This is the White House Oval Office wall. This is so tacky. It is incredibly embarassing for us as Americans.
Saturday, March 21, 2026
Surprise, unease in Japan after Trump uses Pearl Harbor to defend Iran war | AP News
Surprise, embarrassment, unease in Japan after Trump uses Pearl Harbor to defend Iran war
"TOKYO (AP) — Senior U.S. and Japanese officials tend to shy away from anything but very careful public comments about Japan’s 1941 sneak attack on U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor. So there was embarrassment, confusion and unease on Saturday in Japan after President Donald Trump casually used the World War II attack to justify his secrecy before launching the war against Iran.
The Japanese discomfort was compounded by the fact that Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi was sitting awkwardly at Trump’s side as he spoke.
Partly, the reaction is linked to the crucial security and economic role that the U.S. plays for Japan, its top ally in the region. Put simply, Japan needs to make sure the U.S. relationship thrives. That’s why Takaichi was in Washington.
But it’s also a reflection of just how fresh the political debate about Japan’s role in World War II remains here, even 80 years after its end.
Senior leaders, including Takaichi, have argued that Japan has apologized enough for what happened in the war. Takaichi herself has recently hinted at visiting Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where Japanese war criminals are honored among the 2.5 million war dead.
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AP AUDIO:Surprise, embarrassment, unease in Japan after Trump uses Pearl Harbor to defend Iran war
Surprise, embarrassment, unease in Japan after Trump uses Pearl Harbor to defend Iran war. AP correspondent Julie Walker reports.
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It is, however, somewhat startling for Japan to see these history questions spill over into a White House summit.
On Thursday, when asked by a Japanese reporter why he didn’t tell allies in Europe and Asia ahead of the U.S. attack on Iran, Trump cited Pearl Harbor to defend his decision, saying, ‘Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK?”
The liberal leaning Asahi newspaper said in an editorial Saturday that Trump’s comments “should not be overlooked.”
“Making such a remark to justify a sneak attack and boast about its outcome is a piece of nonsense that ignores lessons from history,” Asahi said.
Claims of rudeness
Social media reaction has ranged from accusations of ignorance and rudeness by the U.S. president to claims that he didn’t see Japan as an equal partner. There were calls for Japan to protest what Trump said.
Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, said in an online opinion piece published in the Nikkei newspaper Saturday that the comment signaled that Trump was “not bound by existing American common sense.”
“I get the impression that the comment was intended to bring the Japanese reporter (who asked the question) or Ms. Takaichi into complicity in order to justify his ‘sneak attack’ on Iran during diplomatic negotiations and without telling allied countries,” Watanabe said.
There’s also a feeling that an unspoken understanding exists between U.S. and Japanese leaders to tread carefully on the subject. Both sides need each other, with Washington relying on Japan to host 50,000 troops and an array of powerful hi-tech weapons, and Japan relying on the U.S. nuclear umbrella to deter hostile, nuclear-armed neighbors.
Japan’s post-World War II constitution bans the use of force except for its self-defense, but Takaichi and other officials are now seeking to expand the military’s role.
When it comes to U.S.-Japan reconciliation, many here look to the example of former leaders Barack Obama and Shinzo Abe, who in 2016 paid tribute together at the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and at the Hiroshima Peace Park.
Mixed reaction for Japan’s leader
Takaichi, a hard-line conservative, was praised for not reacting to the comments by Trump, letting them pass with a roll of her eyes and a glance at her ministers seated nearby.
After all, the goal of her summit was to deepen ties with her most important ally, not debate World War II. She arrived shortly after Trump suggested that Japan was among the nations that did not quickly join his call to help protect the Strait of Hormuz.
Some, however, criticized Takaichi for not speaking up.
Hitoshi Tanaka, a former diplomat and a special adviser at the Japan Research Institute think tank, wrote on X that he felt embarrassed to see Takaichi flattering Trump.
“As national leaders, they are equals. … To make an equal relationship is not to flatter,” he said. “Just doing what pleases Trump and calling it a success if you are not hurt is too sad.”
