Hegseth has a history of supporting controversial policies involving the military
CNN
By Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski, CNN
(CNN) — As protests broke out across American cities in June 2020, Pete Hegseth, co-host of the weekend “Fox & Friends” show, joined an on-air panel to discuss the situation in Seattle, where protestors had created a self-declared autonomous zone around a few blocks near downtown.
Hegseth, speaking remotely from his home, suggested the only way to save the city was to send in the military.
“The question is, do you send in the troops? Do you say, ‘Hey, this isn’t going to happen anymore’? Or do you let Seattle, sort of, implode on itself?” said Hegseth, comparing it to teaching a wayward child a lesson.
“It’s the idea of you caught your kid with cigarettes underage. Do you take them away right away or do you force them to smoke every cigarette in front of you in the entire pack to learn the lesson of what’s not going to work?”
As President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US military as secretary of defense, Hegseth would be in position to execute that kind of order should it come from the White House.
During his first term in office, Trump never went so far as to order active-duty troops to put down riots in American cities. The closest he came was in the summer of 2020, when he ordered the DC National Guard to assist local law enforcement in responding to riots and looting in the city. He also asked governors to send in their state guard units to DC.
Among those who deployed to the nation’s capital that summer was Hegseth.
“If the National Guard had not been called up, I can’t help but think where Washington, DC, would be right now,” Hegseth said on Fox News in 2020.
Hegseth also applauded a controversial New York Times op-ed written that summer by Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who called for the military to break up nationwide riots around the country.
While Hegseth called the policy a “very mainstream idea,” some Pentagon officials expressed concern about using the military to “dominate” protesters and worried about using military force against civilians.
Polls at the time indicated Americans were evenly split on the idea of using the military to quell riots and protests that summer.
Hegseth’s position on using the military to put down domestic riots is among a number of controversial policies he has supported in the past, including speaking in favor of enhanced interrogation methods such as waterboarding, pardoning US soldiers convicted of war crimes, targeting cultural institutions in drone strikes, and banning women from combat roles.
CNN’s KFile reviewed hundreds of Hegseth’s radio and TV appearances from 2008 through 2024, many of which occurred while he was a Fox News contributor and host. After initially criticizing Trump’s lack of national security experience during the 2016 presidential primaries, Hegseth became one of Trump’s most ardent supporters after he won the election that year.
On military matters in particular, Hegseth has often praised Trump’s decisions and sometimes encouraged him to go further.
Hegseth’s selection has been clouded by a number of factors, including his decision in 2020 to pay an undisclosed amount in a settlement to a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her in 2017. Hegseth strongly denies her allegations.
A New Yorker article published Sunday alleged Hegseth was pushed out as the head of two veterans’ advocacy organizations amid internal allegations of financial mismanagement and personal misconduct.
Hegseth’s lack of experience has also raised concerns about his ability to manage a large organization like the Pentagon with its nearly $1 trillion annual budget.
But his views on certain aspects of military policy, albeit expressed from the confines of his job as a cable news co-host, strike some experts as outside the mainstream, not in keeping with classic military doctrine, and all but impossible to implement.
“If he came into the secretary of defense job trying to institute all these policies, boom, boom, boom, the place would stop functioning and he would find himself an irrelevant secretary of defense,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. James “Spider” Marks, a CNN military analyst.
In a statement to CNN, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition touted Hegseth’s record of military service and defended his past comments as a Fox News host.
“Pete has shared points of view in the past as a private citizen and media personality, but as nominee for Secretary of Defense, he’s committed to upholding the Constitution and President Trump’s Make America Strong Again agenda,” the statement read.
An early Trump critic
A Princeton and Harvard graduate, Hegseth, 44, joined the Army National Guard in 2002 and served for nearly 20 years before retiring as a major. He deployed to Guantanamo Bay, where he served as an infantry platoon leader, and later served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was awarded two Bronze Stars, among other awards, for his service.
He frequently appeared on Fox News while working at veterans-related nonprofits and later became the weekend co-host of “Fox & Friends” in 2017.
During the 2016 presidential election, Hegseth initially supported Republican Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. He harshly criticized Trump’s grasp of national security issues and for saying that he got his military advice from people like himself on Fox News.
“You wouldn’t want a top-tier presidential candidate getting all of their military advice from watching ‘Meet the Press.’ There’s a lot more nuance. There’s a lot more detail,” Hegseth said in August 2015. “Foreign policy, national security is not about TV shows. [The campaign is] going to have to walk back a little bit from this idea that he gets it from the political shows.”
Before Trump secured the 2016 Republican nomination, Hegseth also attacked him for his five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, calling him an “armchair tough guy.”
“[Trump is] all bluster, very little substance. He talks a tough game. But then when pressed he’s an armchair tough guy,” Hegseth said on Fox News in March 2016, noting that Trump sought his “own five military deferments.”
In October 2015, Hegseth further attacked Trump for flip-flopping his position on the war in Afghanistan – first saying he never supported the war and calling it a mistake before reversing that position – and condemned Trump’s stance on the Iraq War and the veterans who fought in it.
Hegseth on numerous occasions was critical of Trump’s stances on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the president-elect has shifted multiple times over the years. However, Hegseth has since embraced Trump’s skepticism of those two wars and his “America First” ethos.
“If you step back for a moment and look at what was our return on investment, you start to realize, I can eat – I need to eat some humble pie. Put America first and realize that our orientation in the Middle East is ultimately not making us safer right now,” Hegseth said in September 2020.
War criminals and waterboarding
In 2019, CNN reported that Hegseth was privately courting Trump to pardon some servicemen accused and convicted of war crimes. Against the advice of his Pentagon officials, who worried the pardons would undermine the military justice system, Trump pardoned two service members and restored the rank of a Navy SEAL who had been demoted.
Hegseth reiterated his support for not criminalizing soldiers on a podcast in June 2024.
“Donald Trump pardoned a bunch of guys I advocated for in his last couple years in office. They killed the right guys in the wrong way, according to somebody. I’m done with that,” Hegseth said. “We need to fight total war against our enemies when we do. And yeah, you don’t kill civilians on purpose, but you kill bad guys. All of ’em, you stack bodies, and when it’s over, then you let the dust settle and you figure out who’s ahead.”
Hegseth also pushed Trump to take further action against Iran after the president ordered a drone strike in January 2020 that killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.
In a Fox News segment, Hegseth suggested Trump should take further action by targeting cultural sites that may harbor dangerous weapons – a violation of both international law and the Department of Defense’s policy.
“If we want to defeat them, we have to think smart about how we navigate within these rules, without playing a game rigged to help them,” he said in January 2020. “I don’t want to hit cultural sites on purpose. If you are using one to harbor your most dangerous weapons, that should be on the list.”
Like Trump, Hegseth has also praised waterboarding as an “effective” tactic. He said it was “absolutely a mistake” to take waterboarding off the table in 2016 and said the president had the power to bring it back.
“If it’s gonna keep us safe, all it would take is an executive order by the next president to change that law,” Hegseth said in 2016.
Congress codified a ban on waterboarding in 2015.
CNN’s Winter Hawk and Ileya Robinson-Williams contributed to this report.
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