The New Cabinet? Pete Hegseth
One of the less likely of President-Elect Trump's cabinet picks to be confirmed is his choice for Secretary of Defense: Pete Hegseth. Since the name has been announced, a number of objections have been raised to Hegseth's selection, including allegations of sexual assault.
Hegseth was born on June 6, 1980, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father Brian Hegseth was a basketball coach, and his mother is Penny Hegseth. He attended Forest Lake Area High School, where he played football and basketball, graduating in 1999 as class valedictorian. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Princeton University in 2003. He also played basketball for the Princeton Tigers. In 2013, he received a Masters in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
While at Princeton, Hegseth joined the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) in 2001. After graduating from Princeton in 2003, Hegseth joined Bear Stearns as an equity capital markets analyst and was also commissioned as an infantrt officer in the Minnesota National Guard. In 2004, his unit was called to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, where he served as an infantry platoon leader. There he received the Army Commendation Medal. He volunteered to serve in Iraq, where he served first as an infantry platoon leader and later as a civil-military operations officer. During his service in Irag, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, the Combat Infantryman Badge, and a second Army Commendation Medal. He returned to active duty in 2012 at the rank of captain and he volunteered to deploy to Afghanistan with the Minnesota Army National Guard to train Afghan security forces. In 2014, Hegseth was promoted to the rank of major and left active duty to be assigned to the Army Individual Ready Reserve.
Hegseth was one of 12 national guardsmen flagged as a potential insider threat and removed from the group providing security for the presidential inauguration of President Joe Biden in 2021. On January 14, 2021, a fellow Guard member who was the unit's security manager and on an anti-terrorism team sent an email to the unit's leaders notifying them of a tattoo on Hegseth's bicep reading "Deus Valt", a phrase the security manager determined was associated with white supremacists who use it to invoke the idea of a white Christian medieval past. Shortly thereafter, Hegseth was told to stay home from the event. He later wrote in his fourth book that this caused him to resign in disgust, and his last day on active duty was March 31, 2021.
When he returned from Iraq, Hegseth worked briefly at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and in 2007 went to work as executive director at Vets for Freedom, an organization which advocated a greater troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2008, VFF was unable to pay its creditors, and a 2009 forensic accountant report showed that the organization was about half a million dollars in debt. VFF's backers decided to merge its core functions with another veterans group, Military Families United, and reduce Hegseth's role. Hegseth was demoted from executive director and president with a $45,000 salary to an officer with a $5,000 salary. In 2012, in Hegseth's final year at VFF, he was paid $8,000 while the organization received just $81 in grants.
In 2012, Hegseth formed the political action committee MN PAC. One-third of its $15,000 in funds were spent on Christmas parties for families and friends and less than half of the PAC's resources were spent on candidates, and as of March 2018, the PAC had closed its account.
Hegseth was the executive director for Concerned Veterans for America, an advocacy group whose main funders were the Koch brothers. Hegseth had that jon from 2013 to 2016. The group advocated greater privatization of the Department of Veterans Affairs. In a whistleblower report, former CVA employees said Hegseth was frequently heavily intoxicated during official events to the point of having to be restrained, passing out, and shouting slogans calling for the death of Muslims. The report also said that he sexually pursued female employees and under his leadership the organization ignored allegations of sexual impropriety, including allegations of sexual assault. According to reporting by The New Yorker, mismanagement and alcoholism concerns led to Hegseth's forced resignation from CVA in January 2016. Hegseth was considered to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration,
In 2012, Hegseth ran for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota, but he withdrew from the race after the May 2012 convention. During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, Hegseth initially backed Marco Rubio, and then Ted Cruz, before becoming a supporter of Donald Trump.
Hegseth joined Fox News as a contributor in 2014. In December 2018, Hegseth co-hosted Fox News Channel's All-American New Year. On June 14, 2015, Hegseth accidentally hit a West Point drummer while axe throwing during a live segment in honor of Flag Day. Hegseth missed the target and the axe hit one of the people behind it. In 2018 the drummer filed a lawsuit against Fox and Hegseth alleging that he has suffered "severe and serious personal injuries to his mind and body," and "permanent effects of pain, disability, disfigurement and loss of body function" as a result of their negligence.
In May 2019, it was reported that Trump was considering pardoning several US military service members who had been convicted of committing war crimes, including a veteran set to stand trial for shooting indiscriminately at civilians, hitting a girl and an elderly man, as well as fatally stabbing a captured teenage Islamic State (ISIS) member while he was receiving medical treatment. Hegseth was discussing these cases on Fox News without disclosing that he had advised Trump to pardon them. In November 2019, Trump pardoned three service members accused or convicted of war crimes.
In November 2024, President-Elect Trump announced that he intended to nominate Hegseth to serve as the next US Secretary of Defense. Hegseth ended his deal with Fox News that month so he could take the position. Several days later, a woman sent a memo to Trump's transition team about a 2017 sexual assault allegation against Hegseth. Several senators subsequently expressed concern, including Republican Senator Kevin Cramer, who said that the allegations were a "pretty big problem, given that we have...a sexual assault problem in our military."
In his book, "American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free," Hegseth said he believes there are "irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right in America leading to perpetual conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process". He furthermore called for an "American crusade", which he described as "a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom". In a May 2024 interview where he talked about education, Hegseth said "Democracy, democracy, defend the democracy. Do you know what our founders did not want us to be? A democracy." In his book, Hegseth has equated democracy to a leftist demand.
