Pete Hegseth’s Path from Campus Provocateur to Fox to the Pentagon

The gasp you may have heard on Tuesday evening was the collective sound of America’s generals and admirals reaching for supplemental oxygen, as they discovered that Donald Trump, the President-elect, had chosen Pete Hegseth as the country’s next Secretary of Defense. Hegseth served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Army National Guard and was the executive director of Vets for Freedom, a conservative advocacy group, but he has not held a senior military role or managed a large organization. His résumé is so thin that Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican and loyal Trump supporter, responded to the news with one word: “Who?”

Trump’s attitude toward all things military has historically bounced between effusive displays of regard (recall his efforts, resisted by Pentagon leaders, to stage a Soviet-style military parade on Pennsylvania Avenue) and utter contempt (take his repeated slams against John McCain: “I like people that weren’t captured”). Trump himself took unusual measures to avoid military service—he was initially unable to clarify exactly which of his heels had the bone spurs that enabled him to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. But no decision more clearly reveals Trump’s disdain for his country’s armed forces than his selection of Hegseth as Defense Secretary. This is, in many ways, a classic Trump choice. Hegseth’s qualifications for directing three million employees of the world’s most powerful military machine fit Trump’s well-worn pattern: simply put, Hegseth is on TV. Specifically, he appears on Trump’s longtime favorite channel, Fox News, as a weekend host of the talk show “Fox & Friends.” And—meeting another Trump standard—he looks and sounds like a loyal and studly follower. (Square jaw, good hair.) Even those who know Hegseth are shocked by the decision. His former Fox colleague Gretchen Carlson tweeted, “From silly diner interviews on Weekend Fox & Friends to Secretary of Defense? I never thought I’d say I’m stunned about any pick after the election but nominating Pete Hegseth for this incredibly important role? Yes he’s a veteran . . . and?”

Hegseth, who is forty-four, has been engaged in Republican politics since college. His first battlefield was the verdant quads of Princeton, where he marched into the wars of journalism as publisher of the campus conservative magazine, The Princeton Tory. Founded in 1984, the Tory was an outlet for students who included, through the years, Ted Cruz, the Texas senator; Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America; and Danielle Allen, the Harvard classicist and a former political columnist for the Washington Post. Like a slew of other conservative publications at élite colleges, the Tory was launched with financial assistance from the Institute for Educational Affairs, a foundation created by the neocon Irving Kristol to incubate right-wing voices on campuses.

“As the publisher of the Tory, I strive to defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity,” Hegseth wrote, in 2002. (Hegseth was perhaps better known on campus as a six-foot-one guard on the basketball team—he didn’t play much, but the coach, John Thompson III, said that he was “nothing but character.”)

In the same year that Hegseth was defending the West against diversity, he and the other editors of the Tory opined that the New York Times’ decision to publish announcements of same-sex marriages had opened the floodgates to incest and bestiality: “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?”

Another Tory article, published in Hegseth’s tenure, contended that “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.” In response, students wrote letters of protest, and Princeton’s L.G.B.T. coördinator met with the magazine’s leaders. Hegseth, then a senior, replied to critics that the Tory’s “argument is not that such-and-such is a bad person because they’re gay. It’s the lifestyle of homosexuality that we consider immoral.” (In 2012, Hegseth mounted a short-lived campaign for the Minnesota U.S. Senate seat held by the Democrat Amy Klobuchar, and he told the Daily Princetonian that, back in his Tory days, the magazine had used “some phraseology or terms or language that [was] maybe too sharp.”)

The head of Princeton’s student government pushed back against the Tory’s anti-gay comments, writing, “I have many homosexual friends, and I worry that statements like this make them feel even more alienated at a school like Princeton. In your ideal world, maybe gays would not exist. But this is America in the 21st century, and gays do exist—they’re in your classes, they’re your professors, and they’re even your friends.” Hegseth and the Tory’s editor replied, “Overwhelming majorities of Americans agree with the notion that homosexuality and heterosexuality are not moral equivalents.”

During his first Administration, Trump considered appointing Hegseth to lead the Veterans Affairs Department. Hegseth’s collegiate scribblings don’t seem to have been what prevented him from getting that job. He apparently interviewed three times for the role, but was passed over amid reports that he had had two extramarital affairs with co-workers during two marriages. At the time, some congressional Republicans also counselled against Hegseth’s nomination because he seemed too extreme to win confirmation. He has frequently pressed Trump to pardon soldiers who were accused of war crimes, and he speaks often on TV about the evil of the “deep state.” Hegseth, who served in Guantánamo Bay on his first tour of duty, has also defended the treatment of inmates there and called for the expansion of the detention center.

Hegseth might have some difficulty getting confirmed this time around, even with a Republican majority in the Senate, if the initial skepticism from senators is any indication. (“Oh, really?” the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville said, when informed of the pick. “I’d have to think about that.”) But, if Hegseth were to make it through, he might be expected to act on his oft-repeated complaints that the military has sacrificed its warrior culture to conform to progressive notions of equity and inclusion. In his recent book, “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth writes that the U.S. military has been taken over by a woke mentality that has dampened recruitment efforts. “The Pentagon likes to say ‘our diversity is our strength,’ ” Hegseth said on Fox, in June. “What a bunch of garbage. In the military, our diversity is not our strength, our unity is our strength.” He has also called for the removal of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, Jr., because he is too “woke,” and argued to ban women from combat roles or “labor-intensive-type jobs.”

Hegseth, a graduate of both Princeton and Harvard (in 2013, he received a master’s degree in public policy from the latter), has since soured on his Ivy League preparation. In 2022, to protest the teaching of critical race theory at Harvard, he wrote “RETURN TO SENDER” across his degree, on live TV. But, in 2017, he told the Daily Princetonian that his experience at Princeton was of a place where “you can civilly agree or disagree, but respect each other’s differences. I always thought Princeton did a pretty good job of advancing free exchange of ideas.”

That civility extended to a campus practice of duels at high noon in front of one of Princeton’s eating clubs. In his senior year, Hegseth said he was challenged to such a duel—no muskets, just paintballs—by the head of a campus left-wing organization, who was appalled by the Tory’s journalism. “I was in ROTC so I was the better shot,” Hegseth said. “It was fun.” ♦