Top Ten Wildest Moments With the Fox News Host Trump Wants for Our Next Secretary of Defense
AP Photo/George Walker IV
Former-and-future President Donald Trump has been rolling out his picks for key Cabinet positions and his choice for Secretary of Defense, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, was certainly one who made waves. The co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend has a long and expansive history of making outlandish comments, finding himself entangled in controversy, and endangering the lives of drummers.
Below, join us on a look back at the man your next president wants to appoint to exercise command and control over our all military service branches, oversee a nearly $900 billion budget, and supervise millions of active duty service personnel, National Guard members, reservists, and civilian employees.
10. He’s complained about vaccines but also says he never washes his hands because he can’t see germs
Hegseth has been a vocal critic of the Covid-19 vaccine, specifically the military’s requirement for service members to get the shot (never mind the many other vaccines the military has required for years, especially for those deployed overseas).
He’s seen fit to opine on the safety and efficacy of vaccines that were developed from decades of research on the very similar SARS virus and have now been safely given to billions — literally, billions with a “b” — people around the world. And here he is in 2019 on Fox’s curvy couch declaring that he can’t remember washing his hands “once” during the past decade.
“Germs are not a real thing,” Hegseth declared. “I can’t see them, therefore they’re not real.”
Things that are not visible to the naked eye but can still cause you real harm include bacteria, viruses, mold spores, radon, carbon monoxide, nuclear radiation, the music of Nickelback, and what Ernest Hemingway referred to as “The Artist’s Reward” — “that terrible mood of depression.”
9. He enthusiastically embraced Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud and cheered on the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021…
On the morning of the Jan. 6, 2021 protests that would later turn deadly, Hegseth was reporting live from the Ellipse, where then-President Trump and his allies would hold their “Stop the Steal” rally that would culminate in the march to the Capitol that erupted into violence as Trump condemned his own vice president, Mike Pence, for refusing to thwart the Electoral College certification.
Hegseth was effusive in his praise for the cause, noting how people had been “waiting for hours” to come in, chanting “Stop the steal.” He claimed that 70 percent of Georgia Republicans believed the November 2020 election “was not legitimate, that it was stolen” and that was something “no doubt it has an effect on the hearts of this city right now, of Americans.”
“I think it’s not an understatement to say, we’re in a constitutional tinder box right now,” he said, describing the feelings of “illegitimacy” about the election “based on things they feel in their heart and love of their country.”
He also noted Trump “will articulate a lot of that from the stage,” cheered on by “thousands of supporters,” and there were “dozens of Senators and congressmen” who would be “objecting with that long debate that will go on and on.”
At no point since the 2020 election has anyone ever been able to produce any evidence that, if true, would support overturning the results in a single precinct, much less a whole state, and certainly not the multiple states Trump would have needed to switch from Joe Biden. On Jan. 6, 2021, there was no actual valid debate about the legitimacy of the election, and countless Republican members of Trump’s administration both told him so and have since declared so publicly.
8. …and defended the rioters the next day, saying “They love freedom”
Hegseth’s sympathy for the “Stop the Steal” cause was not extinguished by the scenes of police officers being violently assaulted defending the Capitol.
On Jan. 7, 2021, mere hours after the Electoral College certification voting was delayed by hours because of the violent riot and police officers’ blood was still being cleaned off the Capitol steps and hallways, Hegseth pushed back against his colleague Brian Kilmeade’s characterization of the riot “that had lawmakers running for their lives” by saying the “movement” was “obviously defined by far more than one day.”
It was “a bunch of nonsense” to dismiss the rioters as “conspiracy theorists motivated just by lies,” Hegseth continued, describing them instead as “they love freedom and they love free markets.”
7. He defaced his own Harvard diploma and sent it back in a fit about critical race theory
In June 2022, Hegseth brought his Harvard University diploma to the Fox & Friends Weekend set with him and quoted a section from his 2020 book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, in which he urged conservatives to “Stop supporting your alma mater!”
“Stop now,” he wrote. “Stop sending your money. And stop sending your kids. This is a start, but crusading means taking the next step. Send your diplomas back. Mail them back return to sender. Thank you for the ‘education,’ but I can no longer support your leftist cause. Then explain why. When the time is right – mark my words — Harvard University will be getting the diploma it gave me back from me.”
“And I brought my diploma with me!” Hegseth announced before taking his diploma out of the frame. He wrote on it with a sharpie in large letters “RETURN TO SENDER,” crossed out the word “Harvard” at the top to rename his alma mater “Critical Theory University,” and signed his name.
