No, Pete. You Don't Have 'Complete Control.'

He can lie to Trump about the war. Trump can repeat his lies. But that doesn't mean they're really winning.

Of course, Pete Hegseth leads an operation called “Epic Fury.” (Photo by Andrew Harnik via Getty Images)

Allow me to take you back five weeks to a magical time. It was just four days into the military campaign against Iran, a campaign that the arrogant geniuses in Pete Hegseth’s “Department of War” named “Operation Epic Fury,” presumably to match their ridiculously overheated view of themselves.

Hegseth stood at a podium in front of an American flag and announced, “America is winning decisively, devastatingly and without mercy.” Then he continued with his characteristic bravado, that of an unfettered alcoholic who’s just laid waste to a couple of fifths and a gregarious Fox news host freed to fulfill his orgasmic fantasy of killing with abandon. He spoke with maximum excitement:

Starting last night and to be completed in a few days, in under a week, the two most powerful Air Forces in the world will have complete control of Iranian skies, uncontested airspace. I hope all the folks watching understand what uncontested airspace and complete control means. It means we will fly all day, all night, day and night finding, fixing and finishing the missiles and defense industrial base of the Iranian military, finding and fixing their leaders and their military leaders, flying over Tehran, flying over Iran, flying over their capital, flying over the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Iranian leaders looking up and seeing only U.S. and Israeli air power every minute of every day until we decide it’s over.

And Iran will be able to do nothing about it. B-2s, B-52s, B-1s, Predator drones, fighters controlling the skies, picking targets, death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly.

Oh, what a magical time that was for Pete. You can imagine him adding a “death and destruction” tattoo to his collection. You can imagine how pumped up he was to say those magical words: “complete control.”

But that was then. Before American F-15 flyers were shot down over supposedly “uncontested airspace.” Before Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in a war that Hegseth said the U.S. was “winning decisively.” Before an increasingly desperate and deranged Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iranians “back to the Stone Ages where they belong.” Before he threatened that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Didn’t Trump already declare victory dozens of times, backed up by Hegseth’s Epic Fury? Just Wednesday, after pulling back from the genocidal threat to annihilate a civilization for a “two-week” ceasefire, Trump told Agence France-Presse, “Total and complete victory. 100 percent. No question about it.”

He sounded a lot like Killer Pete, who was, as usual, triumphant in the extreme. “Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital-V military victory,” he said during Wednesday’s Pentagon press conference.

Never mind that Iran may now have a more radicalized regime, the strait is now under total Iranian control, relations with NATO allies have been deeply damaged and more than a dozen U.S. military bases in the region have been severely damaged, rendering them essentially “useless.” Never mind at least 13 American soldiers dead and more than 380 injured, the tens of billions spent, the thousands of civilians killed in Iran and Lebanon, the mounting oil crisis and the ongoing damage to the U.S. and global economy—all for an unauthorized, unsupported war of choice with no clear justification against a nation that posed no imminent threat to the U.S.

Real warriors—not frauds who play them on TV—know that war is hell. They don’t relish death and destruction. They are humbled by their duty. And they’re not afraid of journalists reporting the truth.

(They also would not face blowback like this from a federal judge: “The curtailment of First Amendment rights is dangerous at any time, and even more so in a time of war. Suppression of political speech is the mark of an autocracy, not a democracy.”)

And real presidents—not a malignant con artist who turned a reality TV gig into a non-stop crime operation—wouldn’t rely on pretend warriors who relish death and destruction. They wouldn’t want a military commander lying about victory when the smell of defeat is heavy and the lives and limbs of American soldiers and civilians are at stake.

But Pete and Donald are quite a combo. One pumps up the boss—after all, his job security is on the line were he to do otherwise—while the pumped-up boss relishes his status as a total winner.

How confusing it must be for Trump to discover that even his MAGA worshippers have had it with him. How tiring it must be to have to remind everyone—at great length on Truth Social yesterday—that Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones have “Low IQs” and are “LOSERS” who are “just trying to latch on to MAGA.”

That’s not all: “They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past, look at their record. They don’t have what it takes, and they never did!” Trump says of his former friends. All of a sudden, they’re “NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity.”

It must be so insulting to Trump’s fragile ego that he’s lost their support. They have failed to understand what his War Secretary has insisted and which he knows in his addled brain to be true—that the Iran war has been a “total and complete victory. 100 percent. No question about it.”

He never loses. Not in the 2020 election. Not in Iran. Not ever. That’s the MAGA way:

MAGA is about WINNING and STRENGTH in not allowing Iran to have Nuclear Weapons. MAGA is about MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and these people have no idea how to do that, BUT I DO, because THE UNITED STATES IS NOW THE ‘HOTTEST’ COUNTRY ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD!

Donald J. Trump needs to be removed. He is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. He is a continuing and deadly danger to America and the world. So does Pete Hegseth, who in a sane world would never have been confirmed for his job. The Constitution provides mechanisms to make this happen.

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