Reporter criticized
There was initial blame on social media of the Japanese reporter who asked the question that prompted Trump’s Pearl Harbor comment.
The reporter, Morio Chijiiwa with TV Asahi, later said on a talk show that he asked the question to represent the feelings of Japanese who are not happy about Trump’s one-sided attack on Iran, and because other countries, including Japan, are being asked to help out.
“So that’s why I asked the question. I was meaning to say, Why didn’t you tell us, why are you troubling us?” he said. “Then President Trump hit back with the Pearl Harbor attack. … I found it extremely awkward for him to change the subject.”
Junji Miyako, 53, said Takaichi flattering Trump felt more condescending to him than the President’s Pearl Harbor remark.
“I was so frustrated to see Takaichi didn’t even say anything to Trump to stop the war,” he said. “I think Trump’s Pearl Harbor comment was stupid, but to me the war he started is a much bigger problem.”
___
This story has been corrected to state that Trump spoke on Thursday, not Friday.
Klug is the AP’s news director for the Koreas, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. He’s covered Asia since 2005 and has reported from across the region, including multiple trips to North Korea.
Yamaguchi is based in Tokyo and covers Japanese politics, security, nuclear energy and social issues for The Associated Press."
‘I’ve learned first-hand how evil is tolerated’: Colm Tóibín on living in the US under Trump | Colm Tóibín | The Guardian
‘I’ve learned first-hand how evil is tolerated’: Colm Tóibín on living in the US under Trump
"The Brooklyn author on immigration and the inspiration behind his latest collection of stories
I often write the first paragraph of a story in a notebook, add to it every so often or leave it there to see if something might emerge from it. In 2008, in San Francisco, I went with three friends on a hike near Muir Woods overlooking the Pacific Ocean. At the summit, there was a kind of lodge where you could get a bed for the night and use the kitchen to make your own dinner. The view was spectacular.
As we climbed, I began to imagine a character, an Irish guy who had made up his mind to go home. This was his last big outing in the landscape. He had been working as a plumber. Dotted in the Bay Area were houses where he had repaired pipes and installed new sinks and toilets and washing machines. This was his legacy in America. He was someone who could be depended on in an emergency. But he was illegal and he was going home.
Over the next few years, the story became more solid. If my character left America, he knew that he would never be allowed back. He had a daughter from a marriage that had ended. He was crazy about her. If he left, he would lose the connection with her. I imagined him having one last day out with his daughter in that beautiful place. I wrote some more of the story and then I left it aside.
Sixteen years later, the story came back into my mind. It occurred to me that the election of Donald Trump for the second term and the prospect of him taking it out on illegal immigrants would be the actual spur to make my character really decide that he had to go home. He would leave on Monday 20 January 2025, the precise date of Trump’s inauguration. The hike with his daughter, almost a teenager, would take place on Saturday 18 January.
I worked it so that I would write the story of the hike on the very day it took place. I was in the same time zone. The inauguration was looming. ICE was coming towards us. Trump was getting louder and more ominous. As my protagonist and his daughter set out from the city, I was writing what they might say and do at the same time of the morning in question. They didn’t know (as I didn’t know) how they would find a parking space. But then it became easier than they (or I) had imagined. The aim was to finish this section that day. I could make changes, but they would be small. I would try to make it stick, so that I would not have to rewrite it on another day, a day when Trump had already taken over. I wanted the story done by then. And I wanted to publish it soon afterwards. It was superstitious; it felt serious at the time.
Sometimes, a glimpse is enough to start with, or a small detail from a much larger story. In his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, Henry James talks about this idea of a “germ”, what he called “a mere floating particle in the stream of talk”, something that “has the virus of suggestion”. Life, as James would have it, is “all inclusion and confusion”, just as art is “all discrimination and selection”. If you are seeking the inspiration for a story, then very little is more than enough. Something hinted – a clue, a suggestion – can do more in the imagination than something spelled out.
