Donald Trump has appointed Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense—and he’s one of the worst choices yet.
“Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday night. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice—Our military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.”
While Hegseth is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he is significantly less experienced than a traditional pick to head the Department of Defense. Hegseth once called the very same Iraq War that Trump and JD Vance just spent weeks pretending to critique “an example of what we got right, when we got it right.”
He will now run the Pentagon and command 1.3 million active-duty troops. Or maybe fewer: Just last week, Hegseth said, “I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles.
“It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” he explained. “Our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally—not traditionally, over history—men in those positions are more capable.”
Hegseth doesn’t seem to want anyone but white men to be in the military. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth painted the military as anti-white and suffering from a “long-term infection of radical left wing social justice policies.”
He wrote that “affirmative action posts have skyrocketed, with ‘firsts’ being the most important factor in filling new commanders. We will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!”
Trump seemed to echo many of Hegseth’s complaints on the campaign trail, with his own ramblings about “woke” military leadership.
Hegseth has repeatedly fearmongered about the spread of Islam in the United States, both as a contributor to Fox News and in his 2020 book, American Crusade.
“Just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today,” Hegseth wrote in his book.
“Islamists—and even mainstream Muslims—use aggressive tactics to exploit American ‘tolerance’ as utter weakness in order to achieve accommodations that would never otherwise be tolerated,” he wrote. “I’m not talking about on the battlefield, I’m talking about in our classrooms, city councils, and social media.”
Hegseth has also complained about Muslim birth rates in states such as Michigan, which has the largest Arab population in the country. He pushed fears about the “integration” of Muslims into American society and has lamented France’s changing “demography” in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, which he compared to an invasion.
“Next to the communist Chinese and their global ambitions, Islamism is the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world. It cannot be negotiated with, coexisted with, or understood; it must be exposed, marginalized, and crushed,” he wrote in American Crusade.
Unsurprisingly, Hegseth is a big supporter of “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer.
Although he graduated from Princeton University, Hegseth has criticized elite universities. “I have a new rule, the more elite the university and advanced a graduate is, the dumber they are,” Hegseth said on an episode of Fox News’s The Five. “If you went to an Ivy League, prove that you have any common sense at all.”
Hegseth has claimed that he sent his degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government back.
Maybe he’s right. In 2019 Hegseth, laughed on air about not washing his hands for 10 years, saying, “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore, they are not real.”
This story has been updated.