When Leaders Are Angry Children With Lethal Weapons as Toys
Who are these terrors playing video games with everyone’s lives?
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Watching Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth cheerleading their war of choice, I thought to myself: Are we in the Age of the Man-Child? Does that help explain the fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into?
Evidence of this is everywhere, from how we indulge our childlike passions to the kinds of people we trust to lead us.
From so-called grown-ups gaming their hours away to our obsession with bro podcasts and “anything weird,” our love of superheroes and spectacle and firepower, some significant part of our population seems only too glad to indulge their inner child, dispense with their personal agency, and eschew adult-type qualities.
For a lot of people, it’s just not worth it to seek proportionality and balance, to exhibit restraint, responsibility, maturity, wisdom, generosity, prudence — and work to foster harmony and tranquility.
And given that mind-set, it isn’t hard to see wanting to join the ICE bullyboys, indulging in facile hatreds, and, especially, being thrilled to have prototypical Man-Children like Hegseth and Elon Musk and especially Trump shape our world.
Being a Man-Child means dispensing with analysis and contemplation, making rash decisions, acting impulsively and imprudently. Then blaming others when things go south, or just shrugging, “Hey, my bad.” Haha.
(N.B.: Of course, the bros aren’t all men. Kristi Noem shooting her dog and terrorizing Americans, and Pam Bondi snarling and insulting her way through testimony, make that abundantly clear.)
The shocking, jokey, war propaganda videos from Trump and his influencer army make clear that bad taste and vulgarity are now de rigeur in every situation. The videos mix news footage of explosions in Iran with gaming videos, movie action heroes, and bone-crunching football tackles — all trivializing the death of real people and destruction of real places.
Hegseth’s lack of restraint, glorification of carnage, and bloodthirsty glee at death and destruction has surprised even the most jaded military veterans.
The goal of the Defense Department, Hegseth said, is “lethality, lethality, lethality.” He also said, “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
And he vowed to dispense with the “stupid rules of engagement” — such as taking steps to reduce harm to civilians.
The goal of the war in Iran is to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long.”
While drunk, Hegseth repeatedly shouted “Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” at a bar in 2015. As defense secretary, he has shown a similar lack of restraint and a bloodthirsty glee at the destruction and death.
After Hegseth said there will be “no quarter, no mercy for our enemy,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) posted on X:
“No quarter” isn’t some wanna be tough guy line — it means something. An order to give no quarter would mean to take no prisoners and kill them instead. That would violate the law of armed conflict. It would be an illegal order. It would also put American service members at greater risk. Pete Hegseth should know better than to throw around terms like this.
(N.B.: Before being elected to the Senate, Kelly served 25 years as a Navy aviator, flying 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm; after his military service, he was a NASA astronaut who piloted and commanded multiple space shuttle missions.)
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I’ve said many times that I think Trump can be summed up simply as batshit crazy. Most of the people he hires are not themselves necessarily crazy, but they are all messy, deeply problematic people, and almost all of them seem to lack principles and, especially, gravitas. To put it mildly, Man-Children.
Another example of Trump’s empowering Man-Children — is his choice of the bear-carcass-snagging, toilet-seat-snorting, shirtless bench-pressing Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in turn appoints others of similar unserious mien.
MAHAMania: SnackDown pic.twitter.com/svdOP6CcWG
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 15, 2026
In fact, we see the phenomenon in everything from the early Trump 2.0 tech bros running rampant with their new chainsaw-toy DOGE, to almost any appointment you care to look at. All his choices have been conspicuously unqualified — comically, tragically so.
A corollary is the disrespect these incompetents show for actual expertise, insulting those who built their careers and reputations by hard, peer-reviewed work. (RFK demonstrated this by smearing pediatricians, among the lowest paid doctors, when he insinuated they order inoculations in order to profit financially.)
Related: Building Herd Immunity to Truth: More on RFK Jr.’s Anti-Vax Crusade
Trump’s band of self-inflated third-raters also follow his lead in repudiating all earned credibility — including, importantly, trained, credentialed, journalists.
Now everyone can be an “independent journalist” or an “influencer” simply by a self-declaration and a big algorithmic boost from the likes of Musk or some other like-minded social media lord. We’ve seen that with Trump’s preferred new breed of media characters fawning and preening at his press conferences.
It was once seen as a sign of maturity to occasionally admit when you don’t know something, but in the case of the Man-Children, being a know-nothing becomes the thing to be admired.
Like George W. Bush, Trump makes his anti-intellectualism a virtue that MAGAs relate to. And his combination of declared ignorance and shameless lying is a reminder that he’s in charge and immune from any objective standards.
It reminds us that a Man-Child is in charge.
