What to Know About Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Pick for Defense Secretary

What to Know About Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Pick for Defense Secretary

The choice of the Fox News host and veteran was outside the norm. But he was a dedicated supporter of President-elect Donald J. Trump during his first term.

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By Helene Cooper

Reporting from Washington

President-elect Donald J. Trump has picked Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to lead the Pentagon and the 1.3 million active-duty men and women of the American military.

The choice of Mr. Hegseth, 44, was outside the norm of the traditional defense secretary. But he was a dedicated supporter of Mr. Trump during his first term.

“Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First,” Mr. Trump said in his announcement on Tuesday night. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice — our military will be great again, and America will never back down.”

But several Pentagon officials questioned Mr. Hegseth’s lack of experience — other than serving in the military — and raised concerns about his ability to win Senate confirmation, even with Republicans winning control of the chamber.

A Minnesota native, Mr. Hegseth graduated from Princeton University and has a master’s degree from Harvard. He has been married three times.

Here are other things to know about Mr. Hegseth.

He is a New York Times best-selling author.

Mr. Hegseth’s book, “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” was published in June.

“Our ‘elites’ are like the feckless drug-addled businessmen at Nakatomi Plaza, looking down on Bruce Willis’s John McClane in ‘Die Hard,’” Mr. Hegseth wrote in the New York Times best seller. “But there will come a day when they realize they need John McClane — that in fact their ability to live in peace and prosperity has always depended on guys like him being honorable, powerful and deadly.”

He has suggested that Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be fired.

During a recent podcast interview, Mr. Hegseth said that General Brown, who is by law the senior military adviser to the president and the most senior American military general, should be fired for being too “woke,” a term for those who support diversity and inclusion.

Mr. Hegseth also asked in his book whether General Brown, an African American Air Force fighter pilot with 130 combat flying hours and 40 years of service, would have gotten the job as Joint Chiefs chairman if he were not Black.

“We’ll never know, but always doubt — which on its face seems unfair to C.Q.,” he wrote, using General Brown’s nickname. “But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it really doesn’t much matter.”

He has challenged the idea of women in combat.

Mr. Hegseth expressed surprise that he had not received “more blowback” to his book because, he said on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast, “I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles.”

Mr. Hegseth said that he was happy to serve with women but that he did not think they should have certain roles in the military, particularly ones that include “physical, labor-intensive-type jobs,” like Special Operations forces and infantry artillery positions.

He vocally supported Mr. Trump in 2017 after the racial storm in Charlottesville, Va., during which a white nationalist killed a protester when he crashed his car into the crowd.

Republicans and Democrats alike criticized Mr. Trump for saying that those who resisted the neo-Nazis and white supremacists during protests in Charlottesville were as much to blame as the far-right crowds who marched on the college town.

But Mr. Hegseth took up the mantle for Mr. Trump.

“I think the president nailed it,” Mr. Hegseth said on “Fox & Friends” after the protests. “He condemned in the strongest possible terms hatred and bigotry on all sides as opposed to immediately picking a side out the gate.”

He doesn’t like the military’s diversity programs.

Any “general, admiral, whatever” involved in diversity and inclusion in the military, including General Brown, “has got to go,” Mr. Hegseth said in the same episode of the Shawn Ryan podcast, using a profanity to describe such programs.

During another podcast, with the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, Mr. Hegseth said that the military’s recruitment challenges were caused by advertising that featured diverse service members.

“There are not enough lesbians in San Francisco, Hugh, to man the 82nd Airborne,” he said. “You’re going to need to go to guys in Kentucky and Colorado and Ohio, who love the country, and pretty soon you will need ads that reflect that.”

He championed service members accused of war crimes.

After joining Fox News as a commentator, Mr. Hegseth repeatedly supported service members accused of war crimes, including Maj. Mathew L. Golsteyn of the Army Special Forces, First Lt. Clint Lorance of the Army and Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs.

In Fox appearances and in interviews with family members of the accused, Mr. Hegseth portrayed the men as heroes and victims, wrongly prosecuted by stateside bureaucrats who did not understand the complexities of combat.

Notably absent from those interviews were the troops who served with the men.

Multiple platoon members serving under Lieutenant Lorance and Chief Gallagher directly contradicted Mr. Hegseth’s characterizations in court, describing the killings by their leaders as coldblooded, unnecessary and in no way related to the confusion of combat.

“War is hard; there is collateral damage,” Staff Sgt. Daniel Williams said in an interview. “I get that. I’ve got my own stories,” But Sergeant Williams, who was on his third tour in Afghanistan and was a squad leader in the platoon, added, “That’s not what this was; this was straight murder.”

Mr. Hegseth often appealed directly to Mr. Trump to intervene. In 2019, the president dropped charges against Major Golsteyn, pardoned Lieutenant Lorance, who was serving a lengthy sentence for murder, and reversed a demotion for Chief Gallagher, who had been acquitted of murder at trial, but stripped of his rank for other crimes.

Mr. Trump made clear who had influenced his thinking, posting on Twitter a month before the pardons, “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill! @PeteHegseth.”

He served at Guantánamo Bay.

Mr. Hegseth served as a second lieutenant at the prison operation at Guantánamo Bay in 2004 and 2005 with an infantry unit of the New Jersey Army National Guard. He later visited there, in 2016, as a member of the media for a report about life at the base and prison on Fox News.

He has called for the expansion of the detention operation, which has 30 detainees now, down from around 600 when he served there. He has also suggested “expediting military commissions,” the war crimes court where the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and others are charged.

Carol Rosenberg, Ernesto Londoño, Eric Schmitt and Dave Philipps contributed reporting.

Trump Builds His Administration

As his team ramps up the transition process, President-elect Donald Trump says his administration will radically reshape the federal government.

• White House Press Secretary: Trump announced that he had chosen Karoline Leavitt, who worked in his administration and was his campaign’s press secretary, to be his White House press secretary.
• Justice Department: Trump intends to nominate three members of his criminal defense team to senior roles at the department, raising further concerns about politicization of the department.
• Health and Human Services: Trump said he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy opposes fluoride in water, promotes unproven Covid therapies and has threatened to prosecute medical journals.
• Immigration: Trump’s plans to expel noncitizens on a mass scale are likely to raise prices on goods and services and lower employment rates for U.S. workers, many economists say.
• Skirting the Senate: Trump’s demand that Senate Republicans surrender their role in vetting his nominees poses an early test of whether his second term will be more radical than his first.