Pete Hegseth

Pete Hegseth   ( military officer,  TV presenter,  author,  politician)
Born	June 6, 1980  Minneapolis,  Minnesota,  U.S.
Alma mater	Princeton University
Children	4
Spouse	Meredith Schwarz
Member of	United Against Nuclear Iran
JD Vance's casting vote confirmed his appointment  United States Secretary of Defense In office 20 January 2025 - Present Appointed by Donald Trump Preceded by Lloyd Austin

Peter Brian Hegseth is a former Army National Guard officer, television presenter, and author who has been the 29th United States Secretary of Defense since 2025.

Background

Pete Hegseth studied politics at Princeton University, where he published for The Princeton Tory, a conservative student newspaper. In 2003, he was commissioned as an infantry officer in the Minnesota Army National Guard, for whom he served at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth worked for several organisations after leaving Iraq, including as an executive director at Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America. He became a contributor for Fox News in 2014. Hegseth served as an advisor to President Donald Trump after initially supporting his campaign in 2016. From 2017 to 2024, he was a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend.

Career

Senate confirmation

In November 2024, then-President-elect Trump named Hegseth as his nominee for Secretary of Defense. A Senate Committee on Armed Services committee hearing for Hegseth was held days before Trump's second inauguration. He faced allegations of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement, and alcohol issues leading up to his committee confirmation. He was confirmed by the US Senate, with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote, the second time in US history that a Cabinet nominee's confirmation was decided by a vice president after Betsy DeVos in 2017. He is the second youngest person to serve as Secretary of Defense, after Donald Rumsfeld, and the first Minnesotan.

His 2024 book, The War on Warriors, is said to have helped him secure Trump's nomination. In a 2020 book, American Crusade, he described how the US military would take side in a civil war, to "mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents", in response to a left he identified with sedition, the book is meant to lay out the strategy in order to defeat America’s internal enemies".

Concerns

The claim Hegseth was drinking alcohol during a NATO press conference was "fact checked" by Snopes and found to have "no credible evidence". But his drinking habit has been widely discussed, including by him and it is known that he stored bottles of alcohol in his office before he became a government official.

Alcoholic, or recovering alcoholic with sexual assault allegations against him. His mother, in an email, called him an "abuser of women". According to John Kiriakou, he answered a question he did not like in March 2026 with: "Yeah? That's what your mother said last night when I was leaving her house". (the Pentagon’s top press aide had given a "your mom" reply to a Huffington Post reporter in October 2025, with other instances of this type of answer in the administration, and soldiers staring to make jokes of the general sort based on what they hearing )

Criticism

“[... ] I just keep remembering who is just actually leading this quote-on-quote war and who is in charge of the Pentagon, and it's just a Fox News host. He just got thrown into this position and he is a complete psychopathic Neo Nazi, who's doctrine of his little gang is for all Muslims to die [...]”
Abby Martin (March 6, 2026) 
(Hegseth reportedly having chanted "kill all Muslims" on a drunken night out in 2015 )

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Donald Trump/Second presidency	“My opinion generally is that some figures in the Trump administration were kind of chosen as a PR move and that they're not actually in charge of what they're nominally in charge of. "So, like Pete Hegseth, head of the Pentagon, he's kind of a Fox and Friends, you know, he's a TV show host. And the The Deputy Director of the Pentagon, Steve Feinberg of Cerberus Capital, is most likely the person actually running the Pentagon, not Hegseth, in my opinion. "And I think that's true also for, RFK Junior in charge of HHS. I don't really think he's running. He's just kind of this figure that connected with Trump's base, particularly during the Covid era, and made them think reforms would come. And those reforms haven't really come, but he's kind of there to give the impression that things have changed. But the person behind him, the deputy secretary, is Jim O'Neill, who's a career affiliate of Peter Thiel who's also the power behind J.D. Vance and, you know, the man that made Palantir what it is. "And so, you know, I think it's just a way of sort of masking the people that are actually running stuff. And I think that's probably true, too, of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. They were making the rounds on podcasts and were making these connections and building trust and relationships with the public in Trump's base. But it seems like they're not actually, running anything, in my opinion. They're kind of figureheads in a way, and they're willing figureheads. I would say."”	Whitney Webb	28 July 2025

 

Event Participated in

Event	Start	End	Description
Donald Trump/Second presidency	20 January 2025	20 January 2029	The Donald Trump 2.0 administration.

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