Donald Trump is a leader with an unusual breadth of mind – such breadth that he does not fit into the narrow corset of commitments, obligations, institutions, agreements and other similar “prejudices” in which other leaders sometimes suffocate. Not that we had the slightest doubt, but it is good that he himself clarified it for the remaining etherealists. When asked recently which successor leader in Iran would be “to his taste”, the American president boldly stated that it would not necessarily have to be a leader elected by the Iranian people, it could well be “religious”, especially since – we add maliciously – the Iranians have possessed theocratic Know How for almost half a century (since 1979) and it would be a shame for it to go to waste. “I have no problem with religious leaders,” Trump clarified for those who didn’t get it the first time; “I work with a lot of religious leaders and they are fantastic”. Just like that, so calmly and so simply, he dispelled the illusions of those – the few, it is true – who believed even for a moment that uncle Donald started such a bloody war solely to restore democracy in long-suffering Iran.
We first got suspicious in September 2025, as soon as Trump signed a presidential decree to rename the US Department of Defense to the Department of War. To be fair, this name was the name of the relevant ministry until 1949, when the Soviet Union acquired its own nuclear bomb, and the United States – as well as NATO, by the way – decided that they should emphasize their defensive rather than offensive purpose. Last year’s sour grapes. Defenses and nonsense! Is it possible to maintain the (too far from the second) most powerful army in the world and wait like a “chicken” when they will attack you? On the other hand, of course, Trump systematically marketed himself to his followers as the “President of Peace” and, given his deep television education (he even was a successful presenter of “The Apprentice” in the past), if you asked him about “Big Brother”, he would probably refer you to the world-famous reality TV show and not to George Orwell’s ‘1984’, where, with the use of the infamous ‘Newspeak’, words now meant their opposite: you said ‘hate’ and you meant ‘love’, you said ‘war’ and you meant ‘peace’ and so on. No, we do not regard uncle Donald capable of such subtle semiotic pirouettes.
However, Donald Trump’s real ‘success’ was the Secretary of War himself. One would think that he was ripped straight from “Dr. Strangelove” (1964) by the late Stanley Kubrick, and more specifically from Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, wonderfully played by Sterling Hayden (to whom Trump’s Secretary of War even resembles in appearance), a madman who provokes a global nuclear conflict in order to protect our “precious bodily fluids” from communist contamination.
Like Jack Ripper, Pete Hegseth, uncle Donald’s 46-year-old Secretary of War, comes from the military, with a successful combat career in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a similarly successful television career on the ultra-conservative Fox News channel. And if you don’t know anything about his biography, just take a look at his body, where with seven (!) tattoos he could well be posthumously proclaimed the patron saint of body piercing: next to the rifle and the flag that we would reasonably expect every army nut to ‘ink’, we see phrases in Latin, acronyms in Greek, even words in Arabic (with an offensive meaning for the Arabs), a religious/patriotic delirium and, above all, a hymn to the Christian crusades against the Islamic world. In addition – and for anyone who hasn’t figured it out yet – Pete Hegseth has published his book “American Crusade”. We understand each other, I suppose.
Christian nationalism, which Pete Hegseth embraces and blatantly preaches, even transforming his body into a propaganda poster, is a movement that is at the opposite end of what a modern secular democratic state advocates for. He supports legislation that will protect the Christian religion from any criticism or challenge, the presence of Christian symbols and idols in public view, state intervention in the practice and promotion of the Christian religion in public education, such as with mandatory school prayer – in short, he identifies state and church in a (as wide as the cat can step) mild theocratic regime, where “non-believers” will live as second-class citizens, until the start of the next crusade, when it will not be necessary for them to live at all. Ideas of this type and quality explain quite well to us why Donald Trump generally has no problem with “religious leaders”, but the parallel fact that he appoints as Secretary of War a body and soul fanatic apostle of these ideas is not a comforting sign.
Petros Tatsopoulos is a writer and former Member of the Greek Parliament.
Adaptation to English of the original article published in “The TOC”, March 09, 2026 .