About 20 years ago, I interviewed a historian in the area of the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pallars. Because the Pallars is sparsely populated and remote, the historian had been able to account for every single death there in the Spanish civil war. And he was also able to collect many small details about injuries, bombardments and movements of troops.
What was strange, he said, was that in the summer of 1938 the town of Pobla de Segur in the Pallars was almost quiet. The real action was elsewhere. Thus, the fascist soldiers could hold parties at night down by the river, play guitar and drink plenty.
The historian invited a general who had been a young officer in Franco’s army in 1938 to return to the Pallars more than half a century later and show him where certain things had happened. As the general, now in his 70s, was walking through the town, he met a local woman who was out shopping, and, with surprise and a kind of delight, the two recognised one another immediately. They had known each other in that summer, the summer of 1938. She was from a world that was vehemently anti-Franco; no one wanted to remember those parties by the river.
That was all I needed. I almost asked the historian to tell me nothing more beyond that single encounter on the street. From that, I could start imagining those nights by the river in that summer of the civil war. And then conjure up the woman years later being told that the young soldier she had fallen in love with, whom she hadn’t seen for more than 50 years, was coming on a visit – he was a retired general now – and he remembered her name and he would like to see her.
It is important to be ready not to write the drama. At first, I tried to see what that meeting would be like. And then it struck me that it would be more powerful if the woman and the soldier didn’t meet all those years later. He had invited her to lunch but she didn’t go. The story would centre on how she spent those hours, knowing he was so close by, not meeting him.
The confrontation that does not occur is often more dramatic than the one that does. At the very end of another story, A Sum of Money, the young man who has been sent home from boarding school for stealing money has to face his parents. I sat gazing at a blank page for a long time as I worked out how this fraught encounter might be written until I realised that it didn’t have to be written at all. In the finished story, no one says anything. They almost do and then think better of it.
But something happens that makes a difference. The lack of open drama is a way to allow a shift to take place in someone’s sensibility. My job is to give it as much nuance and ambiguity as I can and also make it matter, make the arrow hit its mark.
James wrote about a fellow novelist who had published a much praised work of fiction about French Protestant youth. When someone asked her how she knew so much about French Protestant youth, she replied that once she was walking down a stairway in Paris and looked in through a doorway and saw a group of French Protestant youth. That is where her knowledge came from, just that. What James appreciated was the ability “to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern”.
In spring 1988 I decided to find a small apartment in Barcelona. One day, as I waited to be shown around a possible rental, three women in their 60s joined the queue. We spoke for just two or three minutes, but enough for me to discover they were sisters, they were Catalans, they had come back from living in Argentina for many years, they found prices in Barcelona very high. They finished one another’s sentences.
I waited 30 years to write The Catalan Girls. It is, at 30,000 words, the longest story in my latest collection. I imagined the lives of those three women I had fleetingly encountered. I dreamed up how and why they went to Argentina, how each of them lived there, and then how they came back to Catalonia. I made the middle one lesbian, the youngest dreamy and the eldest bossy. I gave them lovers and husbands. I imagined that the bossy one bossed her two younger sisters into getting the same hairdo as she had before they travelled back to Spain.
I moved closer also to what I knew. I imagined the three sisters attending the same festival in the village of Tírvia in the Pallars as I attended in July 2017. I could easily have seen them if I had looked over. I knew what music the band was playing.
Other elements in the story came from memory. The house where the middle sister lives in the outskirts of Buenos Aires is precisely where I lodged in the spring and early summer of 1985. Her room is my room. The apartment where the youngest sister lives, paid for by her lover, is where I also lived in the spring of 2013.
In writing stories, I get energy from rooms I knew but no longer live in, from things that have gone, from spaces that seem oddly haunted and have lodged in the memory or could come back in dreams. In A Sum of Money, much of the action takes place in the dormitory known as The Attic at St Peter’s College, Wexford. I have not been in that dormitory since 1971.
