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Secretary of Defense is one of the most complex and consequential positions on earth. The person in that position is responsible for overseeing the world's largest bureaucracy, the Department of Defense, with over 2.6 million employees and a budget of over $840 billion. The Secretary of Defense is tasked with managing this massive institution to ensure the short-term and long-term security of the United States.
On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump nominated Pete Hegseth, the weekend co-host of Fox & Friends, to be the next Secretary of Defense.
Hegseth is a military veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and received a Bronze Star and other commendations. He also served in the National Guard. But the largest organization that Hegseth has previously run is Concerned Veterans for America, a Koch-funded right-wing advocacy organization, where he served as Executive Director from 2012 to 2016. Concerned Veterans for America had a few dozen employees and a budget of around $15 million during his tenure. In that role, Hegseth hired his younger brother, who had just graduated college, to a well-compensated media relations position at the CVA. Hegseth founded a small PAC in his native Minnesota to support conservative candidates. It managed to raise about $15,000 over several years. One-third of the raised funds were "spent on two Christmas parties and reimbursements to Hegseth."
Even Trump's most loyal supporters acknowledge Hegseth's lack of relevant experience. Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist during his first term, said that Hegseth has "never run a big organization" and is "kind of a madman."
But while Hegseth has limited management experience, he has spent many years in the public eye and has a long record of punditry. Here are 13 things everyone should know about the man Trump wants to put in charge of the nation's military.
Hegseth says women should not be in combat roles
"I'm straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles," Hegseth said in a media interview on November 10, 2024. According to Hegseth, "[e]verything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat, means casualties are worse."
"Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes,” Hegseth wrote in his 2024 book The War on Warriors. “We need moms. But not in the military, and especially not in combat units.”
"There aren't enough lesbians in San Francisco to staff the 82nd Airborne like you need, you need the boys in Kentucky and Texas and North Carolina and Wisconsin," Hegseth said in a podcast earlier this year.
Women have formally been allowed to serve in combat roles since 2013 and have been involved in combat operations for decades. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page suggested Hegseth's position is misguided because "women have shown they can perform well in many roles" in the military.
Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of rape to sign an NDA
A woman reportedly alleged that she was raped by Hegseth during an October 2017 conference for the California Federation of Republican Women in Monterey, California. The woman reported the incident to the Monterey police, which investigated the incident but did not file charges. Hegseth, through an attorney, claims that the encounter was consensual.
According to the Washington Post, however, Hegseth paid the woman an undisclosed sum to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Asked whether Hegseth had paid the woman to sign an NDA, Hegseth's attorney said, "there’s no other skeletons to come out."
A friend of the woman wrote a four-page memo to the Trump transition team detailing the incident and suggested that the woman was not fully conscious when she was with Hegseth. According to the memo, the woman "didn’t remember anything until she was in Hegseth’s hotel room and then stumbling to find her hotel room." She then went to the emergency room where "she received a rape-kit examination that 'was positive for semen.'"
Hegseth's lawyer volunteered that Hegseth was “visibly intoxicated” at the time of the incident and, according to the lawyer, the alleged victim had "been the aggressor."
Hegseth published a column in college that claimed having sex with an unconscious woman is not rape
While he was a student at Princeton in 2002, Hegseth was the publisher of the Princeton Tory, a right-wing student newspaper. In the September 2002 edition of the publication, flagged for Popular Information by Will Davis of Arc Initiatives, Hegseth published a column that claimed having intercourse with an unconscious woman was not rape. The columnist claimed that rape required both the failure to consent and "duress," and women who are passed out cannot experience "duress":
[A] bemusing yet mandatory orientation program, revolved entirely around whether an instance of sexual intercourse constituted “rape.” The actual instance portrayed in the skit was in fact not a clear case of rape – at least not in my home state. (In short, though intercourse was not consented to, there was no duress because the girl drank herself into unconsciousness. Both criteria must be satisfied for rape. Unfortunately, the panelists never cited any legal definition of rape.) Yet the panel – all females in the session I attended – claimed that rape it was.
In an introductory note to students in the September edition, Hegseth wrote that he hoped the Princeton Tory would "help shape the way you view the world."
Hegseth is a serial philanderer, making him a target for blackmail
Hegseth has been married three times. He divorced his first wife in 2009, and according to court records, the marriage dissolved because of Hegseth’s “infidelity.” In August 2017, "while married to his second wife, Hegseth had a daughter with a Fox News producer, a woman with whom he had been having an affair." Hegseth's second wife "filed for divorce in September — a month after the child was born." While many people get married and divorced multiple times, the nature of Hegseth's conduct may make him a target for "blackmail and espionage."
