Background and career
Peter Brian Hegseth (born June 6, 1980) is an American government official, U.S. Army veteran, and former television personality who has been serving 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 (2020) and The War on Warriors (2024). In November 2024, then-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 the vice president, JD Vance, casting a tie-breaking vote. It was only the second time in U.S. history that a Cabinet nominee's confirmation was decided by a vice president, following Betsy DeVos during the first Trump administration in 2017. Hegseth is the second-youngest secretary of defense after Donald Rumsfeld, who first occupied the position in the Ford administration. Hegseth has drawn criticism during his tenure as secretary of defense for a variety of actions such as the fallout from a leaked government group chat on Signal; alleged war crimes related to U.S. military strikes on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea; promoting Christianity inside the military; using unmarked military planes for boat strikes; the use of force and rules of engagement in the 2026 Iran war; an unprecedented purge of admirals and generals; and a military mandate for testosterone screening. Conversely, Hegseth has received praise from Republican politicians, right-wing political commentators, and Christian nationalist organizations for his role as defense secretary.
Peter Brian Hegseth was born on June 6, 1980, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is of Norwegian descent, as his great-grandparents migrated from Norway to Minnesota before they had children. He was the first of three children of Brian Hegseth and Penelope Haugen. Hegseth's father was a basketball coach for high schools across Minnesota before retiring in 2019. Hegseth's mother is an executive business coach who has taught with the Minnesota Excellence in Public Service (MEPS) 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 on June 10, 1999, as valedictorian. Hegseth played on his high school's football team and was a point guard on the basketball team, where he set school records for career three-point shots, single-season three-point shots, and single-season three-point shooting percentage. He was named all-conference twice and earned all-state honors as a senior. After high school, Hegseth enrolled at Princeton University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in politics in 2003. 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 (2001) "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.
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 council member 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 (2024) that he resigned over the incident.
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 US$160,000. Hegseth lost to Kurt Bills in the Republican convention in May, and ended his candidacy 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 President 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.
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 (2020), 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 (2018) 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 US$5 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 and accused murderer Mathew L. Golsteyn, as well as reversing the demotion of Eddie Gallagher. 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 in 2018, and the suit was resolved in 2019. In Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network (2023), 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 in the 2020 presidential election. 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 (2022–2023), a television program criticizing "the Left's educational agenda". He also hosted the series Battle in the Holy Land (2019–2023), The Life of Jesus (2022–2023), and the special Battle in Bethlehem (2019), on the service.
On November 12, 2024, President-elect Donald Trump named Hegseth as his nominee for secretary of defense, after Arkansas senator Tom Cotton announced he would not serve as secretary. Hegseth subsequently ended his contract with Fox News. The selection of Hegseth was seen as a sign that Trump sought to appoint a loyalist to lead the Department of Defense, and his relative lack of experience surprised officials in the department. According to Vanity Fair, Trump's transition team became aware the following day of a sexual assault allegation involving Hegseth that occurred in Monterey, California, seven years prior; The Washington Post reported that senior officials on the team were surprised by the allegation and reconsidered his nomination. Despite the allegation, Trump defended Hegseth and several Republican senators indicated that they would support him. His nomination was threatened by an article from Jane Mayer in The New Yorker detailing alleged financial mismanagement and alcohol issues while leading his veterans' groups, while an NBC News article reported that his drinking habits concerned his colleagues at Fox News; The New York Times reported in December that Trump had begun to consider Florida governor Ron DeSantis as an alternative. In an effort to retain his nomination amid controversies, Hegseth began a campaign that month. Advisors to Trump privately sought to persuade him to support Hegseth in fear that it would embolden recalcitrant Republican senators, while he could not garner support for DeSantis, according to The New York Times. In addition, the Times reported that Vice President-elect JD Vance had led a group of Republicans, including Donald Trump Jr., former Trump aide Steve Bannon, political activist Charlie Kirk, and Breitbart News reporter Matt Boyle, to support Hegseth's nomination. Trump allies took a direct approach to addressing the controversies, including an interview with Megyn Kelly that impressed Trump. Hegseth appeared at the United States Capitol in December; Trump publicly reaffirmed his support for Hegseth afterwards. The visit gave Iowa senator Joni Ernst, who had threatened his nomination, a positive impression of Hegseth. Hegseth appeared before the Senate Committee on Armed Services on January 14. He positioned himself as a "warrior" while denying the allegations and his previous claims that women should not serve in combat roles. Hegseth was criticized by Democrats over allegations of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement, and alcohol issues. Rhode Island senator Jack Reed, the committee's ranking member, noted that Hegseth had used the term "jagoff" in his book The War on Warriors (2024) to derogatorily refer to a Judge Advocate General officer who reprimanded him on the use of rocket-propelled grenades. He did not answer a question from Virginia senator Tim Kaine on whether or not sexual assault, drinking, or infidelity were disqualifying. The Committee on Armed Services voted to advance his nomination 14–13 along party lines on January 20, after Trump was inaugurated. Hegseth's former sister-in-law, Danielle, sent an affidavit to senators alleging that he was abusive to his second wife, Samantha, and that he had issues with over-consumption of alcohol. Hegseth denied having a drinking problem and pledged not to drink if confirmed. On January 24, Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate in a 51–50 vote. Every Republican senator, with the exception of Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell, voted to confirm him, while every Democratic senator opposed his nomination, leading to a 50–50 vote. Vance cast a tie-breaking vote to confirm Hegseth. His confirmation was threatened by Senator Thom Tillis, who told Senate majority leader John Thune the day before that he would not vote for Hegseth on the basis of his sexual assault allegations. Persuaded by Vance, Tillis expressed support for Hegseth on X minutes before the vote. His confirmation was the second in US history to be decided by a vice president, after Betsy DeVos's confirmation for secretary of education in 2017.
