War Sermons, Drone Grifts, and the Trump Family Rewards Program

Pete Hegseth turned a Pentagon briefing into a MAGA revival meeting while the Trump boys chased a fresh Pentagon-adjacent grift.

Good morning! Well, to everyone except Pete Hegseth, who apparently mistook a Pentagon briefing for an audition tape to play Secretary of Defense in a low-budget apocalyptic reboot of Top Gun directed by a youth pastor. Hegseth’s Iran update yesterday had so much chest-thumping, sermon-soaked, media-bashing testosterone in which he declared that the United States is “decimating the radical Iranian regime’s military in a way the world has never seen before” and insisted that “never before has a modern, capable military… been so quickly destroyed and made combat ineffective,” that it passed as an infomercial for annihilation.

He framed the war in cartoon-villain language, saying Iran’s leaders now look up and see only “the stars and stripes and the Star of David,” which he called “the evil regime’s worst nightmare.” He then rattled off one absolute claim after another: “Iran has no air defenses. Iran has no air force. Iran has no navy.” Just a full buffet of total-war swagger, as if the Secretary of Defense had wandered into the briefing room after binge-watching action movies and decided adjectives were for the weak. He also claimed Iran’s military production capacity has basically been erased, saying “all of Iran’s defense companies will be destroyed” and that its “entire ballistic missile production capacity” had been “functionally defeated, destroyed.” Not degraded, or disrupted. Destroyed, obliterated, flattened, vaporized. The man talks like every sentence should end with an explosion in the background.

And because apparently simple militarism was not enough, he veered into insult-comic territory, describing Iran’s leadership as “desperate and hiding,” “cowering,” and adding, “That’s what rats do.” He mocked the country’s new leader as “the so-called not-so supreme leader,” claimed he was “wounded and likely disfigured,” and sneered that because he issued only a written statement, “His father dead. He’s scared. He’s injured. He’s on the run.” Hegseth sounded like a drunk uncle doing regime-change fan fiction at Thanksgiving.

Then came the press tantrum. Hegseth was furious that the media keeps describing this as a war, or as instability, or as a problem for global shipping, because in his mind the real scandal is insufficiently patriotic chyron management. He whined about banners like “Middle East war intensifies” and “war widening,” then offered his own preferred state-approved headlines: “Iran increasingly desperate” and “Iran shrinking, going underground.” Which is especially rich given that confirmed reports say the Pentagon is now sending roughly 2,500 Marines aboard USS Tripoli toward the Middle East, the kind of move that tends to make “war widening” sound less like media bias and more like basic literacy. He actually used the phrase “an actual patriotic press,” which is the sort of thing that usually makes people sit up a little straighter when democracy is still functioning. He took a swipe at CNN as “fake news” and added, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” Very comforting to know the Secretary of Defense is spending wartime energy workshoping cable-news ownership jokes.

He then lavished praise on Trump in language that was only a cape and a fog machine away from full cult theater, declaring that “President Trump holds the cards,” and that his hand is “firmly on the wheel as well as on the throttle setting.” Not content with that, Hegseth wrapped the whole thing in “America first, peace through strength in action,” because apparently every bombing campaign now has to come with its own campaign-slogan gift bag. He also leaned hard into holy-war language. “I serve God, the troops, the country, the Constitution, and the President of the United States,” he said, before urging Americans to remain “on bended knee” and appeal to “Almighty God’s providence.” So the mood was less sober military command presence and more youth pastor with access to bombers.

And if all that still was not enough, he closed with good old-fashioned blood-and-thunder rhetoric, promising “No quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” insisting “We will stop at nothing to win,” and solemnly reminding everyone that “War is hell. War is chaos.” Which, yes, true enough, though it lands a bit differently when delivered by a man who spent the previous several minutes talking like the war itself was the coolest thing he has ever seen. So the basic shape of Hegseth’s remarks was this: Iran is collapsing, Trump is masterfully in control, the press is unpatriotic, the military is unstoppable, God is on speed dial, and anyone still asking inconvenient questions is apparently too stupid to appreciate the majesty of this all-American spectacle of righteous destruction. In other words, it was not a Pentagon briefing. It was a MAGA war sermon with missiles. Hegseth sounds like Dr. Strangelove rewritten by a Christian nationalist who thinks Starship Troopers was a documentary and fascist newsreels just had a branding problem. Perhaps he should be tested for steroid use.

