War is nothing new for America — but the way Pete Hegseth talks about it is. President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense often styles the US’s actions in Iran as being blessed by God. As being holy.

He likened the recovery of a downed Air Force member in Iran on Easter Sunday to the resurrection of Christ. He quoted a Bible verse about God blessing war at a recent press conference on Iran. Famously, he has a tattoo that says “Deus vult,” which is Latin for “God wills it,” and it was a rallying cry for Christian armies during the Crusades. 

The head of Hegseth’s church, Pastor Doug Wilson, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that “I like the job he’s doing, and I like how he speaks.” Wilson said that he can hear his teachings coming through when Hegseth talks about the war. 

It’s been a long road for Wilson to achieve this level of influence. The evangelical pastor founded Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, in the late 1970s. The church has since spread across the country under the umbrella of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. 

Recently, it opened a branch in Washington, DC: An ideal spot to serve a conservative faithful increasingly warming to Wilson’s ideas around Christian nationalism and Christian theocracy, which hold that the US should be governed by Christians according to Christian principles.

Wilson told Vox that he’s been on the fringes for decades. Now, he’s being invited into the halls of power. He recently led a prayer service at the Pentagon, he’s been on Tucker Carlson and Ross Douthat’s podcasts, he’s spoken at Turning Point USA events and at the National Conservatism Conference. Not so fringe anymore.

In a wide-ranging conversion, Wilson and Noel discussed what his ideal Christian theocracy would look like; his desire to ban abortion, same-sex marriage, repeal the 19th Amendment; and why he thinks Trump is laying the groundwork for his Christian nation.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Right now the seat of power in America is President Donald Trump. Do you like President Trump’s leadership? 

Two thirds of the time, I like it a lot. A third of the time, I think: What is he doing? 

A good thing to compare Trump to is: America’s got cancer and Trump is chemo. Trump is a radical chemo treatment and chemo is toxic. Chemo is a system where it kills the cancer before it kills the patient. 

I like the progress that Trump has made on the cancer. And I’m aware of some of the damage that’s done to the healthy tissues by his management style, his leadership style. But politics is the art of the possible.

I hear you saying: President Trump is getting us closer to the Christian nation that I want. He also acts in ways that contradict what Christ preaches in the Bible. And he is often a bad role model, right? Do you have any reservations, being a pastor, about letting Trump off the hook? 

If I did let him off the hook, then I would have reservations about that. But I really haven’t. The president needs Christ. But we live in a topsy-turvy world, because there are some of his policies that are far closer to the biblical Christian position than some sanctimonious Christians who disapprove of his mean tweets and his behavior. 

In the congregation I pastor, we don’t have any Trumpkin, wild-eyed supporters where no matter what Trump does, it’s always good. When Trump misbehaves, everybody laughs. We budgeted for that. That’s bad. And we know it’s bad and we say it’s bad. But we don’t have Trump derangement syndrome. 

When he does good things that thrill us, we’re thrilled. I don’t mind saying that there are a whole range of issues where Trump’s behavior has thrilled me, and others that I just heartily disapprove of. And I don’t think I’m setting a poor example for our people. When I say what I think for, of, about both of those categories.

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, attends a Communion of Reformed Evangelical Church. And that’s why I think people mention you in the same breath. 

“In the world I live in, conservative, evangelical leaders are willing to oppose Trump where they think he’s wrong and they’re willing to support him where they think he’s right.”

Correct.

The secretary of defense has had opportunities — ample opportunities of late — to speak publicly in front of the American people. Do you hear your church’s teachings when he speaks? 

Yes. 

How so? 

Let me flip it around. I don’t hear anything from him that contradicts what we teach, and I believe that he’s a consistent Christian gentleman. I like what he’s doing. I like the job he’s doing, and I like how he speaks. I’ve not heard anything that contradicts what we would teach from the pulpit. 

He has spoken of the war in Iran in religious terms. He also suggests that God is on America’s side. God is rooting for America in this war. I think the thing that people struggle with is the idea that God would be on board when you see civilian casualties like this school in Iran with the children — [more than] 150 people killed. 

That happens, and then the secretary of defense says: God’s on our side. Can you help us understand why that feels right to you? 

The first thing I would say is that no answer should try to pretend that war isn’t horrible, okay? In any war, horrible things will happen.

But when you look at a regime that killed, what, 35 to 40,000 of their own people in the last month or so, if you’re looking at a regime where a woman can be executed for having been raped? We have a lot of problems, a lot of moral problems. We are not a moral paragon. But if you put this, the Western civilization that we have and the Islamic Sharia state that they have in Iran, I believe that it’s not a morally ambiguous situation at all. 

