I’ve been trying not to get too wound up every time Donald Trump announces a nominee for a position in his new administration. We knew his choices would be absurd. We knew most senior officials in his last administration endorsed Kamala Harris. We knew it would cause him to scrape the bottom of the barrel for sycophants and grifters this time. We knew it was coming.
And yet. Trump’s selection of Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as secretary of defense is gum-in-your-lap shocking. This is worse than the time Trump floated Sarah Palin as a potential secretary of veterans affairs.
His views are even more troubling.
Where to begin? Let’s start with the big one: Hegseth is not qualified for this role. He has no particular experience or expertise that would lead any sane person to put him in charge of America’s military, including the largest governmental bureaucracy in the world.
Hegseth began his career as an analyst at Bear Stearns while serving as a junior officer in the Minnesota Army National Guard. He did basic things all young service members of that era did: A rotation at Guantanamo Bay in 2003. A tour in Iraq in 2005. Then another tour with his Guard unit to Afghanistan in 2012.
In between, Hegseth got involved in politics, working first for an organization called Vets for Freedom (a group founded to support George W. Bush’s escalation of the war in Iraq) and, later, Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative-leaning veterans group. Hegseth did a lot of fundraising, made many TV appearances and generally ingratiated himself to Republican Party leaders.
Being well-spoken, telegenic and politically connected — rather than any particular experience in the military — landed Hegseth the gig that would make him known to millions of Americans: He joined Fox News as a contributor in 2014, and currently co-hosts “Fox & Friends” on weekends.
And that’s it, my friends. That is your nominee for secretary of defense. No experience in government outside the military. No experience running a large organization. The Defense Department has nearly three million employees. It has an annual budget of $842 billion.
Where Trump claimed implausibly that he can bring peace through strength, Hegseth is a hawk through and through.
Beyond his complete lack of qualifications, Hegseth, like many in Trump’s orbit, has a messy personal life. 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. His first marriage also ended after Hegseth was unfaithful. This is relevant because it’s not clear Hegseth can even get a security clearance, much less the type needed to run the Defense Department. Behavior like that opens individuals to blackmail and espionage and many aspiring civil servants each year are denied clearances for far less.
Hegseth may also have trouble getting cleared for the same reason he was barred from working at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021. Before that event, 12 National Guard members were removed from the inauguration’s security team after being vetted by the FBI. Hegseth later admitted that he was one of the 12. “Members of my unit in leadership deemed that I was an extremist or a white nationalist,” he said, blaming it on his “Jerusalem Cross tattoo.” However, what may have caught the bureau’s eye is the “Deus Vult” tattoo on Hegseth’s bicep, a Crusader motto now widely used by white supremacists and Christian nationalists.
And still, these are only Hegseth’s lack of qualifications and his liabilities. His views are even more troubling. The most salient issue is that millions of voters claimed to have chosen Trump for his promise to end wars. But where Trump claimed implausibly that he can bring peace through strength, Hegseth is a hawk through and through.
He has another tattoo citing the Bible’s Matthew 10:34: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” In his early years of activism, Hegseth suggested, often and publicly, that the U.S. should escalate the war in Iraq by embracing President Bush’s “surge.” In 2017, he argued “there’s merit in a pre-emptive strike” against North Korea. In 2020, he encouraged President Trump to “rewrite the rules” of war and to consider striking Iranian cultural sites.
In other words, Hegseth is the opposite of the peacemaker Trump claimed to be during his campaign.
In Trump’s first presidency, Hegseth lobbied successfully for Trump to pardon American service members and contractors accused of war crimes. Hegseth argued vehemently for the pardons, a view antithetical to the professional ethos inside the Department of Defense.
Siding with war criminals is not Hegseth’s only view that won’t sit well with DOD leadership. Just six days ago, Hegseth told The Shawn Ryan Show that “any general that was involved — general, admiral, whatever that was involved — in any of the DEI woke s--- has got to go.” He also opposed women serving in combat roles in the military. “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. It hasn’t made us more lethal. It has made fighting more complicated ... Over human history, men in those positions are more capable.”
For a normal president, Hegseth would never come anywhere near the Cabinet. But for Trump, the selection of Hegseth makes sense. His lack of qualifications and experience are an asset. It means Hegseth will be pliable, a yes man who will do whatever Trump wants. That makes him a danger to the U.S. military and the country at large. And while it all may seem like a joke, we must take this nomination absolutely seriously. This is how republics fall. Placing a professional military under the hand of a political apparatchik intent on carrying out the orders of a president with self-described dictatorial leanings will not end well. For that reason, and all the others, Hegseth must not be confirmed.