“People will say ‘this is just a stunt, you still have a degree’ and that’s fine,” he acknowledged. “I went, I got the degree, I walked to the classes and all that, but I hope this is a statement that as conservatives and patriots, if we love this country, we can’t keep sending our kids and elevating them to universities that are poisoning their mind.”
It should perhaps be noted that while Hegseth does brag about mailing his degree back to Harvard, he still proudly cites the master’s degree in public policy he earned from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, as well as his bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton University. Trump also lauded Hegseth’s Ivy League degrees when he announced the nomination.
6. He wrote that liberals were America’s “domestic enemies” and one of the “two fronts” the U.S. military had to fight along with “radical Islam”
In his book released earlier this year, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth argued that “red-blooded American men” were needed to save America from the “radical leftist leaders” and “elite candy-asses,” ranting about the military going “woke” with “diverse recruits” who were being “pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies.”
Democrats and liberals — including former President Barack Obama by name — are denounced by Hegseth as America’s “domestic enemies” multiple times. He blasts the personnel who supported implementing DEI policies as “cowards hiding under stars,” “whores to wokesters,” “willing tools, taking orders from Ivy League leftists,” “[c]owards, then sellouts.”
Fighting these “domestic extremist” would be “round two” of the “war” we fought against “radical Islamist ideology for twenty years,” with our soldiers keeping “[b]usy killing Islamists in shithole countries.” Now, the war would come to the “home front” with the 2008 election of a “young, untested leftist” Obama included in Hegseth’s description of the “enemy” at home who “pounced” at the chance to “push its agenda” of “straight-up weirdo shit” to “trash our laws” and fail to “uphold their own constitutional oaths of office.”
Liberals did not deserve any credit for fighting America’s wars, in Hegseth’s telling of the tale. “The Left didn’t fight the wars. They stayed home and wrecked our house. America-wreckers, all of them. These domestic extremists are the real American ‘Jody’ — ask a veteran; they’ll tell you,” wrote Hegseth, referring to the military slang for a civilian who has an affair with a soldier’s wife while he is deployed.
Hegseth makes it clear that he does in fact mean to label the Left as enemies, writing that for military members, “our oath is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against anyone who threatens it. The expectation is that we will defend it against all enemies — foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)”
5. He’s really mad about women enlisting and leftists “neutering” the military
In his War on Warriors book, Hegseth describes an ideal time before the military went “woke” as one in which “courageous men took their oath to the Constitution seriously” — no mention of women who took that same oath, including the hundreds of thousands who enlisted during World War II. Hegseth complains about the military “being harassed by obligatory training” that includes “radical sex theories” and “gender policies” that are “designed to neuter our fighting forces.”
Hegseth repeatedly describes leftists as “neutering” the military and the ideal soldier with exclusively male terms like “young American men” who “loves God, his family, and his country,” while mocking current military leadership as backing ideas like “We will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything!”
“The Left must control everything-and, today, they are obsessed with controlling, and neutering, our military,” he wrote. “The military cannot be organized like a Harvard fraternity, catering to ever more obscure constituencies. Our key constituency is normal men, looking to be heroes and not victims. Ordinary men, willing to be extraordinary — or die trying; for God, country, and their brothers. We aren’t a collection of aggrieved tribes. Equality is our bedrock, lethality our trademark. There is no black and white in our ranks. We are all green. Our strength is not in our diversity, but in our unity and in our love for each other, our families, and, most of all, our nation.”
“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” Hegseth said on a podcast just days before Trump announced he wanted him as Defense Secretary.
4. That time he argued with a teleprompter
On November 14, 2020, in the wake of Trump’s furious — and baseless — claims 2020 election was stolen by fraud, Hegseth read from a teleprompter as he reported the news that there were several demonstrations in Washington, D.C. “in support of the president’s effort to reveal voter fraud and count all the legal votes,” he said. “So far, state election officials have not reported serious irregularities with the vote that would affect the outcome of the race.”
Immediately after saying that, Hegseth sought to distance himself from the news he had just reported. “That was in the teleprompter,” he said. “I read it. I don’t know if I even believe it.”
3. He aggressively lobbied for a pardon for a former Navy SEAL accused of war crimes, including shooting a little girl
Hegseth took an active role in urging Trump during his first term to pardon several service members accused of war crimes, most notoriously Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was accused by his fellow SEALs of a series of war crimes, including shooting a school-age girl and an old man with a sniper rifle, and walking up to a teenage ISIS fighter who was being treated by medics to stab him to death with a hunting knife.
Another senior SEAL said Gallagher had a habit of parking an armored truck near villages “and emptied the truck’s heavy machine gun into neighborhoods on the other side with no discernible targets.” Video of the interviews investigators conducted with these SEALs show them calling Gallagher “freaking evil,” “toxic,” and other chilling assessments about his capacity for “killing anybody that was moving.”
