Fox News host and veteran Pete Hegseth has said exactly how he will shake up Pentagon
Trump’s nominee for defense secretary has called for a war on what he calls the ‘woke’ military, including potentially firing top brass.
President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Fox News host Pete Hegseth as his nominee for defense secretary would place atop the Pentagon a combat veteran and political ally who has assailed the military as ineffective and “woke,” mused about firing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and blasted the top brass as having failed to safeguard American strength.
Hegseth’s nomination suggests a coming battle over social and personnel issues within the armed forces, historically one of the nation’s most diverse institutions. He has been among Trump’s most high-profile supporters to champion the cause of rolling back initiatives designed to promote diversity.
Throughout his campaign, Trump made a distinction between fighting generals and “woke” generals, vowing to fire the latter. Asked in a podcast interview with the “Shawn Ryan Show” published last week what he would do, Hegseth set a tone that looks ominous for senior Pentagon officials.
“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said, referring to Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. “Any general, any admiral, whatever,” who was involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs or “woke s---” has “got to go,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth could not be reached for comment.
His nomination represents a major victory for Donald Trump Jr., who has lobbied for the inclusion of more unorthodox candidates, such as Vice President-elect JD Vance and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, against the wishes of establishment Republicans who favored filling key administration roles with those they see as more traditional choices, such as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
The breakneck speed of the Hegseth nomination also underscores the value Trump places on TV personalities who have used their platform to promote his agenda.
On Thursday, the president-elect called Hegseth and asked whether he was interested in becoming the next defense secretary, said a person familiar with the conversations who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel meetings. Hegseth immediately said “yes,” which then triggered Trump’s team to begin the formal vetting process, this person said.
On Monday, Hegseth was asked to fly to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for a final round of meetings with Trump, during which the president-elect offered, and Hegseth accepted, the job. “It came together pretty quickly,” the person said.
In last week’s podcast interview with Ryan, a Navy SEAL veteran, Hegseth said he was one of two finalists to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs when Trump took office in 2017, but the president found him to be “a little young” then to do the job.
Nevertheless, during Trump’s first term, Hegseth proved valuable to the president by promoting pieces of legislation he cared about on his show “Fox & Friends Weekend,” including the VA-focused Mission Act and the Accountability Act. The show’s weekend schedule and four-hour time slot fit Trump’s viewing habits, and he appeared on the show multiple times.
In his statement announcing the nomination, Trump cited a book that Hegseth wrote — “War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free” — and its treatment of what the president-elect said was a “left-wing betrayal of our warriors, and how we must return our military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability, and excellence.”
The Biden administration has maintained that critics distort the military’s diversity initiatives, saying they account for far less focus and time than opponents allege.
The Princeton- and Harvard-educated Hegseth, who served as an Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Minnesota National Guard, also played a role in episodes that roiled the Pentagon and involved Trump’s defiance of military norms during his first term in office.
Hegseth was a key player, for instance, in convincing the then-president to intervene in the war crimes cases of three U.S. service members in 2019. That effort led to pardons for two Army officers, Mathew L. Golsteyn and Clint Lorance, in separate murder cases, and a redemption of sorts for Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who had seen his rank reduced after a military jury acquitted him of murder charges but found him guilty of posing for a photograph with a corpse.
Hegseth lobbied the president directly from his perch at Fox News, featuring the cases frequently and casting them as the malicious prosecution of war heroes. Trump called Hegseth numerous times about the issue, officials familiar with the discussion said at the time. While some Trump administration officials celebrated the decisions, others worried they would set a bad precedent and damage U.S. relationships abroad.
Golsteyn, who was accused of killing an unarmed Taliban official and burning his body to hide evidence in a murder case, celebrated the decision on Tuesday night.
“This is a phenomenal choice for SECDEF,” Golsteyn said in a text message. “We are a military of lions led by morally bankrupt sheep. The scale of the problem requires someone of great intellect and character with whom the establishment can expect no quarter. Pete Hegseth is that guy.”
Past comments by Hegseth, who has called for senior military officers to be held accountable for their failures at home and abroad, also suggests he will attempt to bring a new kind of criteria to his leadership of the Pentagon.
“[GI] Joe also knows that if he loses his rifle, he’ll be demoted immediately,” he wrote earlier this year. “But if a general loses a war — or billions of dollars of military equipment — nothing happens.”
His emergence as Trump’s pick raises the stakes for high-profile officers such as Brown, the former pilot who President Joe Biden selected as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Although it was Trump who tapped Brown to become Air Force chief of staff in 2020, positioning him to become the first African American officer to serve in that role, he gained notoriety for a video in which he spoke in emotional terms that year about the impact of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota police and about his own experiences with race in the military.
In the podcast interview with Ryan, Hegseth said that firing Brown and other officials seen as being involved in diversity initiatives would be a step toward countering what he described as “socially correct garbage” in the military.
Hegseth has criticized the Obama administration’s 2015 decision to drop gender-based restrictions and allow women to serve in direct-combat jobs, a move that followed years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan that erased traditional notions of what it means to serve on the front lines. Since then, women have assimilated into positions that historically were all-male, including infantry and artillery units.
“Gimme a female pilot all day long. I have no issues with that,” Hegseth told Ryan in last week’s interview. His sticking point, Hegseth said, is a perception that the military has lowered standards for women in physically demanding jobs. Allowing women into combat roles, he said, “hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”
Israel, Britain and other U.S. allies also allow women to serve in combat.
Hegseth also has blamed the military’s current culture for its ongoing recruiting challenges and said personnel with views like his were routinely sidelined.
“We can no longer expect to win the wars our nation sends us to fight if the sniper fire is coming from inside our ranks, and straight from the front of our formations,” he wrote.
Hegseth’s selection did not please every Trump ally.
One person who has advised Trump for years contrasted Hegseth with more experienced public servants like Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida), who Trump has nominated as his national security adviser, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), who is a likely pick to lead the State Department, and questioned whether Senate Republicans, who will control the chamber starting next year, would back his nomination.
“How is Tom Cotton going to defend this pick? Joni Ernst?” the person said, referring to two Senate Republicans with national security credentials. “Everyone else is a bull’s eye, and this one isn’t even on the target.”
Senate Democrats, who will be involved in scrutinizing Trump’s nominations, raised immediate skepticism about his pick of Hegseth.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a social media post that he is “not qualified” for the job.
“I lead the Senate military personnel panel. All three of my brothers served in uniform. I respect every one of our servicemembers,” she wrote. “Donald Trump’s pick will make us less safe and must be rejected.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), another member of the Armed Services Committee, said in a phone call that “this very surprising nominee deserves extremely close scrutiny.”
“I’m reaching no immediate conclusions,” Blumenthal said, “but I will certainly be questioning very critically what his views are on various highly significant policy issues, and what direction he would lead the Pentagon.”
