The Snowflake Secretary

On Friday morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a press conference in the Pentagon briefing room where he walked up to the lectern and immediately began touting the Trump administration's success in its war with Iran "for the world to hear, and the press to actually admit."

The former Fox News weekend host then began to pick apart press coverage—from the specific words used in reporting to the banners splashed across cable news—going so far as to offer his own propaganda-style headlines for the media to use. But he reserved special venom for CNN, calling its reporting that the Trump administration had underestimated the war's impact on the Strait of Hormuz "patently false" and quipping: "The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better."

The remark offered perhaps the clearest signal yet that the Trump administration is rooting for Ellison—the 43-year-old Paramount chief and son of tech billionaire and key Trump ally Larry Ellison—to win control of CNN's parent company Warner Bros. Discovery. But the comment, coming from a senior cabinet member, was quickly met with disgust. "The administration has made clear they expect the American press to root for President Trump and his administration, which sometimes involves ignoring the facts," a news executive told me. "That is not the role of the American press, and goes against the U.S. Constitution and what our Founding Fathers envisioned for this country 250 years ago."

Hegseth, who has shown himself to be deeply concerned with projecting an image as a grizzled warfighter who will show "no quarter" to enemies, has used his authority as Defense secretary to wage a relentless campaign against press independence—one that has escalated sharply in recent weeks as U.S. military operations in Iran have intensified, with no clear end in sight and the American death toll growing. Even the use of the phrase "no quarter" reflects Hegseth's penchant for tough-guy talk, with some having cited the term's actual definition as a violation of international law.

The bravado, it turns out, has its limits. Last week, Hegseth complained that the press only highlights U.S. casualties to make Trump "look bad"—a grotesque smear attempting to reframe reporting on battlefield losses as a media conspiracy against the president. "But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it's front-page news," he said. "I get it; the press only wants to make the president look bad. But try for once to report the reality." White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later doubled down in defense of Hegseth, lashing out at CNN's Kaitlan Collins, claiming that the media “does only want to make the president look bad” and singling out the network for its coverage.

Then earlier this week, the Pentagon banned press photographers from briefings after Hegseth and his aides deemed wire images from a March 2 news conference (see above) "unflattering," as The Washington Post's Scott Nover first reported. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson dressed up the decision as a new policy "allowing one representative per news outlet" in the briefing room to "effectively" use the space. But few were fooled. The National Press Photographers Association slammed the decision as showing “an astonishingly poor sense of priorities in the midst of a war and is, for a public servant, not a good look.”

Hegseth’s campaign of censorship and control over the press is more than a year in the making. As the 45-year-old has come under scrutiny for his conduct inside the Pentagon and the U.S. military's operations abroad, he has moved systematically to tighten his grip on information. The Pentagon revoked reporters' long-held ability to navigate the building's unclassified hallways freely. It banished journalists who refused to sign his unprecedented restrictions on reporting, replacing them with MAGA influencers cosplaying as journalists to lob softball questions. And as the U.S. carried out the military operation that deposed Venezuela's authoritarian leader, the Pentagon sidelined the press corps entirely in favor of sycophantic media figures during a multi-state victory lap.

None of it has ultimately worked. Reporters tasked with covering the Pentagon have continued to do so from outside the building, and the stories keep coming—which is precisely what has sent Hegseth into meltdown mode.

And some of Hegseth’s former Fox News colleagues have publicly taken notice. Pentagon correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported on the air earlier this month that Hegseth “took offense” when reporters asked him “to articulate why the American people are sending their men and women to war, and if he is concerned about it spiraling into a longer war.” And Dana Perino called out Hegseth and Leavitt for their whining over press coverage. “If you are in the administration and you are getting really hung up on what you think the enemy in the mainstream media is saying about you, you are focusing way too narrowly,” she said.

She’s not wrong. Hegseth spent years on a comfortable Fox News couch building a brand around contempt for the thin-skinned and the easily offended. But in office, Hegseth has revealed himself to be exactly that—a snowflake behind a military shield.