A New Crusade? Trump Taps Christian Nationalists Pete Hegseth & Mike Huckabee to Top Posts

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman in Denver, Colorado, broadcasting from PBS12 right here in Five Points Media Center, also home to our colleagues at Free Speech TV, a wonderful media center, joined by Democracy Now!’s Nermeen Shaikh in New York.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Concerns are mounting over Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, Fox News host and military veteran Pete Hegseth. CBS News reports that Hegseth was one of 12 National Guard members who were removed as guards for President Biden’s 2021 inauguration over possible extremist ties. Hegseth has tattoos associated with the white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements, including what’s known as a Jerusalem cross, a symbol used by Christian nationalists.

Meanwhile, officials in Monterey, California, have confirmed police investigated Hegseth as part of an alleged sexual assault that occurred in 2017 at a hotel where Hegseth addressed the California Federation of Republican Women.

AMY GOODMAN: Pete Hegseth has also been a vocal opponent of the Pentagon’s embrace of multiculturalism and the Pentagon’s decision to allow women to serve in combat. Hegseth, who once served at Guantánamo, made headlines in 2019 for pushing Trump to pardon U.S. soldiers accused of war crimes, including one convicted of murder.

We’re joined now by Jeff Sharlet, journalist and author, professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. His book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Professor Sharlet’s new piece for Religion Dispatches is headlined “Meet Pete Hegseth, the Man Who Will Lead the Entire US Military — A Man Deemed an ‘Extremist’ by the US Military.”

Well, let’s start right there, Jeff Sharlet. Explain what you mean. Who called him an extremist, and what are Pete Hegseth’s views?

JEFF SHARLET: The number one person who called Pete Segseth an extremist is Pete Hegseth. It’s page one of his new book, The War on Warriors. It’s the way he leads out his interviews, this idea that he was too extreme for today’s “woke” military, dominated, as he puts it, his words, by trans, lesbian, Black females. And so, he tells a story of being pushed out of the military. We can’t actually confirm that. No one can confirm that. I think what’s more important about it is that he wants that story out there. He wants it known that he is too far to the right for the Armed Forces.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Jeff Sharlet, could you explain? What do you think led Trump to name him?

JEFF SHARLET: So, Pete Hegseth, one, he’s from Central Casting. He’s got the chiseled jaw. He’s got the biceps that he flexes on his Instagram showing off his tattoos that are from the white supremacist world.

But he really came to Trump’s attention through his advocacy for three military personnel charged or convicted of war crimes, and most famously Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who was — his own men said that he stabbed to death a teenage prisoner who was receiving medical care, shot deliberately a young girl. And Hegseth used his platform to say — to sort of amplify Trump’s idea — we’ve heard that Trump says the “one rough hour” that violence is needed. And Trump liked it.

But more than that, Hegseth promises in his book the first war he’s going to wage is against the U.S. military — that’s whom he describes as the domestic enemy, the enemy within — to purge the generals who are disloyal to Trump and replace them [inaudible] who will do absolutely the commander’s will. And I’m not paraphrasing. What’s startling to me about this pick and the reaction to it is we speak of it as concerns. Here’s a man who wrote a book declaring his intention to wage, not metaphorical, but actual war within the United States. That’s what he says. He says this is not a political project anymore. This is a civil war.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Is anything known at all about his foreign policy positions? What does he think about the position of the U.S. military around the world?

JEFF SHARLET: That’s actually kind of — that’s another part of what makes him appealing to Trump, is, on the one hand, he writes, in traditional fascist style, that war is absolutely necessary for what he calls normal men to realize their masculinity. On the other hand, like Trump, he presents this kind of isolationist posture. It’s not that he doesn’t want Israel to wage total war; he doesn’t care as much about it. So, then he says, “OK, so, where is this war? The war is within, and we will depend on the so-called normal men in Israel.”

He is, however — and this is important — he’s a Christian nationalist. He believes absolutely in the idea of the ingathering of Israel as a stage toward the Book of Revelation in the Bible. So, he sees Israel’s war on the Palestinians as biblical prophecy and one that must be supported for the sake of Christendom.

AMY GOODMAN: And we want to continue on that strain and also talk about Governor Huckabee, also a proud Christian nationalist, who President Trump has nominated to be the ambassador to Israel. But I wanted to stick with something you said for one moment and that you wrote about, Jeff Sharlet, in your piece. You laughed about, you know, his biceps. But it’s what’s on his biceps, those tattoos. “On his chest he’s had inked a ‘Jerusalem cross’ — a symbol of the crusaders’ holy war against Muslims and Jews — and on the flip side of his bicep there’s this, featured on his Instagram: ‘Deus Vult,’ God wills it, is more crusader kitsch — and popular with White supremacists.” Talk more about this. And then we’ll play what he has to say to, for example, to Netanyahu.

