MAGA devotees scrambled to defend Pete Hegseth after a government watchdog found that the Pentagon spent millions on steak and lobster last year.
An analysis by Open the Books found that the Defense Department spent more than $93 billion on various grants and contracts in September 2025 alone, the highest monthly total since at least 2008, as part of a frantic end-of-year spending spree to maintain its funding for the following year.
Last September, the Pentagon spent $15 million on ribeye steak, $7 million on lobster tails, $2 million on Alaskan king crabs, and $1 million on salmon.
But the eye-watering sums didn’t faze MAGA loyalists.
Dan Bongino, the podcaster who left his gig as deputy FBI director after just nine months, threw a chest-thumping defense of Hegseth and American troops on a Thursday episode of his eponymous show.
“We love you on this show. I don’t give a flying f–k if you eat steak and eggs for breakfast, steak on steak for lunch to prepare yourself for steak at night, ribeye steak at night,” he said. “I don’t even want you eating sirloin. It’s too cheap. I want you eating rib eye, porterhouse. F–k, I want you eating a tomahawk once in a while.”
Far-right activist and Trump whisperer Laura Loomer called on Hegseth to up the ante.
“Can you order even more lobster and steak for the troops?” she wrote in a post on X, tagging the defense secretary.
“They deserve to eat that every day,” she continued. “I don’t mind my taxpayer dollars going toward feeding the troops surf and turf. Let’s increase the lobster and steak budget.”
David Freeman, a MAGA influencer who goes by Gunther Eagleman online, said “anyone mad that our troops ate steak and lobster are f—--g idiots.”
Libs of TikTok, an account run by Chaya Raichik, redirected the outrage over the Pentagon spending spree to fraud in Minnesota.
“I don’t give a s–t about some lobster dinners for servicemembers who put their lives on the line to protect us while the Somali fraud in just Minnesota is $9 BILLION dollars and Democrats are busy covering up for it,” she wrote on X.
Others in MAGAworld zeroed in on Paul Begala, a former Clinton adviser who appeared unconvinced that the money went to the troops when he appeared on a CNN panel Wednesday night.
“Do you believe the Secretary of Defense is personally eating all the lobster? It’s for the troops,” Scott Jennings, the network’s conservative commentator, told Begala.
“Oh, really, the troops are getting lobster?” he responded. “You are so full of it.”
“Does CNN’s main guests or hosts get anything right? EVER?” conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller said on X.
Podcaster Tim Pool said “it’s a well-known and longstanding tradition to give lobster and steak to troops before war,” referring to the “surf and turf” meal that troops widely believe signals a significant development incoming.
“These people know this and are just pretending they don’t because they are s–theads,” he wrote on X.
But the spending occurred in September last year, months before the U.S. joined Israel in waging war on Iran. At the time, the Defense Department was primarily focused on launching strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
