Sixteenth-century alchemists believed they could grow a man in a flask.
Seal the right mixture in a glass flask, keep it warm for forty days, and a homunculus would emerge: a tiny, fully formed human being that needs no education, no apprenticeship, and no moral growth of any kind. Paracelsus wrote out the recipe. Nobody ever produced one.
We have now produced two.
Neuroscience gave the word a second life. The cortical homunculus maps the human body the way the brain experiences it, and the result is a grotesque little figure with enormous hands, swollen lips, a giant tongue, and very little else. It shows where the brain spends its attention. Look at the man in the Oval Office and the man he installed at the Pentagon, and you see both versions at once. Here are two men convinced they arrived fully formed, whose proportions run almost entirely to mouth and grasp.
I spent twenty years in police work and commanded the Investigative Services Division. The job teaches you early: A badge doesn’t make a man an investigator, and a title doesn’t make him a leader. Rank confers authority. It does not confer ability. When the two come apart, people get hurt. So let us do what investigators do and open the file.
Start with Pete Hegseth, who came to command the most powerful military in human history from the couch of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” a seat he kept until November 2024.
In March 2025, he typed strike details for an operation in Yemen into Signal, a commercial messaging app, on his personal phone. One chat included a journalist. Another, CNN reported, included his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer. The Pentagon’s own inspector general, a Trump appointee, spent eight months on it. The 84-page report found he sent the strike times of manned American aircraft over hostile territory across an unapproved, insecure network two to four hours before the bombs fell. He refused to sit for an interview. He refused to hand over his phone. Some messages had auto-deleted before anyone could capture them.
His verdict on the report? “Total exoneration.”
When Donald Trump plays the voice of restraint, the room has a serious problem.
Joe Broadmeadow
Every detective has interviewed this man. He sits across the table, refuses to answer questions, withholds evidence, and then walks out to the cameras to announce the investigation cleared him. We did not call that exoneration. We called it a suspect.
His argument was that nothing happened to the aviators and the mission succeeded. Hardly a justification to ignore the abject security failure, except in this administration.
Then came the globe. Two 30-inch globes from the 1930s sit in the Pentagon, believed to have served Dwight Eisenhower in his 1942 war planning. In February, Hegseth’s staff tried to move one. The Army historians who should have supervised were furloughed during the shutdown, so the staff went ahead without them. They dropped it and gashed the shell near Antarctica. Nobody has said whether Hegseth gave the order. It hardly matters. A leader sets the climate, and his climate says you never wait for the people who know how.
This month he announced the Pentagon would livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, and called the decision a “no-brainer.” No other country is known to broadcast its executions. Republican Senator Thom Tillis noted public executions are what dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. Within a week, the president overruled him.
When Donald Trump plays the voice of restraint, the room has a serious problem.
And the war. Operation Epic Fury began against Iran on February 28. The administration declared it over on May 5. American troops kept dying anyway, and in July the Pentagon’s casualty site listed four service members killed that month in an operation it says had already ended.
By August, an Air Force email told personnel to stop using the name. The Defense Department’s inspector general now reports the full mission statement is classified, and Central Command told the watchdog it kept refining the mission after the shooting started. A homunculus cannot grow into a job. He can only rename it. He renamed his own department, too.
Which brings us to the original. Donald Trump is the alchemist’s dream made flesh, the man who believes he emerged from the flask complete. No briefing can teach him anything his gut has not already decided. No expert knows more than he does about tariffs, wind turbines, or war.
Consider the Hasan livestream from his side of the desk. A White House official told reporters Trump and his advisers had no idea the plan existed until Hegseth announced it. The commander in chief learned about a policy the United Nations would call abhorrent the same way the rest of us did. Then he said he “absolutely” endorsed it. Then, as the backlash grew, he killed it while writing on Truth Social that streaming the execution might have made a strong deterrent.
He opposed it, supported it, and canceled it, all without ever seeming to understand it.
That is the chain of command under a homunculus. He did not supervise his defense secretary. He watched him on television, like a viewer, which is exactly how he chose him.
The public has noticed. Pew measured his approval at 30 percent in early October. Reuters/Ipsos put it at 31 percent, a record low, two weeks before the midterms. He responded by claiming a 99 percent approval rating, the highest ever. You know who else gets 99% approval ratings? Kim Jung Un and Vladimir Putin.
Investigators have a name for the suspect who volunteers an alibi nobody asked for, and nobody believes. We call it a tell.
He renamed the United States Institute of Peace after himself and hosted a summit there this month, while American forces remained engaged in a war whose purpose his own Pentagon now keeps secret from the people paying for it. The tiny figure in the brain map has huge (his might be a bit smaller than the average hormunculus) hands for grabbing and huge lips for talking. You won’t find a part for listening anywhere on it.
Set both men beside the man whose globe they dropped.
Eisenhower spent most of two decades as a staff officer before anyone gave him a command of consequence. He wrote a battlefield guide for Pershing, served MacArthur in the Philippines, and ran war plans for George Marshall. By 1942 he was bent over that globe, marking it up, working out how to move millions of men across oceans. On the eve of D-Day, he drafted a note in case the landings failed, taking sole blame. He never needed to send it. As president, he warned the country about the very military-industrial machine he understood better than anyone alive.
Eisenhower grew into his stature over thirty years. The men now sitting in his chairs think stature comes with the office, like the parking space.
The alchemists’ homunculus had one weakness. It could live only inside the flask. Expose it to open air, and it withered. For these two, the flask is the cable studio, the rally stage, and the Truth Social feed, sealed places where volume passes for competence and loyalty passes for judgment.
On Tuesday, voters get to open the flask.
In my old line of work, we had a word for a man promoted past his ability. We called him a liability. In Washington, we call him Mr. Secretary. And Mr. President.
Sources
- Signalgate report says Hegseth created a risk to national security with cellphone messages, Idaho Capital Sun
- Signalgate report finds Hegseth potentially put U.S. forces at risk, Axios
- Hegseth’s staff dropped globe believed to be used by Eisenhower in Pentagon move, WJLA, citing The Washington Post
- Trump reverses Pentagon’s plan to livestream Hasan execution, Task & Purpose
- Trump shuts down Pentagon plan to broadcast terrorist’s death, Reuters via Nation
- Trump scraps plans to livestream Nidal Hasan execution, MaltaToday
- Trump announces Nidal Hasan execution ‘will not be streamed’, ABC News
- The Pentagon classified the mission statement for Operation Epic Fury, Task & Purpose
- Military personnel told to stop calling Iran conflict “Operation Epic Fury”, CBS News
- Trump’s approval rating drops to 30%, Pew Research Center
- Trump approval rating falls to record low of 31%, UNI, citing Reuters/Ipsos
- Truth Social posts of October 10, 2026, American Presidency Project
- Pete Hegseth fast facts, CNN via KRDO
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