Hegseth has said in a controversial editorial commentary that "The movement to legitimize the homosexual lifestyle and homosexual marriages is strong and must be vigorously opposed." He says that homosexuality has opened the floodgates to incest, polygamy, pedophilia, child marriage, bestiality and zoophilia. He wrote, "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? 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."
Hegseth opposes transgenders in the military In a podcast with Jay Cutler and Sam Mackey, Hegseth said that transgender soldiers are "not deployable" because they are "reliant on chemicals" and added that "being transgendered in the military causes complications and differences". In the same podcast he also said that women should not serve in combat roles, stating: "Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat means casualties are worse".
Hegseth also criticized universities for teaching students about "environmentalism and radical environmentalism. " In June 2022, on the show Fox and Friends, Hegseth crossed out Harvard on his diploma, writing in "Critical Theory" and then marking "Return to Sender" across the central body as a protest of Harvard and other such universities. "People will say 'this is just a stunt, you still have a degree' and that's fine. I went, I got the degree, I walked to the classes and all that, but I hope this is a statement that as conservatives and patriots, if we love this country, we can't keep sending our kids and elevating them to universities that are poisoning their mind. I may have survived it, but a lot of kids go there and buy into 'critical theory university,' and that's how we get future leaders, Supreme Court Justices, Senators, others, who see America as an evil place. And Harvard is a factory for that kind of thinking."
Hegseth has been sharply critical of America's NATO allies. He said, "Maybe if NATO countries actually ponied up for their own defense - but they don't. They just yell about the rules while gutting their militaries and yelling at America for help." In American Crusade, he wrote "NATO is not an alliance; it’s a defense arrangement for Europe, paid for and underwritten by the United States" and called on it to be "scrapped and remade in order for freedom to be truly defended". He also criticized US funding for the United Nations, calling it "a fully globalist organization that aggressively advances an anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-freedom agenda. Here’s one set of rules for the United States and Israel, another for everyone else." In 2022, he said the Russian invasion of Ukraine "pales in comparison" to "wokeness" and crime. But in March 2022, he called Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal. He said: "What's at stake is repelling an authoritarian who basically is saying 'I want the Soviet Union back." He has also criticized US military aid to Ukraine .
Hegseth has referred to Israel as "God's chosen people" in a 2016 interview. He is opposed to a two-state solution and supports Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank. In American Crusade, he compared his support for Israel to the Crusades, saying "We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians a thousand years ago, we must. We need an American crusade." He has called Iran's government an "evil regime". In January 2020, Hegseth called on Trump to bomb the Iranian homeland, if they were storing weapons. In May 2020, Hegseth said the "communist Chinese" want to "end our civilization" and is creating a military "specifically dedicated to defeating the United States of America".
Hegseth has said that he wants to fire General Charles O. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and purge the military of "woke" generals, saying that "any general that was involved, general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI, woke shit has got to go." Hegseth also criticized the US military slogan "our diversity is our strength", calling it the "dumbest phrase on planet Earth". In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, he called on the US to ignore the Geneva Convention, arguing it gives the enemy side an unfair advantage.
Hegseth has defended the rioters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, calling them patriots who had been "re-awoken to the reality of what the left has done" to the country. He has said that only a handful of military personnel had been at the attack.
In October 2017, a woman told police in Monterey, California that Hegseth had sexually assaulted her in a hotel room. The woman told police that she was with Hegseth at the hotel bar, where "things got fuzzy" and, she said, a drug may have been slipped into her drink. She told police she remembered "being in an unknown room with Hegseth", who took away her phone and blocked her efforts to leave. She told police she "remembered saying 'no' a lot" and that Hegseth had forced sex with her. She told police that she did not recall the incident for several days, after which she went to the emergency room for a rape kit test, after which the police started an investigation. Hegseth admitted to police that he did have sex with the woman but that it was consensual. The police referred the matter to Monterey County District Attorney Jeannine M. Pacioni, who declined to press charges, saying, "No charges were supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt". A civil lawsuit was threatened and in 2020, Hegseth paid the woman as part of a non-disclosure agreement. In November 2024, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Hegseth, later said his client "felt that he was the victim of blackmail and innocent collateral damage" and paid only because he feared for his career. The allegations, police report, and non-disclosure agreement came to public notice in November 2024, after Trump announced his intention to nominate Hegseth as U.S. defense secretary
In 2004, Hegseth married his first wife, Meredith Schwarz, who was his high school girlfriend from Minnesota; they divorced in 2009 after he admitted to multiple infidelities. In 2010 he married his second wife, Samantha Deering; they have three sons. In August 2017, while still married to Samantha Deering, Hegseth had daughter Gwen with Fox executive producer Jennifer Rauchet. In September 2017, Samantha Deering filed for divorce. Hegseth and Rauchet-who has three young children from her first marriage -married on August 16,2019.
In 2018, during Hegseth's divorce proceedings from his second wife, his mother Penelope Hegseth sent him an email criticizing his treatment of women. The email stated: "You are an abuser of women - that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth...It's time for a someone (I wish it was a strong man) to stand up to your abusive behavior and call it out, especially against women." The New York Times published this email in November 2024 after Trump announced his intention to nominate Hegseth to be defense secretary. When interviewed about the email, Penelope Hegseth told the Times she had written it "in anger, with emotion" and had "immediately apologized in a separate email."
This morning (December 4th) the New York Times is reporting that President Trump is having second thoughts about this nomination and may instead nominate Florida Governor Rick DeSantis.