WASHINGTON (States Newsroom) — Senators jockeyed to magnify contrasting aspects of Pete Hegseth’s life at his confirmation hearing Tuesday on whether the veteran, Fox News personality and accused perpetrator of sexual misconduct is qualified to lead the nation’s military and its nearly $900 billion budget.
Lawmakers on the Senate Committee on Armed Services questioned the nominee for secretary of defense for just over four hours, the first of many hearings to come for President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks. Trump takes office in six days.
Senators on the Republican-led committee praised Hegseth for his “warrior ethos.” The veteran-turned-cable-news-host authored several books that have, among other talking points, compared modern patriotism to the crusades and critiqued Pentagon leadership, including his 2024 book “War on the Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of Men Who Keep Us Free.”
Committee Chair Roger Wicker described Hegseth as an “unconventional” choice and someone who will “bring a swift end to corrosive distractions such as DEI,” shorthand for diversity, equity and inclusion.
“Mr. Hegseth will bring energy and fresh ideas to shake up the bureaucracy. He will focus relentlessly on the war fighter and the military’s core missions, deterring wars and winning the ones we must fight,” the Mississippi Republican said.
But the committee’s ranking member, Jack Reed, slammed Hegseth’s nomination, telling him “the totality of your own writings and alleged conduct would disqualify any service member from holding any leadership position in the military, much less being confirmed as the secretary of defense.”
“Mr. Hegseth, I hope you will explain why you believe such diversity is making the military weak, and how you propose to undo that without undermining military leadership and harming readiness, recruitment and retention,” said the Rhode Island Democrat, who also questioned Hegseth’s recent assertion in his book against the Geneva Conventions.
Dust on his boots
Seated before the committee in a blue jacket, red striped tie and American flag pocket square, Hegseth pledged to be a “change agent” and agreed with Trump that “it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm.”
“Like many of my generation, I’ve been there. I’ve led troops in combat. I’ve been on patrol for days. I’ve pulled the trigger down range, heard bullets whiz by, flex-cuffed insurgents, called in close air support, led medevacs, dodged IEDs, pulled out dead bodies and knelt before a battlefield cross,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth was interrupted by shouting audience members three times in the first several minutes of his opening remarks.
In the weeks since Trump nominated Hegseth, accusations of sexual assault, harassment, alcohol abuse and financial mismanagement at veterans’ nonprofits have surfaced against the 44-year-old who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Hegseth told Wicker he chalked up the allegations to a “coordinated smear campaign” from “anonymous sources.”
“I’m not a perfect person, as has been acknowledged, saved by the grace of God, by Jesus and Jenny,” he said, referring to his third wife, television producer Jennifer Hegseth, who was seated behind him.
At numerous points in the hearing Wicker entered into the record letters attesting to Hegseth’s character, including from former colleagues at Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, two veterans service organizations he led following his time as an Army infantry officer.
Women in combat roles?
Throughout the course of the hearing several female committee members, among them veterans who served in noncombat, combat and intelligence roles, pressed Hegseth on his years-long record of disparaging women in the military.
As recently as Nov. 7, he told podcast host Shawn Ryan that “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles.”
Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who served in the Army National Guard for over two decades, point-blank asked Hegseth to declare on the record that women should remain in combat roles, given that they meet “very, very high standards.”
“My answer is yes, exactly the way that you caveated it,” Hegseth said.
In an impassioned critique, Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a combat veteran from Illinois, said, “How can we ask these warriors to train and perform the absolute highest standards when you are asking us to lower the standards to make you the secretary of defense simply because you are buddies with our president-elect?”
Duckworth lost both her legs and partial use of her right arm when a rocket-propelled grenade downed her Black Hawk helicopter north of Baghdad.
Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, said Hegseth seems to have “converted over the last several weeks.”
“You wrote in your book just last year, this is the book ‘War on Warriors,’ ‘But if we’re going to send our boys to fight, and it should be boys, we need to unleash them to win.’ … Which is it? Is it? Is it only boys can fight? I mean, you’ve, you’ve testified here today that you believe in women in combat.”
Managing an organization
Democratic senators also questioned Hegseth’s ability to manage an organization’s finances.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut, held up tax records from Hegseth’s tenure at the Concerned Veterans of America that he said showed budget shortfalls and up to $75,000 in debt from credit card transactions.
“That isn’t the kind of fiscal management we want at the Department of Defense,” Blumenthal said.
“I don’t believe that you can tell this committee or the people of America that you are qualified to lead them. I would support you as the spokesperson for the Pentagon; I don’t dispute your communication skills,” Blumenthal said.
Hegseth told the committee that one of his top priorities would be to obtain a clean audit of Pentagon spending.
Money from television and book sales
Hegseth’s own financial disclosure shows that he’s made just north of $4.6 million as a Fox News host since 2022.
Hegseth, who lives in Tennessee, reported a $348,000 advance for his “War on Warriors” book and a range of anywhere from $100,001 to $1 million in royalties. The disclosure form only requires ranges, not specific dollar amounts.
He also reported just under $1 million in income for speeches he’s given over the last two years.
Additionally, Hegseth reported royalties in the range of $100,001 to $1 million for his 2022 book “Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation.” The book, co-written with David Goodwin, champions a “classical” Christian education system and claims to reveal the “untold story of the Progressive plan to neutralize the basis of our Republic,” according to a synopsis featured on the book’s official website.
In June 2022, while hosting “Fox and Friends Weekend,” Hegseth scrawled“Return to Sender” on his Harvard graduate degree diploma – striking the word “Harvard” and replacing it with “Critical Theory” – and told viewers he didn’t want it anymore.
In 2020, Hegseth delivered remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, rallying for a “battle for the soul of America” and promoting his book titled “American Crusade.”
He drew a through line from the 11th-century military campaigns when, he said, “Europe was effectively under threat from Islamic hordes,” to the American Revolution, and all the way to 2016 when “a country rose up and said ‘We’re going to make America great again.’”
“We live in a similar moment,” Hegseth told the CPAC crowd.
In 2016, while promoting his book “In the Arena” to an audience at the conservative Heritage Foundation, Hegseth railed against many cultural topics while juxtaposing them with the famed Teddy Roosevelt arena speech in Paris on which his book centered.
“We teach our kids to be wimps. We turn our men into women and women into men,” he said.
On the topic of immigration in Europe, Hegseth said, “When you forget who you are and you don’t demand, at some level, allegiance and assimilation from populations that separate themselves and then have 10 kids while you’re having one, that’s how the most popular name in London becomes Mohammed for newborn boys.”
Hegseth began as a Fox News contributor in 2014.
In July 2010, Hegseth testified against the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan over her “unbecoming” treatment of military recruiters at Harvard in 2004.
Hegseth joined the Army ROTC during his undergraduate education at Princeton University in the early 2000s.