The war has certainly divided Christians. Pope Leo wrote, “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” What do you make of his statements? 

I’d say he needs to read his Old Testament more. Psalm 144:1, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my fingers for battle.” Pope Leo, before he was the pope, was just sort of an ordinary Democratic leftist critic of Trump. 

Hmm.

And in the recent spat that Trump and the pope had, it was just Trump dealing with a political opponent, which is what the pope was being. I don’t think the pope was acting in the role of a religious leader executing the scripture there. I think he was just stating his political convictions. 

“God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” 

That strikes you as just a political opinion, just a criticism of President Trump?

Yeah, absolutely. Because when you have people who are very selective in their indignation…when you look at the kind of violence that the Iranian regime perpetrates against their own people — like 40,000 people dead — and they did it on purpose as opposed to blowing up a school by accident, and the pope is silent on that kind of thing, and then he turns to go after Trump for conducting this war. I don’t see equal weights and measures there. I don’t think Pope Leo is being honest. 

President Trump posted a meme depicting himself as Jesus Christ. He deleted it, but it struck many Christians, including many conservative Christians, as really appalling. What was your gut reaction to that? And then when you had time to think it through, where did you land on that? 

My first reaction [was] — I tweeted about it, I said: Somebody needs to figure out how to put this picture onto black velvet so that it can be blasphemous and tacky. The picture was blasphemous. The president’s explanation afterward was that he thought it was a doctor figure, not Jesus. 

Do you believe him? 

I find that’s a stretch, but I’m willing to accept it. If he took the picture down and said that portraying himself as Jesus is not what he intended, at least we got that. That was a very good thing. But I think they’ve gotta do better when it comes to social media management. That was a blasphemous image. And blasphemy is no good, no matter who does it. 

What is the penalty for blasphemy? 

It would depend. It’s like first-degree murder down to manslaughter. So there are varying degrees. The worst penalty in the Old Testament for blasphemy was capital punishment. 

Let me ask you one last question. There’s a writer, Tim Alberta. He comes from an evangelical background. He tweeted this the other day in response to President Trump and the image: “My conviction remains: God did not ordain Donald Trump to rescue the American church, or revive the American church, or redeem the American church. God ordained Donald Trump to test the American church. And the American church has failed.” What do you think God is trying to do with President Trump? 

I agree with everything in that tweet right up to the last line. I disagree with the last line. I think that Trump is a test. This goes back to what I said earlier about chemo. I think that the tumultuous times that we’re living in really are a test. But in many ways, I’ve been greatly heartened at how many Christians have gotten to work taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by the chaos of our times. 

I think Tim Alberta’s tweet seemed to indicate that we failed because all the Christians fell in lockstep behind Donald Trump and, and didn’t stand up and challenge him. But in the world I live in, conservative, evangelical leaders are willing to oppose Trump where they think he’s wrong and they’re willing to support him where they think he’s right. And I wouldn’t call that failure.

President Donald Trump, in between blockading the Strait of Hormuz and posting blasphemous AI images of himself as Jesus, claims he still wants to strike a deal with Iran’s government to end the current conflict, reopen the Strait, and curtail the country’s nuclear program. 

So far, he’s been unsuccessful — and during his first term in office, he tore up the US’s previous nuclear agreement with Iran, negotiated under Barack Obama in 2015. 

To find out how the US and Iran got to yes last time — and why they haven’t under Trump — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who led the Obama administration team that got a nuclear deal with Iran.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What do you think it would take for the US to get a new deal with Iran right now?

It depends on what the objectives are for the president and for Iran. Right now, President Trump wants to make sure Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon. He wants to open the Strait of Hormuz, he wants to stop Iran from funding proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen, because he thinks they create a risk for Israel, who is our ally and all of the countries in the Gulf region. 

Iran, on the other hand, has control of the Strait of Hormuz, so they’re looking to maintain that leverage because it allows them to project power in the region. They want to ensure that they maintain a right to enrichment and they want to be able to continue to have relationships with Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis. 

There’s a big gap and it’s curious, because the negotiation team on our side is quite small. The negotiation team on their side includes people like Abbas Araghchi, who was my counterpart during the 2015 negotiations. He’s now the foreign minister and he knows every single detail of that deal.

Back when you were negotiating with Iran, were there moments looking back when you thought, This is just not going to happen?

Absolutely. There were many points along the way where I said to my counterparts, “If you can’t do it, you can’t do it.”