In the early years of this century, I worked for a semester at various American universities in cities where I will not live again. Thus, in a story called Barton Springs, I could conjure up Austin in Texas, and in Five Bridges, the city of San Francisco. In Sleep, I could venture into an apartment I sublet near Columbia University in 2012 and 2013. I could put my hero in my bed. I could have him watch from the same window as I watched from, with a view of the George Washington Bridge. When I take him back to Dublin, I have him spend time in the long living room in Ranelagh that belonged to the feminist writer June Levine and her husband the psychiatrist Ivor Browne. The bar in Barcelona in A Free Man is a place I once knew well. The story The News from Dublin opens in the back room of the house where I was raised, a house that has long been sold. I won’t go back there.
By the time I wrote those stories, those spaces could only be visited in my memory or in my imagination. Other spaces, such as the room where I am now in New York, have not been written about. Not yet. They have not been lost yet. I do not regret them or miss them. They are not part of a world that I can imagine, a world that has somehow been completed and is ready to be framed or entered stealthily, as a ghost might come and haunt a story.
In the future, if I live long enough, I will be able to see this room as though framed, as though completed. It will be part of memory, part of history. I will be able to write about it. This is the room where I learned first‑hand not only what evil is like but how evil is tolerated. What is strange about being in America in the time of Trump is how ordinary it is, how what was unimaginable just over a year ago is suddenly, shockingly no longer a surprise.
For Five Bridges, I imagined an Irishman, illegal in San Francisco, realising the danger if he stayed. A year after it was published, elements of the story came true. On 9 February, the Guardian reported on the case of Seamus Culleton, from County Kilkenny in Ireland, who came to the United States on precisely the same visa as my character in Five Bridges, and who also built a life over decades.
Culleton was arrested by ICE in September while buying supplies at the hardware store in Massachusetts. After being held in ICE facilities near Boston and in Buffalo, he was flown to El Paso, where he was in a cell with more than 70 men. Culleton told the Irish Times that the detention centre was cold, damp and squalid, and there were fights over insufficient food – “like a concentration camp, absolute hell”.
This is a fate my character in Five Bridges managed to avoid. In the stories of the future, such characters will not be so lucky.
U.S. eases Iranian oil sanctions in scramble to contain energy prices, handing Tehran a boost
U.S. eases Iranian oil sanctions in scramble to contain energy prices, handing Tehran a boost
"Experts say the U.S. risks "funding a war against itself" as sanctions against Iranian oil are lifted, but the step may not do much to contain the conflict's economic ripple effects.
In a twist of wartime irony, the United States has moved to ease sanctions on Iranian oil to cool surging energy prices, a potential boon for Tehran as Washington scrambles to contain the economic shockwaves of its military campaign.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday the easing of sanctions, first imposed after Iran's 1979 revolution, would be “narrowly tailored” and only temporary, “permitting the sale of Iranian oil currently stranded at sea.”
“By temporarily unlocking this existing supply for the world, the United States will quickly bring approximately 140 million barrels of oil to global markets, expanding the amount of worldwide energy and helping to relieve the temporary pressures on supply caused by Iran,” Bessent added.
About 20% of the oil that the world consumes every day travels via the Strait of Hormuz, which runs along part of Iran’s coast. But since the war began at the end of February, shipping in the channel has come to a halt.
Retail gas prices have risen 93 cents per gallon and U.S. crude oil has soared more than 70% since the start of the year, as geopolitical strategy and economic reality collide.
At current prices, the amount of oil Bessent said the measures would bring to market would be worth more than $14 billion for Tehran.
Experts say his decision shines a light on a lack of strategic planning and warn that such measures are unlikely to make a difference to the wider economic pressures.
“The U.S. is funding a war against itself,” Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher on Iran at the Institute for National Security Studies, which is affiliated with Tel Aviv University in Israel, told NBC News.
Three things Richard Engel is watching as Iran war develops
“What we are seeing is really a flawed campaign, not in terms of operational size, but from the strategic preparation for the campaign itself,” he said. “The oil price is becoming much more important than eliminating this regime in Iran.”
