Minnesota lad is Trump choice to lead Pentagon

FOREST LAKE, Minn – Pete Hegseth wasn’t much remembered in this St. Paul suburb until this week. Then somebody figured it would be a good idea to add him as a notable local on the town’s Wikipedia entry: “Nominee for United States secretary of defense.”  It was a shocker but true. President-elect Donald Trump had asked the U.S. Senate to approve Hegseth to take over the Defense Department — the nation’s largest employer with 2.8 million personnel around the globe, an $820 billon budget, and the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal. This for a kid who played football and basketball at Lake Forest High School and graduated in1999 as valedictorian but who went off Princeton and, locals say, never looked back except for a short-lived 2012 bid for the Amy Klobuchar seat in the U.S. Senate.

Sexual assault and tattoos

So how did Pete Hegseth, now age 44,  get from here to there? Hegseth had ben a low-level White House adviser on veterans affairs during the first Trump presidency. Whether Trump remembered him isn’t clear, but Trump, looking at tapes prepared by staff on large screen, saw the photogenic Hegseth as as a right-wing Fox News personality who was rabidly attacked Trump’s critics. For Trump, that was good enough: “Let’s make him secretary of defense.” Further vetting was halted, which quickly turned out to be problematic.

> What about a 2017 claim by a woman at a California Federation of Republican Women convention that Hegseth raped her in a hotel room and then paid her not to tell? When the issue popped last week, a Hegseth attorney said that Henseth was being blackmailed.

> What about an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest. There also was a tattoo on a bicep with the Latin phrase “Deu Vult,” a code among Christian nationalists that translates as “God wills it.” The tattoos got Hegseth booted off a National Guard unit assigned to protect President Biden at the 2021 inauguration. Hegseth resigned from the Guard two months later.

Miliagerial credentialstary and man

Trump himself has no record with the military. He was a Vietnam era draft-dodger with only a vague sense how the military works. He seems to believe somehow that Hegseth’s low-level National Guard experience was good enough run the giant Pentagon defense machinery. Hegseth’s Guard experience was in the infantry – not even at any significant management level. He never saw combat although he was awarded a routine Bronze Star for service in a war zone. In 2012 Hegseth was  deployed to Afghanistan as a counterinsurgency instructor.  He left active duty in mid-ranking major.

Hegseth’s Trump connections

In college at Princeton, Hegseth became a strident right-wing conservative. After Trump was elected in 2016, Hegseth became a low-level advisor to Trump on veteran affairs. During this period Trump briefly considered Hegeth to lead the U.S. Veteran Affairs Department but had second thoughts. Henseth, meanwhile, was continuing his Republican activism. He  wiorked his way into leadership of Concerned Veterans for America, a group backed by political extremist billionaires Charles and David Koch. He made himself available as a speaker at GOP events. Jn fact, it was at convention of Republican women that his Room 528 at the Hyatt Monterey hotel got into police records.

Hegseth’s worldview

In books and public utterances Henseth has expressed a confusing range of views outside contemporary orthodoxy.

> Terrorists. He supported he 2019 Trump pardoning U.S. military service members who had been convicted of war crimes in Iraq, including the fatal stabbing of a captured teenager who was receiving medical treatment.

> Resolving political differneces.  He described polaruzation in U.S. politics as irreconcilable —  ”  perpetual conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process.”

> Polarization. He called for an “American crusade” — “a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom”.

 > Democracy. In a 2024 he denied that democracy was ever a premise in the American creed: “Do you know what our founders did not want us to be? A democracy.”

> Voting age. He fretted about “young kids voting” because, he said, they are averse effects climate change.

> Education.  Hegseth alleged that colleges teach “environmentalism and radical environmentalism”: “Universities are poisoning our kids’ mind.” In one televison stunt he brougt out his Harvard diploma, marked out the uuversity’s name, wrote in  “Critical Theory” and marked it “Return to Sender.” He called Harvard is “a factory for that kind of thinking.”

> Foreign llinces. He called the NATO an outdated and impotent defense alliance.”

> Ukraine. He called U.S.  concern about the Rusian invasion of Ukraine overblown. More importatn, he said, were domestic “wokeness,” which he didn’t define, and crime.

> Israel. He opposed a two-state solution over Gaza as impossible. Israelis. He said Israelis were “God’s chosen people.”

> Pentagin leadership. He called for General Charles Brwn to be purged as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff , as well as all generals who favor diversity, inclusion and equity in the military. The military phrase tyat “our diversity is our strength” is the “dumbest phrase on planet.”

> Women in combat. He opposed women in combat roles. Women in the military, he said, are a distraction to male soldiers. Also opposes transgender soldiers in the military..

> CoVid. He accused Democrats during the CoVd pandemic “rooting for the coronavirus to spread.” Without citing medical evidence, he urged healthy people to work at catching the virus to build immunity.

> Capitol attack. He defended the January 6 insurrectionists as patriots, arguing that they had been “been re-awoken to the reality of what the Left has done” to the country.

 > Women. He bas favored “traditional family values” and a “return of the acceptability of the ‘homemaker’ vocation.”

> Christian nationalism. He has has chest and arm tattoos connected to anti-Semitism

> Russia in 2016 election. He was vocal against special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference.

> News media. Not knowing the facts, he mocked he New York Times for a report on the 2018 arrests of Isis terrorists, even though the Times had he story right.