We thought we were very close to a set of parameters and the supreme leader at the time gave a speech and set out a whole new set of parameters that I think surprised even his foreign minister. 

We had to figure out how we could get from where we were, which we thought was on our way to a deal, to now consider what the supreme leader had publicly said.

We know, in part because President Trump articulated this early and often, that there were some Americans who thought we could have gotten a better deal with Iran. What do you hear as the main complaint and what do you say to those critics?

“All of this has cost everyday average Americans much more out of their pocketbooks.”

The critics say that the strongest part of the deal only lasted for 15 years. They wanted it to last forever. We argued that it gave us what is called a one-year breakout timeline so that we would have a year — if somehow we discovered Iran was cheating, which we thought was highly unlikely — to do something about it. 

I think some critics wanted to go to war. They thought they could create a regime change. We constantly said to the United States Congress, if we risk war, it could close the Strait of Hormuz, it could increase the gas prices, it could take down the international economy, it could mean the lives of our military and an enormous cost to our economy and to American citizens.

Are the right people at the negotiation table?

I find it difficult to believe that Vice President Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner can be successful in two weeks. I fully suspect that the negotiations will continue beyond two weeks if they get any traction at all. 

I think part of the reason the vice president is there is because Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who has no formal role in the government, don’t have credibility with Iran because twice before when they were negotiating with Iran, we attacked. 

It’s hard to believe that someone’s going to keep negotiating with you if the two other times, they’ve attacked in the midst of negotiations.

Is there a risk this time around that the US comes out weaker and Iran comes out stronger?

I think it’s very hard to be that reductive. There are parts of Iran that are weaker. They don’t have the navy they once had. They don’t have the missile programs they once had. They don’t have the nuclear programs they once had. 

They can rebuild all of that and if they get millions of dollars in tolls and sanctions relief from the United States, they will be able to rebuild all that capacity faster. But at the moment they have been set back. 

The United States, in my view, has been set back. We have just spent billions of dollars. We have reduced our inventory of weapons that we may need for other theaters. We have undermined our alliances. We have put Russia and China in stronger positions. We have removed oil sanctions from Russia and oil sanctions from Iran, already putting money in their coffers, giving Russia more money so they can prosecute their horrible and illegal war against Ukraine. 

All of this has cost everyday average Americans much more out of their pocketbooks. The regime in place in Iran now is more hard line than the one before, if you can believe it, and may decide it must have a nuclear weapon in order to deter future attacks. 

If Iran decides it wants a nuclear weapon, I can assure you many other countries, even some of our closest friends around the world, will think they need a nuclear weapon as well.

How closely does President Donald Trump’s war in Iran compare with America’s last conflict in the Middle East? 

Both the Iran war and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq have paired conventional American military dominance with shifting, ambiguous objectives. And both feature an American president desperate to declare the mission accomplished. 

“I do have this kind of really empty, terrible feeling, kind of déjà vu,” Dexter Filkins, a staff writer at the New Yorker who was the former Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. 

Filkins talked to King about America’s quick conquest of Iraq in 2003, the chaos that followed, what the Iraq War did to the American psyche, and where the similarities between that war and Trump’s war in Iran end. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

President Bush claimed to have won the conflict [in Iraq]; about six weeks in, he gets on an aircraft carrier, he’s got this banner behind him that says “mission accomplished.” What was the moment for you that it became clear that the mission had not been accomplished?

It was clear the moment that the US military entered Baghdad, and it’s April 9, 2003. The chaos and the looting and the bloodshed began immediately. By the end of the day, after the US military marches triumphantly into the capital; by nighttime, the capital is on fire. And there’s total anarchy. 

When President Bush flew on the aircraft carrier and said, “mission accomplished,” it was absurd then. But then of course it became a cruel joke because the anarchy that we witnessed in the capital that day just spread far and wide across the country and engulfed the country and stayed that way for a very long time.

What allowed it to keep going? The anarchy starts in Baghdad and then it spreads. And there’s a world in which the US is there. We’ve got good troops, we’ve got good weapons, and so we just win. But that’s not what happened.

The important thing to consider is that it’s not enough. It’s never enough. And you could say that about the Iran war. 

The US military is really good at what they do, and what they do is destroy their enemies. But that is not enough necessarily to make a just and lasting peace that will endure and that will, say, allow the United States to leave. 

“The important thing to consider is that it’s not enough. It’s never enough. And you could say that about the Iran war.”

The United States had plenty of firepower, but it wasn’t enough to hold the country together. This was a very traumatized country that had been torn apart in many different ways, including by its own government, for many, many years. And so all these things kind of spilled out in front of us. 

