Pete Hegseth
Peter Brian Hegseth is an American government official and former television personality who has served as the 29th United States secretary of defense since 2025.
Hegseth studied politics at Princeton University, where he was the publisher of The Princeton Tory, a conservative student newspaper. In 2003, he was commissioned as an infantry officer in the Minnesota Army National Guard, serving at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth worked for several organizations after leaving Iraq, including as an executive director at Vets For Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America. He became a contributor to Fox News in 2014. Hegseth served as an advisor to President Donald Trump after supporting his campaign in 2016. From 2017 to 2024, Hegseth co-hosted Fox & Friends Weekend. He has written several books, including American Crusade and The War on Warriors.
In November 2024, President-elect Trump named Hegseth as his nominee for secretary of defense. In a Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing days before Trump's second inauguration, Hegseth faced allegations of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement, and excessive drinking. Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate that month, with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote. It was only the second time in US history that a Cabinet nominee's confirmation was decided by a vice president. Hegseth is the second-youngest secretary of defense.
Hegseth has drawn criticism during his tenure as Secretary of Defense due to the fallout from a leaked government group chat on Signal as well as alleged war crimes related to U.S. military strikes on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea.
Early life and education
Peter Brian Hegseth was born on June 6, 1980, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is of Norwegian descent. He was the first child of Brian and Penelope "Penny" Hegseth. Hegseth's father was a basketball coach for high schools across Minnesota before retiring in 2019; his mother is an executive business coach who has taught with the Minnesota Excellence in Public Service Series, a fellowship and leadership program for Republican and center-right women. Hegseth was raised in Forest Lake, Minnesota, and attended Forest Lake Area High School. He graduated in 1999 as valedictorian.After high school, Hegseth enrolled at Princeton University, where he majored in politics for his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Ivy League school. According to Reserve & National Guard Magazine, he chose Princeton over an offer from the United States Military Academy to play for the school's basketball team. Months before the September 11 attacks, Hegseth joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps. During his years at Princeton, Hegseth was the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Princeton Tory, the school's conservative student newspaper.
In April 2002, Hegseth declared that, as publisher of The Princeton Tory, he would "defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity". The editors of The Princeton Tory criticized Halle Berry for accepting the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Monster's Ball "on behalf of an entire race", and The New York Times for announcing that it would print gay marriage announcements, arguing that it would justify publishing marriage announcements for incestuous, zoophilic, and pedophilic relationships. In October, The ''Princeton Tory published an editorial calling homosexuality immoral. In response, the president of Princeton's student government, Nina Langsam, wrote a strongly worded email to Hegseth and The Princeton Tory''s publisher, Brad Simmons. Her email was published in the following issue.
Career
Military service (2003–2006, 2010–2014, 2019–2021)
After graduating from Princeton in 2003, Hegseth was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army through the university's Reserve Officers' Training Corps program. He briefly worked as an equity-markets analyst at Bear Stearns. Hegseth completed his basic training at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, in 2004, and for 11 months he was a Minnesota Army National Guardsman at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. There, he led a platoon of soldiers from the New Jersey Army National Guard guarding detainees. By July 2005, he had returned to Bear Stearns; shortly thereafter, he volunteered in the Iraq War as an infantry officer, where he received a Bronze Star Medal. Hegseth served in the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment in the 101st Airborne Division, led by Colonel Michael D. Steele. He began his tour in Baghdad before moving to Samarra, where he served as a civil affairs officer, working with the city council and forming an alliance with councilmember Asaad Ali Yaseen. Hegseth has described a near-death experience in Iraq in which a rocket-propelled grenade hit his vehicle but failed to detonate.In 2010, Hegseth deployed with the Minnesota Army National Guard as a counterinsurgency instructor. He volunteered to teach at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul, Afghanistan, for eight months, during the withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan; he taught one of the final classes at the school. After completing his tour in 2014, he was promoted to major and assigned to the Individual Ready Reserve. Through the reserve, he joined the District of Columbia Army National Guard in June 2019 as a traditional drilling service member, remaining in duty until March 2021. He was barred from serving on duty at the inauguration of Joe Biden after a guardsman flagged Hegseth as an "insider threat", noting [|a tattoo] on his biceps of the words Deus vult. He left the Individual Ready Reserve in January 2024, writing in his book The War on Warriors that he resigned over the incident.