Consider Trump sticking to his discredited insistence that Iran is responsible for the bombing of an elementary school that killed scores of children, even though evidence continues to mount that the United States was responsible. In a striking exchange with a reporter, Trump was asked why no other government official will confirm what he’s saying. He said straight out: “Because I don’t know enough about it.” He then stumbled through some awkward dissembling.
But in saying that, Trump accidentally admitted that he’d made an incendiary claim about an extraordinarily serious matter without having the foggiest idea what the facts actually are. Trump’s assertions about the school bombing also forced White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to undertake a clumsy cleanup effort.
Self-serving behavior is awesome and even criminality impressive within this cadre. Like the ex-DOGE staffer alleged to have bragged about taking social security data on a thumb drive to his new nongovernmental employer.
Or the Border Patrol agent, Charles Exum, who shot a woman (a teaching assistant and US citizen) — then bragged, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”
Got a new toy? Use it, dude! See what happens! Any whizbang technologies, from military armaments to AI: Just click and shoot!
Like when a couple of DOGE dudes sicced ChatGPT on all humanities grants, asking the bot to identify anything based on “DEI” and then mass-nixed them all.
‘Stand Your Butt Up!’
Speaking of Man-Children, consider Markwayne Mullin — the new acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. In 2023, as a senator, he challenged the Teamsters union president, Sean O’Brien (with whom he’d long been feuding on X), to a physical fight right in the middle of a congressional hearing, telling him “Stand your butt up!” as he himself stood up and began to remove his ring before others stopped the fight.
Mullin may be as bad as Noem. He defended the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, saying on social media,
These Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are red-blooded American patriots doing a tough job to keep our nation safe. Assaults on ICE are up 1300%.
Man-Children in Techland
Aside from Team Trump, the most dominant Man-Children seem to be the tech titans. Instead of building ethical guardrails around their products, they’re flaunting their latest, shiniest boy-toys, kowtowing to the authoritarians who hold sway over lucrative tech contracts, building their impregnable castles, and withdrawing into opulent isolation. A number of them, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, have retreated to the so-called Billionaire Bunker on an island in Florida.
They’re also determined to avoid taxes that could help the rest of a struggling society, even though they have more money than they could ever spend in multiple lifetimes. Being proudly self-centered is definitely bro territory.
A part of the Man-Child construct is that it’s OK to make things up, then dismiss it all when caught. Deepfakes keep getting more convincing, threatening the public’s grip on reality, which is especially dangerous during wartime — while the shrugging tech companies are doing a commensurately bad job policing the situation.
Remember Honor?
Honor is an awesome thing to behold. It’s about keeping your word. A beautiful, old-fashioned concept you don’t associate with the Man-Child.
How good is Trump’s word? How good are his signed contracts?
How many leaders of foreign countries consider Trump, and the US, a reliable ally? And how will this affect us in the future?
Having honor does not make you a fool. We all know that for our own protection, our military must deceive its enemies. But allies, and enemies alike, all need to believe that the US will keep its word.
Having honor is not for sissies.
Hope Springs…
Fortunately, there are still some adults in the room, standing up to say “enough” to the Man-Children.
Meta’s own oversight board declared that the company — which owns Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and more — did not have adequate measures in place to deal with deepfakes that are proliferating wildly and seeding the public sphere with false information related to the war.
The Anthropic vs. OpenAI conflict over what kinds of artificial intelligence to provide the military, how its products can be used in war — and what lines it will not cross — is a critical one, as we choose sides on what kind of future we want. Among the innovations at issue: autonomous machines that could kill enemy combatants on their own say-so.
A hopeful sign is OpenAI’s own employees expressing concern for how their employer handles the matter. More signs of cracks are appearing as other big tech companies — or at least elements within them — begin to push back. One example is Microsoft siding with Anthropic against the Pentagon.
An Adult in the Room
This is clearly a time when the US, but also the world, craves relief from the damage done by juvenile rhetoric and behavior.
A good start would simply be to highlight the growing dominance of Man-Children in our leadership circles — and make it part of the national conversation. And then to look for those who are definitely not immature incompetents to lead us.
Paradoxically, it may be the young who fix this problem. One of the new breed of under-40s who seem to take responsibility seriously is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D). His unapologetic approach to the actual needs of the public, his fervent defense of all parts of our society — and his unabashed challenge to the growing chokehold of the super-rich — show great promise. So much so that the Mamdani Way is going international: A top shaper of Mamdani’s political success is now in demand abroad and heading out to show politicos elsewhere how it’s done.
The 34-year-old Mamdani, who has been under continuous attack as somehow “irresponsible,” is in fact one of the up and coming leaders in America who is not a Man-Child. He may not be perfect, and he will make mistakes, but he is articulating a vision of democratic government in which everyone is respected, everyone in need is taken care of, and steps are taken to ensure a future in which — to state the goal without fancy rhetoric — everyone gets along.
And that’s an agenda by and for… adults.
