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The Independent UK

World

Holly Baxter

Pete Hegseth’s panicky, angry, weirdly religious Iran war briefing was painful to watch

Pete Hegseth Donald Trump Iran United States Captain America

I’m starting to feel sorry for Pete Hegseth. Week after week, the defense secretary turns up at 8 a.m. sharp to defend the latest disaster in the Iran war — and week after week, he gets more angry about it, more visibly desperate, and more bizarrely religious.

Hegseth is quite clearly a man who wants to cosplay as Captain America but instead keeps wandering onto the set of Joker. “This is not a fair fight,” he said at the podium today, supposedly directly addressing Iran. “We are locked and loaded… We’d rather not have to do it… You don’t have a Navy or real domain awareness! You can’t control anything!”

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