On paper, Pete Hegseth is an unusual choice to become the next secretary of Defense. A former Army National Guard officer who served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, he’s known mostly as a Fox & Friends host. Yet with each Donald Trump announcement — Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services — Hegseth looks like one of Trump’s more qualified nominees, though the bar, as they say, is in hell.
Though Hegseth’s résumé is light, it’s padded with a handful of books. In fact, his output is relatively prolific, as he’s published five since 2016. Two in particular offer some insight into his ascent and how he might approach his new job. His worldview is archaic, inflected with jingoism and a love of violence. In American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, he outlined his case for Trump’s reelection in 2020 and drew parallels between contemporary America and the medieval era. “Our present moment is much like the 11th Century. We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must,” he writes. “Arm yourself — metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”
Later, in 2024’s The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth complains that the U.S. military has become too woke, too effeminate, and too vaccinated to be fit for purpose. “At a basic level, do we really want only the woke ‘diverse’ recruits that the Biden administration is curating to be the ones with the guns and the guidons?” he writes in the introduction to The War on Warriors. “But more than that, we want those diverse recruits — pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies — to be sharing a basic training bunk with sane Americans.”
Hegseth’s probable ascendancy is the culmination of a yearslong ideological journey. Always conservative, he backed Florida senator Marco Rubio for president during the 2015 Republican primary, a fact he recounts with some embarrassment in American Crusade. In that book, he writes that as he watched “the Left lose its mind over Donald Trump’s candidacy, the light bulbs turned on: the Left hates him because they hate us!” His “conversion,” as he calls it, loosely resembles that of J.D. Vance, who is now the vice-president-elect; once Hegseth decided he was for Trump, he was all in, much like Vance. Trump loves a groveler, and after he won in 2016, he almost nominated Hegseth to run the Department of Veterans Affairs before picking David Shulkin. (Hegseth’s desire to privatize the VA drew opposition at the time.)
In American Crusade, he espouses a traditional masculinity and praises Trump for punching back after the Access Hollywood tape. Trump, he writes, was “not playing by the rules of a game that was stacked against him — and against all patriotic Americans.” Hegseth never mentions the actual content of the tape or the dozens of women who’d accused Trump of sexual misconduct by the time of the book’s publication. Elsewhere, he denied the gender pay gap is real. “Women today attend college at higher rates than men. They win elections just as often as men (okay, maybe not the presidency, but that was Hillary’s fault),” he writes. “And, yes, they make the same wages as men — especially after one factors in years spent away from the workforce for childrearing, if women so choose.”
Hegseth’s views on gender are clearest when it comes to female service members. He is vehemently opposed to women serving in combat, portraying them as inferior or even “distractions.” In a list of “simple realities,” he writes that “Men and women are different, with men being more aggressive,” and added, “A man who has a feeling toward a female and acts differently in combat — gets people killed.” He writes favorably of Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, who became the first female soldier since World War II to be awarded the Silver Star after she directed her team during a firefight and killed three Iraqi insurgents. “I like Leigh Ann Hester. She is an incredible soldier and did her job when it counted,” he writes, only to add, “Are there more Leigh Ann Hesters on the ground, shooting bad guys in our military today? What about in the last twenty years? I think we certainly would have heard about they/them by now.” Over that time period, according to the Service Women’s Action Network, 166 women were killed in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In another chapter, Hegseth claimed that women in combat “forces men to ignore” their “civilized instincts.” He went on: “If you train a group of men to treat women equally on the battlefield then you will be hard-pressed to ask them to treat women differently at home.” Hegseth doesn’t elaborate, but seems to imply that women are responsible for the misconduct of men. On Friday, the New York Times reported that in 2017, a woman told police that Hegseth sexually assaulted her. No charges were filed, and Hegseth denies the allegation.
In both books, Hegseth routinely singled out transgender service members, and trans people more generally, for ridicule, and criticized the reversal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the military’s former prohibition on people serving while openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual. “The establishment of DADT, and then ending of DADT, were just policy footholds for radical Leftists, hell-bent on even more radical social change — a full-frontal attack on almost every institution of the military,” he writes in The War on Warriors. He also wants to make it easier to fire woke generals and does not believe that domestic extremism in the ranks is a real problem. In October, the Associated Press reported that “more than 480 people with a military background” have been “accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection.”
Instead, Hegseth believes the real threat to America comes from the left: from Black Lives Matter protesters and antifa and socialists. In his view, modern feminists are working with trans people to destroy the country he served. While Hegseth attacks the left, he defends alleged war criminals, including Eddie Gallagher, a former Navy SEAL accused by his platoonmates of using a hunting knife to repeatedly stab a teenage captive who was receiving medical treatment, among other crimes. Though acquitted of that murder charge, the Navy demoted Gallagher and sought to expel him before Trump as president intervened.
Hegseth’s vision of America is bleak and brutal, and it’s shared by many on the right — including Trump. Hegseth may not be qualified for the role Trump wants to give him, but he’s a perfect fit for a reactionary administration bent on cruelty and political retribution.