While the rest of the planet wakes up to headlines about oil shocks, widening war, and Trump’s usual claim that everything is somehow “almost over” at the exact same time he is escalating it, the American press has also started following the money. And wouldn’t you know it, the money leads right back into the Trump family petri dish. The Wall Street Journal reports that Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are backing a new drone company, Powerus, that aims to cash in on fresh Pentagon demand for U.S.-made drones. This comes as the administration’s crackdown on new Chinese drone models creates a conveniently widened lane for domestic players. In other words, Dad reshapes the market, and the boys just happen to arrive with a shopping cart.

The details are somehow even more on-brand than the premise. Powerus is heading to market through a merger with a golf-course holding company tied to Trump interests, because of course the route into defense profiteering runs through golf. Golf courses, drone manufacturing, Ukrainian tech, Trump money, and Pentagon contracts all shoved into the same blender and poured straight into the Nasdaq. It is less an industrial policy than a corruption smoothie. The company is reportedly working to acquire or license Ukrainian drone technology, wrap it in an American flag, and sell it into the U.S. defense market. While Ukraine bleeds and taxpayers bankroll the Pentagon’s latest shopping spree, the Trump orbit is once again hovering nearby with outstretched hands, ready to monetize another crisis. In Trumpworld, even war comes with a family rewards program.

That drone story matters even more when placed next to reporting on the staggering cost of this conflict. International coverage yesterday drew the line cleanly: the Washington Post laid out the billions already burned in the first days of strikes, while the Wall Street Journal showed the Trump sons circling a new military-tech profit center, and other reporting raised questions about suspiciously well-timed gains on lightly regulated prediction markets. It is a very Trumpian ecosystem. Americans get the bill, Congress gets hit up for more money, oil traders lick their lips, defense contractors spot fresh opportunity, crypto gamblers somehow get lucky at just the right moment, and the president’s family discovers yet another adjacent business model that just happens to flourish in the smoke.

Because the chaos machine never sleeps, the “view from abroad” has been one of the more useful lenses for understanding the moral rot here. Scott Lucas speculates more than I would prefer in places, but he still lands the broader point: Trump talks about war the way he talks about everything else, with bluster, contradiction, and zero ethical coherence. One minute the war is nearly over. The next minute it can go on indefinitely. One minute he ran as the enemy of forever wars. The next he is casually talking like American power has no limits, no costs, and no constraints. He treats every conflict as a branding exercise and every contradiction as something that can be shouted over.

Lucas also hit on something more important than his conjecture: Trump’s habit of flattening all moral distinctions until nothing means anything anymore. In that worldview, the United States helping Ukraine defend itself against invasion is somehow morally interchangeable with Russia helping Iran while American forces are in the field. It is the same Trump logic every time: erase context, blur aggressor and victim, reduce everything to transactions and vibes, then act offended when anyone notices that his foreign policy sounds like it was brainstormed in a cigar lounge by men who confuse cynicism with intelligence. Moral vacancy in a suit that costs too much.

Because irony is dead but still somehow being propped up for donor events, Trump is also expected to serve as the reassuring face of the 2026 World Cup, a task for which he appears to be spectacularly unsuited unless FIFA decides the inaugural Peace Prize should also come with a clown nose and a fire extinguisher. Iran’s national team has now publicly pushed back against all the confusion surrounding its participation, making the entirely fair point that the World Cup is governed by FIFA, not by whichever unstable host-country leader happens to be free-posting that day. Trump’s response was exactly what you would expect: not a sober explanation of security planning, but a glittering sales pitch promising the greatest and safest sporting event in American history. The same man helping turn the region into a geopolitical bonfire wants the world to trust him to host a peaceful international tournament. FIFA should not just revoke the Peace Prize. They should demand it be returned with the box, the ribbon, and a handwritten apology to the concept of irony itself.

On a personal note, I am pleased to report that my fever has stayed under 99 for almost sixteen hours now, which feels like genuine progress and not a moment too soon, because I am very tired of dragging myself through the day feeling like a sack of damp laundry with opinions. The aches and pains have eased up just enough to remind me what normal is supposed to feel like, and Marz, naturally, has decided this improvement means negotiations are over and we must immediately capitalize on a break in the rain.