Moritz Brake, a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies, said the decision to ease sanctions on Iranian oil “points in the direction of an underestimation of how well Iran would be able to resist the assault and the repercussions on the global economy.”
“The risks have been underestimated,” he told NBC News.
The U.S. has already undertaken other efforts to boost supply, including the release of millions of barrels of oil reserves, part of a global effort from International Energy Agency member countries. Since the beginning of the month, the administration has also lifted the Jones Act, easing some shipping regulations, and has temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil as well.
Brake noted that the war in Iran was having a “double effect” on Russia’s war on Ukraine.
“On the one hand, drone attacks have gone down in Ukraine because of Iranian drones no longer being shipped to Russia.” he said. “At the same time, the Russian war machine gets fueled with additional money because of rising oil prices and lifted sanctions.”
Stocks sold off sharply Friday as headlines about the war weighed heavily on market sentiment, delivering the worst four-week trading period since April 2025, when the Trump administration’s trade tariffs dominated the news.
Oil prices rose once again, with international (Brent) oil trading around $111, ending Friday up 8.3% for the week and 84% for the year.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said in an email to employees Friday that the company will be canceling some flights as it prepares for higher oil prices because of the war with Iran.
“Our plans assume oil goes to $175/barrel and doesn’t get back down to $100/barrel until the end of 2027,” Kirby wrote. “Honestly, I think there’s a good chance it won’t be that bad,” he added, but “there isn’t much downside for us to preparing for that outcome.”
Kirby wrote that some less profitable flights are expected to be cut in the short term because of oil prices, like off-peak and red-eye flights. He made the comments in a message in which he said that jet fuel prices have more than doubled in the last three weeks.
“If prices stayed at this level, it would mean an extra $11B in annual expense just for jet fuel,” he said. “For perspective, in United’s best year ever, we made less than $5B.”
Citrinowicz said that measures to ease sanctions were unlikely to change the economic reality.
“Everybody knows that as long as Iran is controlling the straits, nothing will change in terms of the ability to take out the oil,” he said. “You cannot beat geography.”
Opinion | Trump Is Hiding the Truth About the War in Iran - The New York Times
Trump Is Hiding the Truth About the War in Iran
"The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
From his first announcement of the attack on Iran on Feb. 28, President Trump has issued a stream of falsehoods about the war. He has said Iran wants to engage in negotiations, though its government shows no sign of it. He has claimed that the United States “destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability” when Tehran continues to inflict damage throughout the region. He has said the war is almost complete even as he calls in reinforcements from around the globe.
Lying is standard behavior for Mr. Trump, of course. His political career began with a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace, and he has lied about his business, his wealth, his inauguration crowd size, his defeat in the 2020 election and so much more. A CNN tally of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods during one part of his first term found that he averaged eight false claims per day. Many people are so accustomed to his lies that they hardly notice them anymore.
Yet lying about war is uniquely corrosive. When a president signals that the truth does not matter in wartime, he encourages his cabinet and his generals to mislead the country and one another about how the war is going. He creates a culture in which deadly mistakes and even war crimes can become more common. He makes it harder to win by hiding the realities of conflict and by making allies wary of joining the fight. Ultimately, he undermines American values and interests.
There is a reasonable debate to have about the wisdom of this war. Iran’s murderous government does indeed present a threat — to its own people, to its region and to global stability. Mr. Trump could make a fact-based argument for confronting the regime now, especially to prevent it from menacing its neighbors and, above all, from developing a nuclear weapon. We are skeptical, but we acknowledge that there is a case to be made.
Mr. Trump is not making it. Instead, he has lied about the reasons for the war and about its progress, in an apparent attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis.
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The president was only a few minutes into his Feb. 28 announcement of the start of the conflict when he offered an obviously contradictory rationale for it. He repeated his claim that American attacks last June “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program while also citing that program as a reason to go to war. The claim of obliteration is false: Iran retains about 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, potentially enough for 10 warheads.
