After nearly five days of war in the Middle East, Pete Hegseth boasted of the “sheer destruction” US and Israeli forces were inflicting on their “radical Islamist Iranian adversaries”.
“They’re toast and they know it,” the US defence secretary said, adding: “And we have only just begun to hunt.”
Later, he said: “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
In Donald Trump’s war against Iran, Hegseth’s rhetoric casting the US as a righteous, ruthless predator is at the centre of a hyper-aggressive messaging strategy from the White House that has included a barrage of social media clips of the military operations to showcase American lethality and prowess.
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US rules of engagement were “designed to unleash American power, not shackle it”, Hegseth boasted. He later described the Iranian warship torpedoed and sunk by the US in the Indian Ocean as having encountered a “quiet death”.
The official White House X account on Wednesday posted “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”, a minute-long video that began with the depiction of a game involving “mass guided bombs”. It then showed images of US fighter jets taking off from aircraft carriers and missiles being launched from the desert striking their targets, appearing to equate the real footage with the video game.
Other US presidents and senior officials – from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan – have sought to embellish their battlefield achievements and minimise or hide their struggles and losses, but they have often done so with more sober propaganda.
However, the restraints have come off in Trump’s White House with critics accusing the administration of using callous and cruel rhetoric that trivialises the violence that comes with armed conflict.
Hegseth’s “bombastic language seems detached from the reality of wartime decision-making”, said Mara Karlin, a former Pentagon strategy and policy official.
Under Trump, top military officers including Gen Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and admiral Brad Cooper, the commander of US troops in the Middle East, have maintained a more traditional stance, focusing on the details of operation Epic Fury.
In contrast, Hegseth on Monday lashed out at Washington’s traditional allies, who “clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force”.
“You can see Hegseth getting excited behind the podium about having the strongest military in the world and using it to the fullest extent possible to kill as many people as possible,” said Roger Stahl, a professor of communications at the University of Georgia who studies how propaganda relates to war. “There is zero deference to humanitarian law, to the Geneva conventions and to international law in general.”
In the West Wing of the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt deployed similar rhetoric in her first full press briefing of the war. “Iran’s murderous terrorist leaders are paying for their crimes against America. And they are paying in blood,” she said on Wednesday.
Hegseth and Leavitt have both used their perches to attack the media in the wake of the death of six US troops stationed in Kuwait.
Hegseth on Wednesday said: “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality.”
Leavitt berated reporters at the White House, telling them, “the press across the country should accurately report on the success of Operation Epic Fury”.
“If the Iranian regime had their choice, they would kill every single person in this room,” she added.
Their narrative is reinforced with images. US Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the Middle East, has posted a steady stream of photos and videos of warplanes and ships in action.
One begins with the camera facing a stealth B-2 bomber in intense, dark lighting. Others show Iranian military targets in crosshairs before a strike sets them ablaze.
Stahl said the military is “fetishising the weapons themselves – all the Top Gun-inspired scenes of backlit fighter jets rocketing off carrier decks”.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said Trump was the “best messenger who always sets the right tone, and the president’s incredible team follows his lead”.
“Operation Epic Fury has been an extraordinarily successful operation that is completely devastating and demoralising the terrorist Iranian regime, which is exactly what’s being conveyed to the American people in real time,” he added.
A White House official said the administration is using tools such as social media that did not exist 25 years ago when the last big US wars began. They added the overall tone was on par with what the Iranian regime had been doing and saying with its threats and killing of Americans over nearly half a century.
“The dumb, politically correct wars of the past were the opposite of what we’re doing here,” Hegseth said on Thursday during a joint appearance with Cooper in Florida.
One former senior US defence official said the bluster from Hegseth was “his style and to some extent was what he was brought in to do”.
“The president likes his TV style and he’s a TV man,” the official added. “The challenge is it’s just naturally going to obscure what the commanders say because he’s the secretary of defence.”
But critics say the crude spin and visual messaging coming from the very top of the administration – and Hegseth in particular – has been brutal to observe coming from the US government.
“The way Hegseth talks about it so cavalier, is so offensive and just demeaning,” said Rachel Van Landingham, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and now a professor at Southwestern Law School.
She described the defence secretary’s narrative as “macho”, as if he is saying “‘I’m pounding my chest and we’re here to blow shit up.’”
“I think the glorification of violence is beneath the United States and beneath a United States sitting cabinet secretary”.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
