President-elect Donald Trump’s shock decision to nominate a Fox News host to lead the Pentagon on Tuesday gave way to an important question.
“Who the f—k is this guy?” an anonymous defense industry lobbyist asked Politico of Pete Hegseth.
Among those getting to know the Defense Department’s potential new MAGA overlord, a government neophyte whose chief qualification appears flattering Trump on Fox News for a decade, were even GOP officeholders.
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“Who?” asked Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who has been critical of Trump from within the Republican Party, adding for clarity that he has no idea who Hegseth is.
If Cassidy were to roll tape on the erstwhile TV host—Fox News said Hegseth resigned Tuesday and scrubbed his profile from its site, archived here, by Wednesday morning—he’d find a trail of controversial and outright weird claims.
Among other things, he‘s a man who doesn’t wash his hands but does commercials for soap, he‘s covered in Christian symbols but had a child with his mistress while married to his second wife, and he’s an Ivy League graduate who attacked “Ivy League leftists.”
He Really Doesn’t Like ‘Diversity’
Hegseth, 44, an Ivy League grad who served in Afghanistan and Iraq as a member of the Minnesota Army National Guard, has long crusaded against allegedly “woke” policies in the military. He recently said in a podcast interview, “The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is, ‘Our diversity is our strength.’”
Trump is likely more than pleased with that attitude. He is expected to reverse progressive policies enacted by President Joe Biden, including bringing back bans on transgender troops and some DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs.
He Went to Princeton And Attacks ‘Ivy League’ P-----s
Hegseth attended both Princeton, where he graduated with an A.B. in political science, and Harvard, where he has a Master of Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government.
But he apparently has had second thoughts, defacing his Harvard diploma on air in a Fox and Friends Weekend segment then saying he was sending it back and using his most recent book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, to decry generals as “willing tools, taking orders from Ivy League leftists.”
“I don‘t want to elevate the prestige of Harvard, considering what Harvard has become,” he said. “We can’t keep sending our kids and elevating them to universities that are poisoning their minds,” while marking his degree “return to sender.”
He Claimed He Did Not Wash His Hands for 10 Years
Hegseth, a conservative activist, pundit, author, and failed Senate candidate, claimed in 2019 that he hadn’t washed his hands in a decade because “germs are not a real thing.”
Trump is going to absolutely hate this. A self-described “germaphobe,” he asked visitors during his first term to wash their hands in a bathroom outside the Oval Office and called in military doctors if he saw an aide coughing. He regularly asks his security detail for squirts of hand sanitizer.
“It could be a psychological problem,” Trump told Howard Stern in 1993. “I like it. I like cleanliness. Cleanliness is a nice thing. Not only hands, body, everything.”
He Is Heavily, and Somewhat Controversially, Inked
Hegseth has several tattoos, with many alluding to his Christian faith, his time in the military, and his American patriotism.
They include the words “We the People”—from the first line of the U.S. Constitution—on his forearm and an American flag with a rifle overlaid against the bottom stripe on his upper arm.
Two of his tattoos have raised controversy. The first is a tattoo of the Jerusalem Cross, a 13th-century Crusades symbol, over his right bicep.
Some Christian nationalist and far-right groups have tried to co-opt historic symbols, and Hegseth claims he was kicked off of National Guard duty for Biden’s 2021 inauguration because his tattoo was misconstrued.
“Members of my unit in leadership deemed that I was an extremist or a white nationalist because of a tattoo I have, which is a religious tattoo,” he told Fox News in June.
He also has the Latin phrase “Deus Vult” for ”God wills it” on his right bicep. This rallying cry was chanted by Christians during the First Crusade and has also been co-opted by far-right groups.
Like Trump, He Wants to Fire Generals He Doesn’t Like
In one of his many tirades against diversity, Hegseth called for the purging of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown and “any general, admiral, whatever that was involved in any of the DEI woke s--t.”
Trump is expected to pursue a Pentagon overhaul, including potentially convening a “warrior board” of sympathetic retired military officials with the power to fire generals seen as “lacking” in the president-elect’s desired “leadership qualities.”
He has also entertained the idea of using of U.S. military personnel against political enemies on domestic soil.
He Cheated on His Second Wife With a Fox Producer
Brian Stelter’s 2020 book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth recounts that the family values Christian Hegseth cheated on his then-wife with Jennifer Rauchet, a producer on Fox & Friends.
“Jennifer was favoring Pete with airtime,” a network executive told Stelter. “She kept putting Pete on TV.”
When Rauchet, already a mother of three, disclosed to management that she was pregnant with the still-married Hegseth’s child toward the end of 2016, Stelter reported that she was demoted to work on the weekend show Watters’ World.
Ironically, that show’s host, Jesse Watters, also divorced his first wife in favor of his producer.
He Doesn’t Think Women Should Serve in Combat
“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” Hegseth said on Nov. 7, arguing it has “complicated” fighting.
“We’ve all served with women and they’re great, it’s just our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally—not traditionally, over human history, men in those positions are more capable," he added.
Those comments suggest Hegseth might consider reversing the 2013 decision by then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to remove the ban on women in combat jobs—a reversal that was expanded to all military occupational specialties in 2015 by then-Secretary Ashton Carter.
He Accidentally Threw an Ax at a West Point Drummer
In 2015, during a live TV segment on Flag Day, Hegseth accidentally hit a West Point drummer with an ax. Thankfully, the drummer incurred “only minor injuries” and seemed fine afterward.
Lucky for him, Trump wants Hegseth for his Fox News-trained tongue and not his throwing skills.
He Might Not Wash His Hands But He Shills Soap
If the Senate confirms him, Hegseth will almost certainly become the first Pentagon leader to have done paid Instagram ads for soap.
He has been a pitchman for the Grenade Soap Company’s soap, which is indeed shaped in the form of the throwable explosive, boasts a stainless steel rope and has scents which include “gun smoke,” “gurkha” and “patriot” (made with pine tar).
“I travel a lot. When I do, I make sure to pack my fave, One Man Army Grenade Soap,” said the man who will oversee the most expensive fighting force the world has ever seen in one ad.
In another he rewrote the Second Amendment to advocate for “a well-groomed militia,” saying the right of the people “to smell great” should not be infringed while suggesting the best way to celebrate independence day was with a bar of soap.