The overwhelming fact was that the United States military, after it destroyed the government, was unable to keep order. And until you can have order, you can’t build anything that will last. And it took many, many years for the United States to figure out a way to make that happen.

By the time we pulled out of Iraq in 2011, how had the region changed? What did that war do to the Middle East?

The Iraq War was like a magnet for every lunatic — and I mean it, every lunatic — not just in the Middle East, but across the world. It was drawing people, particularly from across the Islamic world, into the country to fight the Americans. And so it became this kind of self-sustaining firestorm. 

You could hear, you could see the propaganda, you could hear it on loudspeakers: Come to the fight, come and fight the Americans. And so we got ourselves into this kind of terrible situation where we saw ourselves as the saviors. But many people across the region saw us as invaders and as occupiers.

I wonder if you can reflect on what you think the Iraq War did to Americans. Because I remember the torture memos, I remember Abu Ghraib…I just remember — and again, I was young, but I remember these things where it was like, Oh shit, this is who we are now.

I would say it’s a bit of a sad ledger because I think when the Americans went in and couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, didn’t find any nuclear weapons, people felt like they’d been lied to, that the government wanted this war, that they wanted to go to war no matter what and they made up this intelligence to go in. 

Whether that’s true or not, I think there was a huge sense that people felt betrayed. We kind of lost our bearings, lost our way. I think, correctly, there was a feeling like, Oh my God, we embarked on this gigantic ambitious, bloody, expensive venture, and what did we get out of this? And I think the first and foremost, for a lot of people, it was a lot of pain that we got out of it.

As you’ve told the story of the war in Iraq, I am definitely hearing parallels to the war in Iran. What do you make of the comparisons? What is appropriate and what is going too far at this moment?

I’d say any war is horrible and terrible things inevitably happen. For instance, in the Iran war, it’s pretty clear that the United States bombed a school for children and killed 150 kids or so. That kind of thing happens, and it’s not to excuse it in any way — those things are kind of terrible across the board. 

But I would say there’s a sense that I have, having lived through, and seen up close, the Iraq War — that the government once again is having a hard time speaking clearly about its goals and its justifications for being there. 

That’s disturbing because we live in a democracy and the government should only be able to do what it is sanctioned to do by its people. President Trump has given out so many different justifications as to why we’re there. And so in that sense, I do have this kind of really empty, terrible feeling, kind of déjà vu.

One of the takeaways we hear is that America never learns its lesson. America is going back into the Middle East. America’s going to fight another stupid, forever war. 

You clearly have a more nuanced perspective on this, and you were in the region, and that counts for a lot. What is the big lesson here for you after the last 25 years of US interference in the Middle East?

I think maybe that there isn’t a big lesson, but in the case of Iran, in the Iran war, I’ll tell you how I feel about it. I don’t like the way the war started. I’m very disturbed by it, but we’re in it and it’s too late to turn back now. 

I think the best that we can hope for and that we should hope for is that we can get to a satisfactory resolution. At a minimum, I think that means for the Strait to be open so that the world economy doesn’t tumble into recession. My main hope is that we can somehow extricate ourselves from this war in a way that doesn’t leave the region in even greater chaos than what we have now.

After five weeks of muddled messaging, President Donald Trump finally addressed the nation on Wednesday night to make the case for his war on Iran. That message was…still muddled. He did not articulate a clear exit plan from the conflict, fobbed the Strait of Hormuz problem off on other countries, and denied that regime change was the point. 

Among those making a clear case against the war is longtime Trump ally and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who now hosts a mega-popular podcast, The Tucker Carlson Show. 

In an interview with Today, Explained, Carlson told Vox’s Noel King that the war “doesn’t serve American interests in any conceivable way. And let me just say that if it does in some way serve the interests of the United States, I’d love to hear it.” 

Carlson told Noel that he brought his argument directly to Trump, to no avail. “I went to see the president three times in the month before this in person, and made the case,” he said. “And in the end it had no effect. So I tried. But I haven’t been in touch with the president since then.”

In addition to the war, Carlson and Noel discussed the conservative moment’s Nazi problem — and how much blame he bears for it. Plus, whether he’s considering a presidential run, and why MAGA voters support the war.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You don’t think that the US should be at war with Iran. Why not?

I haven’t heard a consistent case from anyone, and I would say it’s not just the Trump administration. My strong sense, having watched it closely, is that there was not a groundswell of support for this war from within the Trump administration. The president made the decision to do it, but he wasn’t surrounded by advisers who were urging him to do it. Just the opposite. I don’t think there was any enthusiasm for it.

