Donald Trump’s second-term Cabinet was always going to be weird. But his selection of Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense sent shockwaves through Washington, D.C. — even among Republicans and Hegseth’s cable-TV colleagues.
Shortly after the news broke on Tuesday night, two Republican senators messaged Rolling Stone their dismay over Trump’s announcement, with each doubting Hegseth’s confirmability and basic qualifications for the high-stakes job. “That makes no sense!” one of them said. Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski couldn’t help but say, “Wow,” when quizzed about Trump’s latest selection to fill the highest ranks of his new administration, with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) replying, “Who?”
It wasn’t just Republican senators who were stunned by the news. “WHAT. THE. REAL. FUCK,” a former Fox News colleague of Hegseth’s exclaimed to Rolling Stone on Tuesday.
Hegseth is a decorated Army National Guard veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he has little management experience that would qualify him to run a massive government bureaucracy. He previously led a small veterans group and a PAC that were accused of cronyism and misspending. He has no government experience, and has been working for Fox since 2014. Trump touted Hegseth’s book spending time on The New York Times bestseller list when he announced the nomination.
Hegseth’s most important qualification might simply be that Trump likes him. The president-elect considered him to lead the Veterans Administration in his first term. Instead, Hegseth emerged as an informal adviser to the first Trump White House. Notably: Hegseth was a top player in privately lobbying Trump to grant executive clemency to accused American war criminals — an action that would later spark chaos and dissent within the senior ranks of the military and the Pentagon.
Also alarming: Hegseth is uncomfortably close to extremist movements. By his own accounting, Hegseth was “deemed an extremist” and removed from a National Guard regiment tasked with protecting Joe Biden’s inauguration, because of troubling tattoos. Hegseth claims the problematic ink in question is the giant Jerusalem cross tattooed on his pec, which he’s said is “just a Christian symbol.” But extremism analysts have also pointed to a bicep tat reading “Deus Vult” — or “God wills it” — a battle cry of the medieval crusaders that has recently been appropriated by white nationalists. (The crusaders also used the Jerusalem cross, specifically, in their heraldry.)
Hegseth has also called on Fox News viewers to look sympathetically on the motivations of white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 — insisting “there’s a reason those people were out there.” (Hegseth condemned their “outright racism,” but said it was reasonable they felt their country was “slipping away.”)
The Fox News host also broadcast live from the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, appearing to give weight to Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, while speaking almost enthusiastically about the possibility of violence. “We’re in a constitutional tinderbox,” he said, citing arrests the previous day: “Will there be contention tonight? That’s a possibility as well.” Indeed, Trump’s supporters led a violent insurrection that day at the U.S. Capitol, in hopes of blocking Congress from certifying Trump’s 2020 election loss.
More recently, Hegseth wrote a book about defeating “woke” culture in the military, titled The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. He writes that the Pentagon has become anti-caucasian (“they believe … white people are yesterday”) and is instead promoting “diverse recruits” he alleges are “pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies,” and that pose a risk to their “sane American” bunkmates in basic training.
Hegseth has spoken openly about cracking down on “DEI woke shit” within the military. Trump campaigned heavily on doing the same, showing clips of R. Lee Ermey’s character in Full Metal Jacket abusing soldiers as an example of the type of behavior the military needs to embrace. Hegseth has also said bluntly that he doesn’t believe women should be allowed to serve in combat roles.
Hegseth was shot down as a contender to head the Department of Veterans Affairs during Trump’s first administration thanks to stiff opposition from mainstream veterans groups. His nomination is likely to face stiff opposition in Congress — which may be a reason Trump has been lobbying the Senate to grant him recess appointment powers that would allow him to bypass that body’s duty to advise and consent on nominees. John Thune, who will replace Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader, has suggested he is open to allowing these recess appointments.
Regardless of his viability, the fact that Trump nominated Hegseth marks a return to the trollish chaos and provocation that defined his governing style. Indeed — despite the immediate surprise within the party and among some of Trump’s close allies — the fact that Trump would move to appoint a longtime Fox News figure to the most senior levels of the federal government would only sound out of place for those who didn’t follow his first administration.
