Late-night host discussed the defense secretary’s attacks on DEI, time as a Fox News host and ties to nationalist groups
On his HBO show on Sunday night, John Oliver focused on Pete Hegseth, characterizing his actions as secretary of war as “taking a wrecking ball” to the US military.
Oliver described Hegseth as “the guy you constantly see trying to show off by publicly exercising with troops and recruits, and to go by fitness experts on the internet, not doing a great job of it”.
“I’ve never seen someone be more gentle and dainty in their kettle bell swing,” said one expert. “It’s looking like he’s trying to do some kind of ballet move.”
Hegseth wants to make multiple changes to the US military and in late September delivered the annual “State of the Force” address in Virginia outlining plans for “no more PowerPoint trainings or drag queen shows”. He also said that there would be “no more gender pronouns”.
“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department,” Hegseth said, before tripping over his words as he added: “Translation of that: no fatties, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals, just warriors.”
“If you’re going to go on stage and spew hate, at least don’t flub the delivery like a middle schooler about to lose his first rap battle,” said Oliver.
“That is just pathetic,” the host added. “It sounds less like an inspiring piece of oratory and more like he’s reading from a book called Dr Seuss for Concussed Bigots.”
Hegseth has been dogged by unflattering headlines since he was sworn in as secretary of war in January 2025. Last year, the Pentagon launched an investigation after a journalist was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat discussing military operations.
The recent war in Iran has been highly unpopular with Americans and, as Oliver put it, has “achieved none of this administration’s original goals. Not only has there been no regime change, the strait of Hormuz is now under Iranian control and there seems to be no way out of this conflict.”
In a March press conference, Hegseth called out what he described as “fake headlines” about the Iran war and suggested that a “patriotic press” would reframe the conflict to be more flattering of America.
“To be fair, Hegseth has always sucked,” said Oliver. While at Princeton, he wrote an essay for a student publication attacking the school’s “gratuitous glorification of diversity”.
While working for veterans advocacy organizations, he faced accusations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and being intoxicated at work. (Hegseth has denied these claims.)
While working at Fox News, Hegseth repeatedly defended Donald Trump as the president faced controversies. In 2020, he responded to Trump’s threats to destroy Iranian cultural sites by saying: “I don’t care about Iranian cultural sites … if they could, they would destroy every one of our cultural sites and build a mosque on top of it.”
“For what it’s worth, I doubt that Hegseth and I could agree on what America’s most important cultural sites are,” said Oliver. “He’s probably thinking about a bunch of Confederate statues and the first place his great-great-grandfather ever fucked a gun.
“Whereas, I’d be more concerned with real sites of US cultural history, like the restaurant where [The Real Housewives of New Jersey’s] Teresa flips the table and screams ‘prostitution whore’.”
In 2024, Hegseth clearly articulated his views in a book titled The War on Warriors. In the tome, he compared DEI to “a cultural Marxist revolution ripping through the Pentagon”.
As well as having a tattoo reading “Deus Vult” (a popular white nationalist slogan), Hegseth also has ties to Christian nationalist groups including the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.
The group’s leader believes that homosexuality should be a crime and women should not have the right to vote. He has also called the immigration of Muslim and Hindu people to the US “parasitic”.
When Hegseth was floated as a potential secretary of war by Trump, one defense lobbyist reportedly reacted by saying: “Who the fuck is this guy?”
“Unfortunately, the answer to that question is now: he’s the guy who just spent the last two years taking a wrecking ball to the US military,” said Oliver.
Hegseth seems “utterly obsessed with the racial and gender makeup of the military”, said Oliver. Earlier this month, he instituted a complete ban on transgender military service and he has blocked the promotions of about 10% of top military officers. “Tellingly, more than half of those officers have been female or Black,” said Oliver.
At an address to generals and admirals last year, Hegseth’s characterized service members as people who “kill people and break things for a living”.
“What the fuck is he talking about there?” said Oliver. “You break things for a living and don’t necessarily belong in polite society? That is not a message for the military; that is a message for the fucking Minions.”
“I know that when Hegseth hopefully gets impeached and kicked out of his job, he’ll probably crawl straight back to Fox News so he can host come shitty show called Battle Lines with Pete Hegseth, where he’ll do stunty bullshit like playing beer pong with Kid Rock, or dressing up as a bear and catching a salmon in his mouth.”