Gallagher was acquitted of first-degree murder of a prisoner of war but was convicted on one charge of posing for a photo with the body of a dead captive. Trump did decide to pardon him in November 2019. In 2021, Gallagher boasted on a podcast that he and the other SEALs intended to kill that unarmed captive ISIS fighter, as part of a plan to practice medical procedures on him. “We killed that guy,” he said. “Our intention was to kill him, everybody was on board.”
2. Had a meltdown and stomped out of the Mediaite podcast after just 13 minutes
In November 2021, Hegseth was a guest on our Mediaite podcast The Interview with editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin.
I’ll let McLaughlin describe how it went down:
Hegseth had a tough time answering some of my questions, specifically regarding who won the 2020 election. Our conversation was spirited. He had a bit of a meltdown, repeatedly insulted your humble host (“dumb questions”) and Mediaite (“trash heap”), and ultimately ended the interview early in a bit of a rage.
“Our chat first went south,” McLaughlin wrote, when he “brought up a viral interview [Hegseth] had with a Democratic lawmaker from Texas who confronted him on whether Trump lost the 2020 election.” Hegseth refused to answer the question and called it a “hit job.”
A question about Fox’s Covid policy was the final straw, culminating when McLaughlin asked Hegseth if he was vaccinated.
“Moments after that exchange, Hegseth ended the interview,” wrote McLaughlin. “It was a short 13 minutes, shorter than the usual 30 that we have for this show, but I am grateful he took the time nonetheless. He is welcome to return any time.”
1. Clobbered a drummer with a poorly-thrown axe
At least our editor in chief didn’t suffer any harm other than an incomplete podcast episode. That was almost not the case for an innocent drum corps member who had the misfortune of playing outside the Fox News studios in June 2015.
Jeff Prosperie was in New York City as a member of West Point’s legendary Hellcats marching band to play in celebration of Flag Day and the U.S. Army’s 240th birthday during Fox & Friends Weekend.
Hegseth was throwing an axe at a large wooden target and badly overshot, hurling the axe over the target and into Prosperie and his fellow drummers. Fox News did not air the moment of impact but did show Hegseth grimacing and onlookers reacting in shock as Prosperie grasped his arm and walked away from the other band members.
In a Facebook post, Prosperie posted another clip that included the original Fox footage and also showed the axe striking his arm and then him grabbing it and turning to walk away:
He added a message expressing how he was “thankful to God” that the blade hadn’t turned. “It could have been much worse or fatal,” he wrote:
I was hit by an axe while performing a drum solo live on National TV…..words I never imagined saying! This happened last Sunday and I have been reluctant to post but starting to receive inquiries from concerned family and friends. I am thankful to God that the double sided blade only hit broadside on the outer elbow with significant impact and a couple of cuts as it fell along my wrist. It could have been much worse or fatal. Focusing on full physical and emotional recovery.
In a comment on the post, Prosperie added more details about how the terrifying incident occurred:
My leadership told me they were told there would be no axe throwing. I think the anchor person went rogue and decided to throw it. He had only thrown it once before in practice for an upcoming segment and they told him to throw it with more force. The vid you see is edited showing the Televised portion of the throw and then edited to a portion that was taken on someone’s phone of us being videoed. The part that was actually televised showed the overthrown axe and then segued to us for the drum solo bump, only showing me walking behind the section holding my arm. The actual part where the axe hit me was not televised. Poor decision, obvious negligence, should not have happened, could have been avoided. When shooting or throwing, always know what is behind your target. Basic safety rule. I’m feeling blessed on Father’s day with my 5 children, alive, and with all limbs.
Prosperie sued in 2018 over the incident, naming both Hegseth and the network as defendants. The complaint accused Hegseth of having acted “negligent, wanton, reckless and careless in, among other things, throwing an axe in an area where he knew or should have known that pedestrians were present; in not properly securing the area, in not adequately checking to see if the area was secure;in attempting to throw an axe in public when not properly able; in attempting to throw an axe in public without proper training and in failure to properly look for pedestrians while performing a dangerous act in public.”
Fox issued a statement calling the incident “unfortunate and completely unintentional,” and noted that “FOX News immediately apologized to Prosperie and offered medical assistance, which he declined saying he was ’okay.’ The network also offered compensation, which he declined as well. We have not heard from Prosperie since 2015, so the lawsuit is surprising and we are reviewing it.”
The litigation was “discontinued in 2019″ under undisclosed terms and the parties declined to respond to media requests for comment at the time, according to the AP.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