JEFF SHARLET: So, Hegseth talks a lot about his tattoos. They’re important to him. He began getting them around 2016. The very first one was a cross with a sword running down the middle, which he said was a tribute to one of his favorite biblical verses, Matthew 10:34. This is taken by those who want not a peaceful Christianity, but a war religion. It’s where Christ says, “I come to bring not peace, but the sword.”

He then starts adding this, as I say, crusader kitsch, because it’s important. The Jerusalem cross, it was — is always a political symbol. It’s not a symbol of spiritual struggle, just like “Deus Vult.” But this imagery comes into popular culture not through deep study of history, but through a 2005 Ridley Scott movie, The Kingdom of Heaven. Much like the right at one point was emulating Braveheart, now they’re emulating this movie, this idea of this crusader knight who wages holy war against Muslims, against Jews.

In Hegseth’s book, he talks at great length about the story of Gideon from the Book of Judges. And what’s interesting to him about Gideon is that Gideon’s first step was to purge the enemies within. That was the first battle. And then he emphasizes another part. Gideon goes to war. And we sort of know this. These are sort of Bible stories. But the part that he really likes is that after they won the battle, Gideon orders his men to hunt down every one of the other force and, in Hegseth’s words, “eliminate them all.”

That’s the idea of this sleeve of tattoos, which mixes American nationalism, an AR-15 folded into an American flag, 1775, the year the Army was founded, but also part of sort of the mythos of J6, a group that he has had very positive things to say about.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, we’d like to turn now to ask about President-elect Trump’s selection of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as the next U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is a leading U.S. Christian Zionist who’s openly advocated for Israel’s annexation of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 2008, Huckabee declared, quote, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” This is Huckabee speaking in 2017, when he was visiting an illegal Israeli settlement.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Israel would only be acting on the property it already owns. I think Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria. There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities. They’re neighborhoods. They’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Jeff Sharlet, that’s Huckabee speaking in 2017. So, if you could comment on what he said and also why Trump has selected him?

JEFF SHARLET: I mean, Huckabee is a sort of a key element of the Trump coalition. He brings in evangelicals, and particularly kind of the older, more traditional evangelicals. He’s a Southern Baptist. And he’s also been involved with Israel for a long time. As he says, since 1973, he leads pilgrimages of Christians.

It’s important to understand that in all his advocacy for Israel, this comes from no particular care for the Jewish people, but, as he puts it, he says, “It’s because I’ve read the end of the book,” and by which he means the Book of Revelation. And again, like Hegseth, he sees Israel as playing a role in a battle not so much between Israelis and Palestinians, but as between Christendom versus the real enemy.

There’s an episode of his show in which he talks about who’s really behind Hamas. And I tuned in, thinking, you know, he was probably going to talk the various ideas and so on. And instead, he sounded like the old Saturday Night Live character: “Satan.” Hamas is, he argues, demon-filled — again, not a metaphor for him.

So this is the man who is sort of representing the United States in Israel now, who is as fully fundamentalist as even the furthest-right element of the Israeli government right now, and sees this as a holy war — and again, kind of like Hegseth — in which any step is justified. You are fighting for God, and that’s the end of the story for him.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Sharlet, you have written this book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. You certainly have extensively followed white nationalists, white supremacists. Where do Christian nationalists and Christian Zionists fit into this picture? I mean, he calls himself a Christian Zionist. You heard Huckabee — and by the way, he was the governor of Arkansas. His daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is now the governor of Arkansas, and she was the spokesperson for the first President Trump White House. But where does he fit? Where do Christian Zionists fit into this whole story? And how do Jewish Zionists relate to them? And how does Israel, people like Netanyahu — how do they rely on Christian Zionists?

JEFF SHARLET: Huckabee likes to brag about his special relationship with Netanyahu. And Israel has — or, right-wing Israel governments have said, “Look, Christian Zionists are useful to us, so we’re going to support them.” In fact, the right-wing Israeli governments have said Christian Zionists are actually our better American allies than American Jews.

But Christian Zionism has in some ways been folded into Christian nationalism. Every Christian Zionist is a Christian nationalist, but not every Christian nationalist is a Christian Zionist. Christian nationalism is the larger view — and it tells us something more about what Huckabee is doing. When you go through his archive, so often when he’s talking about Israel, what he’s really talking about is, from his point of view, a struggle for power on the battleground that really matters, which is the United States. And so, for instance, he talks more — when he wants to talk about Hamas, he often talks about Harvard. He talks about elites, these sort of — again, this idea of the enemy within. What happens in Israel is theologically important to him, but it’s more useful politically in the United States. And that’s where it brings us back around to Christian nationalism, this idea of a kind of — not so much a pious nation as a holy war nation, and the war is within.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Sharlet, we want to thank you so much for being with us, journalist and author, professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. We’ll link to your piece, “Meet Pete Hegseth, the Man Who Will Lead the Entire US Military — A Man Deemed an ‘Extremist’ by the US Military.”

Coming up, we go to Ithaca to speak with Cornell professor Enzo Traverso, author of Gaza Faces History.