Hegseth criticized injured veterans who receive government assistance
In an April 5, 2019, appearance on Fox News, Hegseth criticized veterans who receive government assistance for injuries sustained during their service. Hegseth bemoaned that "vets groups… encourage vets to apply for every government benefit they can ever get after they leave the service." He argued that, absent a chronic condition, accepting benefits violates "the ethos of service" because it makes veterans "dependent" on the government.
Hegseth praised “waterboarding," blasted the Geneva Conventions
In an April 2016 speech to the Conservative Forum, Hegseth said that “waterboarding,” a form of torture, was an effective “interrogation technique.” Hegseth said that military leaders “taking waterboarding off the table” was “absolutely a mistake.” He also mocked leaders who claimed that it was “inhumane.”
In addition to being illegal, waterboarding and other forms of torture have been shown to elicit unreliable information from detainees.
Further, Hegseth has been critical of the Geneva Conventions, which provide for the humane treatment of prisoners of war.
Hegseth dismissed moral concerns about the use of nuclear weapons
"They won. Who cares," Hegseth wrote in The War on Warriors about the Americans who dropped nuclear bombs on Japan in World War II.
Hegseth pushed Trump to pardon service members convicted of war crimes
Beginning in 2019, Hegseth advocated for Trump to issue pardons to members of the military who had been convicted of war crimes. Hegseth called for Trump to pardon Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who "had been convicted by a military court in 2013 for the murder of two Afghan men during a military operation in 2012 in which he ordered his soldiers to open fire on a group of unarmed Afghan civilians he suspected of being insurgents." Lorance served six years of a 19-year sentence before receiving a pardon by Trump in 2019.
Hegseth said the United Nations should be shut down
In a May 28, 2020, video, Hegseth said the United Nations should be eliminated:
Stop debating about, like, do we do a little bit less at the U.N.? No. Just get rid of the U.N. Just get rid of it. It is a poisoned body, it is an anti-American, anti-Israel, antisemitic institution that's now bonds together to gang up on us, to gang up on the West. And what use does it have?
Hegseth has a tattoo associated with white nationalists
Hegseth has a tattoo on his bicep that says "Deus Vult," Latin for "God wills it."
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The phrase, which has its roots in the First Crusade, has been appropriated as a rallying cry for white supremacists. The tattoo, according to the Associated Press, resulted in Hegseth being "pulled by his District of Columbia National Guard unit from guarding Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration" because he was viewed as a possible "insider threat." Hegseth acknowledged he was excluded, but claimed it was because he had tattoos with Christian imagery.
Hegseth is a member of a Christian supremacist church
Hegseth is a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). Doug Wilson, CREC’s founder, openly ascribes to Christian nationalism, wrote a book praising the antebellum South as an idyllic multiracial Christian society, and said that women should not have the right to vote. Wilson and his wife have written books implying that rape within marriage is impossible and several women in Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho church community have accused him of protecting their abusers.
Hegseth has been reported to be in good standing with the church. He is also involved with the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a Christian private school network co-founded by Wilson. His children attend a school in the network and he co-authored a book in 2022 with the network’s president, David Goodwin, about how such schools can save kids from leftist indoctrination in “government schools” and elite universities. Hegseth has degrees from Princeton and Harvard.
Hegseth said rising Muslim birth rates were causing "a slow motion 9/11"
Hegseth is a frequent promoter of Islamophobic rhetoric, and has repeatedly warned about Muslim “birth-rates.” On Fox & Friends Sunday in 2018, Hegseth said that France was experiencing “a slow-motion 9/11” because “Muslims are having 2.6 kids, whereas French-born folks are having 1.6 kids.”
In his book American Crusade, Hegseth makes similar claims, writing that Europe is being “invaded” both “culturally and demographically” by Muslims, lamenting that "in 2019, the most popular name in England for newborn boys was Muhammad.” Hegseth claims that this is also happening in America, but that “we are behind the trends of Europe,” due to our “traditional Christian fabric.”
Hegseth promoted editorial comparing same-sex marriage to bestiality
In September 2002, during Hegseth’s tenure as publisher, the Princeton Tory published an unsigned opinion that compared same-sex marriage to incest and beastiality. The piece denounced the New York Times’ decision to publish same-sex marriage announcements, arguing, “At what point does the paper deem a ‘relationship’ unfit for publication? What if we ‘loved’ our sister and wanted to marry her? Or maybe two women at the same time? A 13-year-old? The family dog?” In October 2002, a piece in the Princeton Tory stated that “boys can wear bras and girls can wear ties until we’re blue in the face, but it won’t change the reality that the homosexual lifestyle is abnormal and immoral.”
In The War on Warriors, Hegseth continued to push anti-LGBTQ beliefs, complaining about “ads promoting diversity in the military to ‘trannies and lesbians’” arguing that they were dissuading the “young, patriotic, Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks.”
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