So why are we in this war?

He did it, as the secretary of state explained, because we were pushed into it by the Netanyahu government, by Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, to be totally clear, that’s not a way of exculpating the president. He’s the commander in chief of the US military. Trump made the decision; it was the wrong decision. 

But if you’re asking why did he make that decision, it’s because he was pushed into it by Benjamin Netanyahu, which raises the second obvious question: Where did Netanyahu get the power as the prime minister of a country of 9 million to force the president of a country of 350 million to do his bidding? 

I can’t answer that question, but I can tell you what happened because the secretary of state said it and the speaker of the House said it, and I watched it. And what happened was the Israelis went to the White House and said, We are going to do this. We’re going to move against Iran. 

At that point, the US had really only two choices. One is to follow and the other is to tell Israel no and force them not to do it, because as Marco Rubio explained on camera, if you allowed Israel to go alone, you were certain that American forces and citizens and interests in the Gulf would be destroyed. 

But either way, Benjamin Netanyahu made the decision on the timing of this. That’s another way of saying he was in charge. And I’m just here to say I think it’s wrong, and I think the majority of Americans think it’s wrong.

President Trump has been talking about Iran since the late 1980s. A Guardian interview recently resurfaced from 1988, and he’s asked, “If you were a politician, what would your platform be?” He says, “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools. One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island.” 

This sounds a lot like the way he’s talking [now] about doing a number on Kharg Island. You’re aware of that. Donald Trump is the president of the United States. Can’t this war just be what he wants?

I’m not denying him agency. I stated his agency, which is a matter of fact, not opinion. He’s the commander in chief. He gives the orders. Donald Trump made the decision. 

It is also true that Israel forced that decision. That’s what happened. It’s not a question of did Donald Trump hate Iran or love Iran and now hates Iran? He’s been consistent on that. 

The question is whether a regime change war against a country of almost 100 million people on the Persian Gulf was a) achievable, h) a good idea for the United States, and c) a good idea for the world. And Trump has said consistently, No, it’s a terrible idea. He’s been really specific about it: Regime change war in Iran is a bad idea. So this is the change. It’s not that he woke up one morning and was mad at Iran. What do you do about it is the question.

Not long after the US took Nicolás Maduro into custody in Venezuela, you did a monologue and you said that the US, an empire, needs serious men to run it, people who are wise and understand stakes, not flighty, silly, emotionally incontinent people. 

In light of the way that this war was launched, given the lack of coherent messaging as you’ve described it, the apparent lack of a plan to get out of Iran, do you think we have serious men making wise decisions in the White House?

We’re not seeing wise decisions, obviously. 

I think Venezuela, I think the war in Ukraine, I think all of these build on each other, but I think that the Venezuela operation set us up for what happened in Iran. It sent the message that you can achieve regime change at almost no cost. And as we’re learning five weeks in, that’s not possible in Iran, and the consequences are potentially catastrophic. 

I don’t think anyone who’s paying close attention has slept well for the last month. I would love to be able to say, Okay, we made our point and we killed their religious leader. And somehow that’s virtuous, I guess. And this is victory and we’re leaving. 

As an American, I would like to see that because I want to get out of this with as little damage as possible, but I don’t see how you can do that without leaving Iran stronger than it was in real terms. They have no navy, they have no air force — okay, but they control 20 percent of the world’s energy. How does that not make them stronger than they were in February?

Who are the serious men?

You find out in moments like this. Who can think clearly, who can accept unhappy truths, digest them and make wise decisions on the basis of them or who retreats into fantasy?

Who are you seeing do that? The former. In the White House. In the administration.

I don’t know. I went to see the president three times in the month before this in person and made the case — not too different from the case I’ve just made to you. And in the end it had no effect. 

I haven’t been in touch with the president since then, and so I don’t know. But I do think that there are people, I know that there are people in the White House who may disagree with me on all kinds of issues, but they want to do the best for the country. They’re not crazy. And I’m sure that they’re giving, I hope they’re giving good advice. But the question at this point is how do you get out of this?

It’s not easy. This just happened in 2003. I was there, both in Washington and in Iraq in the aftermath. And it shocks me that we are doing this thing again, particularly under a president who understood exactly what happened in 2003, campaigned all three elections against doing an Iraq War again, because it was stupid. He was the only Republican to campaign against the Iraq War. It’s why he won the nomination, in my opinion, in 2016.

It’s amazing to me that the president who knew, and said he knew again and again and again that this was wrong, that he just did the same thing.