Arrogant ignorance seems to be the calling card of Donald Trump’s second term. 

The president’s puerile comedy routine during last week’s joint address to Congress, in which Republicans laughed as he rattled off a list of federal funding projects he seemed to know little-to-nothing about — and thus, couldn’t justify financing — helped highlight this.

As he rattled off this list — including aid for the African country of Lesotho, which he claimed “nobody has ever heard of” — Trump laid bare the ethos of his administration: “Yeah, we ignorant. But who cares?” Thus far, it’s been a fairly effective strategy to have his followers wear his warts as their own.

Few officials in Trump’s administration appear to have internalized that quite like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the anti-diversity crusader who garnered backlash over the weekend for doubling down on the Trump administration’s ignorance on climate change. Responding to a CNN report about U.S. officials and experts who are concerned about the Pentagon shutting down climate-conscious programs, Hegseth agreed with a Pentagon spokesperson telling the outlet that “climate zealotry and other woke chimeras of the Left” aren’t part of the department’s mission. 

“John is, of course, correct,” Hegseth tweeted, referring to Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot’s comment to CNN. “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.”

Hegseth has used that term — “warfighting” — and other versions of it constantly since he was first nominated to his post. Best as I can tell, his emphasis on building so-called warfighters is part of what seems like a deranged obsession with prioritizing the military’s “lethality,” which he’s also mentioned frequently, while eluding things — like diversity, foreign aid and climate change research — that help mitigate or avoid conflict. 

It’s the kind of mindset you’d expect of a child launching airstrikes while playing “Call of Duty” — not of the head of our nation’s Defense Department. That’s why many of the quote tweets and replies responding to Hegseth are from people condemning his comments for their idiocy. Because, contrary to his suggestion that “climate change crap,” as he calls it, is irrelevant to the Pentagon’s mission, experts for years have predicted the role climate change will play in fueling conflicts that tend to spur U.S. involvement — and draw U.S. resources — in various ways. 

It’s simple, really: Scarcity of resources begets conflict, and climate change worsens scarcity. Experts, for example, have pointed to violent conflicts among farmers in Sudan over dwindling grazing land as a warning of the conflicts likely to multiply in the future if climate change isn’t addressed.

One of my earliest posts for The ReidOut Blog back in 2021, in fact, was on these exact phenomena. I wrote it after watching a panel discussion hosted by the global think tank International Crisis Group, called “Global Warning: How Climate Change Drives Conflict.” Hegseth can slam climate consciousness as “crap” all he wants. But his willful ignorance won’t make the reality of climate-induced conflict any less real — it’ll just hamper our country’s ability to grapple with the problems it causes.