The lies have continued since then. Days later, Mr. Trump said the U.S. military had a “virtually unlimited supply” of high-end munitions. The Pentagon nevertheless has had to withdraw weapons from South Korea to sustain its efforts in the Middle East. He has also asserted that “nobody” believed Iran would retaliate by attacking Arab countries. On Monday, he said that “no, the greatest experts, nobody thought they were going to hit” neighboring countries. In truth, some experts had warned of precisely this scenario.
In another instance, Mr. Trump has used false information to continue his alarming penchant to portray people who contradict him as un-American. Last weekend, he posted an allegation that “Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media” had spread fake videos of an American aircraft burning in the ocean. The White House has offered no examples of American media outlets having done so. Instead, several debunked fake online videos, CNN reported. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump wrote that “you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!”
A shocking falsehood came on March 7, when Mr. Trump claimed in his typically offhand way that a strike on an elementary school in the town of Minab during the first hours of the war “was done by Iran.” The attack killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The U.S. military has conducted an investigation and preliminarily concludedthat an American missile mistakenly hit the school. The military deserves credit for its honesty. The commander in chief, however, still has not retracted his statement.
This pattern is an echo of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, when small lies grew into a bigger ones, such as the covered-up massacres in My Lai and Haditha. The consequences of those untruths were long-lasting. Americans’ faith in government never recovered from the deceptions of Vietnam. And the second Iraq war, which George W. Bush’s administration sold on the grounds of fictitious weapons of mass destruction, represents the start of our cynical modern political era. Since that war began in 2003, every Gallup poll asking about the country’s direction has shown that most Americans are dissatisfied with it.
Lies about war also make it harder to achieve victory: The more one spreads falsehoods, the less one feels obliged to face reality. In retrospect, Americans understand that their leaders’ refusal to confront the truth in Iraq and Vietnam led to strategic errors. The pattern is repeating. Before Mr. Trump began this war, he brushed aside warnings from his top military adviser that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz to traffic it does not approve. The global economy is now dealing with the consequences of his overconfidence.
He may yet learn a more personal lesson about lying in war. Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush will forever be remembered as having misled Americans about U.S. military action. They learned that falsehoods can boomerang on the leaders who tell them.
Starting a war is the most serious action that a political leader can take. It ends lives and can change history. The decisions that guide war must be based in reality, and presidents owe American service members and their families the truth about why they are being asked to fight. Whatever short-term gain Mr. Trump thinks he is getting by lying about the war in Iran is far exceeded by the cost, for him, the country and the world.
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom."
Hegseth Invokes Divine Purpose to Justify Military Might
Hegseth Invokes Divine Purpose to Justify Military Might
"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has imbued U.S. military actions with a Christian moral underpinning that suggests they are divinely sanctioned.
By Greg Jaffe and Elizabeth Dias
Greg Jaffe writes about the expansion of the U.S. military under President Trump. Elizabeth Dias reports on the rise of a new Christian right in the Trump era.
He spoke of “overwhelming force” and the U.S. military’s unmatched ability to rain “death and destruction from above” on its “apocalyptic” Iranian foes.
Then, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, standing in the Pentagon, issued a call to the American people for a specific kind of wartime prayer. He asked them to pray for victory in battle and the safety of their troops.
“Every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches,” he said, “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
At a time when the U.S. and Israeli militaries are dropping thousands of bombs on a majority-Shiite Muslim nation, the explicitly Christian nature of Mr. Hegseth’s call stood out.
More than any top American military leader in recent history, Mr. Hegseth has framed U.S. military operations in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America as bigger than politics or foreign policy. Often he has imbued these actions with a Christian moral underpinning that suggests they are divinely sanctioned.
It is this view of a higher power, married to lethal American firepower, that Mr. Hegseth says gives him confidence that the United States will prevail in Iran.
“Our capabilities are better. Our will is better. Our troops are better,” he said in a recent interview with CBS News’s “60 Minutes.” “The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.”
