On Thursday, September 17, 2026, the influencers and boxers Jake and Logan Paul toured the Pentagon, visited its 9/11 memorial, met Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and addressed uniformed service members from the podium in the Pentagon briefing room. On September 20 the department posted a produced video of the visit with the caption, “Last Thursday, we welcomed Logan and Jake Paul to the Pentagon to meet with our warriors.” Deadline noted it was the day before National POW/MIA Recognition Day.
What they said was unremarkable. “Each one of you matter,” Jake Paul told the troops. “Take this moment and be proud of yourselves for what you do.” Neither said anything political from the podium. Task & Purpose, a military news site, wrote, “It is not clear why the two visited the Pentagon.”
Who was given the podium is the reason this is recorded. Earlier in September, Newsweek reported, Jake Paul told an interviewer that the Second Amendment should reach more advanced weapons: “I think as weapons systems get more advanced, a pistol or a shotgun is not going to be able to upthrow the government, if we the people decide that the United States government is taking advantage of us.” He said citizens should have access to “drones, EMPs, RPGs potentially, anti-helicopter” weapons. Weeks later he was addressing Defense Department personnel from the department's own podium. He has also settled Securities and Exchange Commission charges for illegally promoting cryptocurrencies, according to Task & Purpose, and he is a prospective candidate with the president's backing: at a Kentucky rally in March, Trump told him, “I'm going to make a prediction that you will be, in the not too distant future, running for political office,” adding, “you have my complete and total endorsement!” Logan Paul, who hosted Trump on his podcast before the 2024 election, has faced what the Daily Beast describes as accusations of operating a cryptocurrency scam; those are accusations, not findings.
The Pentagon's statement, from Deputy Press Secretary Joel Valdez: “The Department of War was proud to host Jake and Logan Paul at the Pentagon this week. They toured the building, paid their respects at our 9/11 memorial, thanked our service members, and briefly met with Secretary Hegseth.” A Pentagon official said the brothers paid for their own transportation. Whether Hegseth personally invited them is not established, and headlines saying they came to “lecture” troops overstate remarks that were short thank-yous. On the same trip Jake Paul met Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
No rule is alleged to have been broken and no public money is known to have been spent. The visit fits a pattern this tracker has already recorded, of the department lending military settings to political allies and entertainers: Hegseth's Apache helicopter flight with Kid Rock (see Hegseth Takes Kid Rock for a Ride in an AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter at Fort Belvoir, Weeks After Lifting the Suspensions of Pilots Who Flew by the Singer's Home) and, as Task & Purpose put it, “The Pentagon recruited troops to attend the UFC fight that took place on the White House lawn this summer” (see Trump Is Building a 5,000-Seat UFC Cage on the White House South Lawn to Celebrate His 80th Birthday and America's 250th). Criticism so far has come from social media and from former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who wrote, “We aren't a serious country at the moment.” No sitting lawmaker or veterans' organization had commented when this was written.