nation at a fundamental level. No wonder the media, the mouthpieces of the socialist revolution, hate him so much.
Image: X screen grab.