At the same time, Mr. Hegseth has largely avoided casting Islam as the enemy. In a news conference on Thursday, he praised America’s Gulf Arab allies for supporting the war after Iran attacked them.
“We’re proud to be defending with them, standing with them,” Mr. Hegseth said.
The conservative branch of American Christianity that Mr. Hegseth represents has long been central to President Trump’s movement, and its ideas are frequently invoked by Mr. Trump and senior members of his administration.
“I was saved by God to make America great again,” Mr. Trump said at his 2025 inauguration, referencing a sense of divine mission after surviving an assassination attempt. And last month in Munich, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said America and Europe were bonded together as civilizations by “Christian faith.”
Mr. Hegseth speaks often of the important role that his faith plays in his life and, in his view, the life of the United States. He prayed to “King Jesus” in the White House at a February dinner for governors. Last month, speaking to a group of largely evangelical broadcasters, he described the United States as a nation founded on Christian principles. “There’s a direct through line from the Old and New Testament Christian gospels to the development of Western civilization and the United States of America,” he told them.
Such sentiments have long been common among Mr. Trump’s evangelical supporters, who at times have described themselves as combatants in a holy war that seeks to advance their values and restore America by reconnecting it to what some of them see as its Christian roots.
Mr. Hegseth stands out as the civilian leader of the world’s most powerful military in his willingness to blur the line between a metaphorical war, waged in a spiritual domain, and actual combat. Following the murder of the Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September, Mr. Hegseth posted a video that mixed audio of himself reciting the Lord’s Prayer with video of missiles firing, warships steaming and paratroopers falling from the sky.
“A prayer for Charlie, our warriors, and our nation,” he wrote.
Earlier this month, Mr. Hegseth described countercartel operations, including U.S. military strikes that have killed at least 157 people, as part of a broader war to defend Christian nations from the forces of godless “narco communism” and tyranny.
“We face an essential test,” he told defense ministers from across the Western Hemisphere, “whether our nations will be and remain Western nations with distinct characteristics, Christian nations under God, proud of our shared heritage with strong borders and prosperous people.”
Mr. Hegseth’s calls to prayer in the Pentagon press room and the monthly, voluntary Christian worship services that he has organized in the Pentagon auditorium are a stark departure from the way military chaplains are taught to minister to their flock, which reflects the diversity of the nation. About 70 percent of troops identify as Christian, according to a 2019 study by the Congressional Research Service.
“It is one thing to say, ‘We should get on our knees and pray to God,’ but when you say ‘to Jesus Christ our Lord,’ that really narrows the field,” said the Rev. William D. Razz Waff, an Episcopal priest and board-certified chaplain who served in the Army. “Chaplains are there for everyone.”
Mr. Hegseth’s descriptions of U.S. military actions as divinely sanctioned also run counter to the views of many prominent leaders in different Christian traditions. Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington drew a distinction between praying for America and its military men and women, which he said he does regularly, and the moral understanding of the war that Mr. Hegseth appears to be outlining.
“In my own view in the teaching of the church, this is not a moral war, it is an immoral war, and thus I am not praying that this immoral war continues,” Cardinal McElroy said in an interview. “I see a moral imperative to end this war, to have a cease-fire.”
That sentiment is shared by Pope Leo XIV, who also called for an end to the fighting in Iran. “Violence can never lead to the justice, the stability and the peace that peoples are awaiting,” he said.
Mr. Hegseth, for his part, reaches back to an earlier era of the Catholic church to support his view.
Tattooed on Mr. Hegseth’s right biceps is the Latin phrase “Deus vult,” or “God wills it,” which he has described as a “battle cry” of the Crusades, the ruthless medieval wars where Christian warriors fought to take over Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Mr. Hegseth sees those battles as perhaps the most formative moment in the history of the free world.
In his book “American Crusade,” published in 2020, he describes the Crusades as “bloody” and “full of unspeakable tragedy,” but argues that they were justified because they saved a Christian "
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