Trump Taps Fox News Pundit to Be Secretary of Defense

Donald Trump announced that he has picked Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as his secretary of defense.

The Fox & Friends television personality is an Army veteran and joined the company as a contributor in 2014. After filling in as a co-host in 2016, Hegseth was officially named co-host of the morning show’s weekend edition the following year.

“Pete has spent his entire life as a Warrior for the Troops, and for the Country,” Trump said in a statement. “Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First. With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice – Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.”

“Pete has been a host at FOX News for eight years, where he used that platform to fight for our Military and Veterans,” Trump continued. “Pete’s recent book, ‘The War on Warriors,’ spent nine weeks on the New York Times best-sellers list, including two weeks at NUMBER ONE. The book reveals the leftwing betrayal of our Warriors, and how we must return our Military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability, and excellence.”

In a separate statement, Fox News Media said Hegseth’s “insights and analysis especially about the military resonated deeply with our viewers and made the program the major success that it is today.” The company added, “We are extremely proud of his work at FOX News Media and wish him the best of luck in Washington.”

In 2019, the Daily Beast reported that Hegseth privately encouraged then-President Trump to pardon U.S. service members accused or convicted of war crimes. The report was later confirmed by CNN.

The Daily Beast found that the Fox & Friends co-host, who served as an informal adviser to Trump at the time, had lobbied for Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL platoon leader accused of shooting civilians, including a young girl, and stabbing to death a captured and injured ISIS fighter in Iraq in 2017. Gallagher was convicted of posing with the corpse for a photograph but acquitted of all other charges. In 2019, Trump also reversed a demotion ordered as punishment.
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Hegseth also advocated for Army Major Matt Golsteyn, a Special Forces soldier and Afghanistan veteran, who was charged in 2010 with murdering an Afghan male detainee and burying the body rather than releasing him. Trump pardoned Golsteyn 2019, leading to the dropping of all charges.

Trump has wasted no time in staffing the White House and his Cabinet with loyalists. National security officials and defense analysts who spoke with Politico said Trump’s pick of the television personality, who was once the center of a hand-washing debacle, to run the U.S. Department of Defense was surprising, to put it mildly.
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“[Trump] puts the highest value on loyalty,” Eric Edelman, the Pentagon’s former top policy official during the Bush administration, told the outlet. “It appears that one of the main criteria that’s being used is, how well do people defend Donald Trump on television?”

This article was updated on Nov. 12 at 11:44 p.m. ET to include a statement from Fox News Media and a quote from Politico.