Political activism (2006–2016)
By August 2006, Hegseth moved to Manhattan and began working at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where he met a marine who was working for Vets for Freedom, a political advocacy organization. He began working for Vets for Freedom in 2006 as an unpaid director; by 2007, he was working full-time as an executive director, and by 2008, he became the organization's president. In May 2007, Hegseth appeared at a presidential campaign fundraiser for John McCain. In the months leading up to the 2008 United States presidential election, Vets for Freedom began supporting McCain. As the group's chairman, he criticized Democratic nominee Barack Obama for supporting "a dangerous policy of irreversible withdrawal." By January 2009, Vets for Freedom had accrued hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills, leading to an internal campaign to oust Hegseth. The group merged with Military Families United, and he was removed from leadership by 2011.After returning to Minnesota in February 2012, Hegseth decided to enter the Republican primary for the United States Senate election in Minnesota and had selected a campaign manager, Anne Neu Brindley. By April, his campaign had raised. Hegseth lost to Kurt Bills in the Republican convention in May, and withdrew his nomination days later. He founded MN PAC to support similar candidates, though a third of the organization's funds went to parties for personal friends and family. Hegseth began working as president of Concerned Veterans of America, a group funded by the Koch brothers, that year. The group criticized Obama for the 2014 Veterans Health Administration controversy. Hegseth enrolled in the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, but completed just one semester; he graduated in 2013 with a degree in public policy. In 2022, to protest the offering of classes in critical race theory at Harvard University, he reportedly wrote "Return to sender" on his degree and sent it back to the university.
Hegseth left Concerned Veterans for America in January 2016 after allegations of financial mismanagement and alcoholism. A whistleblower report accused Hegseth of fostering a sexist and hostile workplace at Concerned Veterans for America; one whistleblower claimed that Hegseth had used organization funds as a personal expense account. Another former employee claimed he had witnessed Hegseth drunkenly chanting "Kill all Muslims!" In December, President-elect Donald Trump considered Hegseth for secretary of veterans affairs, but he faced opposition from veterans groups who viewed Hegseth's support for allowing all veterans to choose private doctors as untenable; Paul Rieckhoff, the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said that selecting Hegseth would "be war" and "a radical departure" for the department. Trump later chose David Shulkin, with The Washington Post noting Hegseth's lack of experience in operating a large organization. Hegseth told podcaster Shawn Ryan that Trump found him too young to assume the position. After Shulkin fell out of favor with the Trump administration in March 2018, Hegseth positioned himself as a potential candidate, but Trump selected Robert Wilkie after consulting Hegseth and financier Isaac Perlmutter.
Fox News (2014–2024)
By June 2014, Hegseth was given a position as a regular contributor to Fox News by the network's executive, Roger Ailes. In 2016, he was briefly a host on TheBlaze before regularly hosting Fox & Friends Weekend that year after Ailes's resignation, becoming an official co-host in January 2017. According to a Fox News executive in Hoax, Jennifer Rauchet, a producer of Fox & Friends Weekend who later married him, "was favoring Pete with airtime" and "kept putting Pete on TV." Hegseth served as a temporary host for Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle in an effort by the network to promote other staffers; the change occurred during the boycott of The Ingraham Angle after comments Ingraham made about David Hogg, an activist and survivor of the Parkland high school shooting. He hosted All-American New Year with commentator Lisa Kennedy.Hegseth's opinions expressed on Fox & Friends influenced Trump's policymaking in his first term. In October 2018, as a migrant caravan began traveling to the United States, Trump claimed that "unknown Middle Easterners" had infiltrated the caravan. Trump apparently cited a comment that Hegseth had made on Fox & Friends, though Hegseth said he had not verified his statement's accuracy. Hegseth had apparently based his claim on a statement Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales made after capturing 100 ISIS fighters in the country. In negotiations to avert a federal government shutdown, Democrats neared a deal until Hegseth urged Trump not to support a deal that did not include billion for his border wall. Trump repeated claims Hegseth had made correlating video games with mass shootings after two mass shootings in El Paso and in Dayton in August 2019. Hegseth said he had spoken to Trump about pardoning war criminal Clint Lorance, accused murderer Mathew L. Golsteyn, as well as reversing the demotion of Eddie Gallagher.
image:Maj. Pete Hegseth serving in the DC Army National Guard.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Hegseth while being mobilized to the Washington D.C. National Guard, June 2020
At Fox News, Hegseth was the subject of multiple lawsuits. In 2015, he threw an axe during a Flag Day event in New York City, accidentally hitting a drummer from the United States Military Academy. Video of the incident circulated widely online. The drummer, Jeff Prosperie, alleged that he had suffered "severe and serious personal injuries to his mind and body" and "permanent effects of pain, disability, disfigurement and loss of body function." Prosperie sued Hegseth three years later; the suit was resolved in an unspecified way in 2019. In Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network, Dominion Voting Systems included a segment of Fox & Friends Weekend featuring Hegseth with co-hosts Will Cain and Rachel Campos-Duffy, in which they did not reject claims by Rudy Giuliani that the company's voting machines facilitated voting fraud.
Hegseth was chosen among Fox News's hosts to be featured on Fox Nation, the network's streaming service. To promote the service, he co-hosted a one-hour special, Fox Nation First Look, with Jesse Watters, Tomi Lahren, Britt McHenry, and Tyrus. On Fox Nation, Hegseth hosted The Miseducation of America, a television program criticizing "the Left's educational agenda". He also hosted the series Battle in the Holy Land, The Life of Jesus, and the special Battle in Bethlehem, on the service.