How Pete Hegseth went from Fox News host to Trump’s Defense Secretary pick

CNN

By Brian Stelter, CNN

New York (CNN) — Two years ago, Pete Hegseth relocated his family from New Jersey, near Fox News headquarters, to a small town outside of Nashville, Tennessee. The red state move was on-brand for the “Fox & Friends” co-host, who takes his kids shooting, posts pictures wearing anti-President Biden slogans, and emphasizes his Christian faith.

Now Hegseth, his wife and their seven children may have to relocate again, this time to Washington, DC. On Tuesday evening, President-elect Donald Trump said Hegseth is his pick for Defense Secretary – a decision that shocked even some of his friends at Fox.

Hegseth is a decorated Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But nothing in his biography suggests experience leading large organizations.

As one of his fellow Fox hosts said Tuesday night, in a flabbergasted tone, “You’re telling me Pete is going to oversee two million employees?”

The Department of Defense has closer to three million employees, which only serves to underscore the point. But Hegseth has something else that Trump values: television star-power.

Hegseth, who has been a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend” for the better part of a decade, has used the show to highlight his views about the US military. Hegseth has railed against the Pentagon’s adoption of “social justice” messages and argued that “woke” policies have hurt military recruitment. He castigated the “warped, woke and caustic policies of our current military” in a bestselling book earlier this year. When Trump said in a Fox interview that “you can’t have ‘woke’ military,” Hegseth said, “he’s exactly right.”

“The Pentagon likes to say ‘our diversity is our strength.’ What a bunch of garbage. In the military our diversity is not our strength, our unity is our strength,” he said on Fox.

Hegseth was initially hired as a contributor in 2014 by the right-wing network’s boss at the time, Roger Ailes, and he was promoted to a regular hosting role in the months after Ailes was forced out in a sexual harassment scandal.

Inside Fox, staffers buzzed about Hegseth’s own scandal. Multiple sources said that he cheated on his second wife, Samantha, with Jennifer Rauchet, a producer of Fox’s morning show. In an interview for my 2020 book “Hoax,” an executive confirmed the affair and said Rauchet showed favoritism toward Hegseth. “She kept putting Pete on TV,” the executive said.

Hegseth and Rauchet disclosed their relationship to Fox management when Rauchet was pregnant (and Hegseth was still married). Rauchet was moved to a different Fox show so that the couple wouldn’t be working together anymore.

In 2019, when their daughter turned two, Hegseth and Rauchet tied the knot at Trump National Golf Club Colts Neck in New Jersey. Family members wore Trump-inspired hats that said “MAKE WEDDINGS GREAT AGAIN.”

Hegseth and Rauchet each have three children from earlier marriages. Last year, he told the publication Nashville Christian Family that they “are a family brought together by the grace of God. There are no ‘steps’ or ‘halves’ in the Hegseth clan.”

From Gitmo to guest host

Hegseth’s worldview was shaped by the wars of the George W. Bush era. As a student at Princeton University in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Hegseth wrote a letter to the school paper in defense of military action when a fellow student urged restraint.

Hegseth said on a recent podcast that he was a “huge proponent” of the Iraq war when it began in 2003, but “in retrospect” the United States “absolutely should not” have invaded the country.

After graduating from college, Hegseth went to work at Bear Stearns, the ill-fated investment bank. He deployed to Guantanamo Bay with the New Jersey Army National Guard. He once told an interviewer that he watched news coverage of the Iraq war and felt “I need to find a way to be a part of this,” so he pulled a “bureaucratic hat trick” and moved from the National Guard to an active-duty role.

After returning home from Iraq in 2006, Hegseth wrote that more troops were urgently needed. “America is fighting with a hand tied behind its back,” he wrote.

In between deployments, Hegseth ran a veteran’s advocacy nonprofit group and studied at Harvard University. In 2012 he briefly ran against Amy Klobuchar for the US Senate seat in Minnesota. He got “smoked,” by his own admission. And it might have been the best thing that ever happened to him, because it steered him toward Fox. After a brief stint as a host on TheBlaze, Glenn Beck’s streaming platform, Hegseth signed with Fox.

When his predecessor on the weekend morning show, Tucker Carlson, was promoted to prime time, “they just threw me in and said, do you want to try guest-hosting, and it must have gone alright,” Hegseth told podcast host Jack Carr.

Fox’s homegrown star

In October 2017, Trump invited Hegseth and Rauchet to dinner at the White House – a very vivid demonstration that Trump was a loyal Fox viewer and schmoozer.

Of course, Trump’s own tweets proved that he was glued to the TV. And Hegseth catered to his viewer-in-chief. I reported in “Hoax” that Hegseth would sometimes peek at his phone during commercial breaks, looking to see if Trump had picked up on something he’d said on air. His co-hosts felt like he was putting on a show specifically for Trump.

In early 2018, Hegseth was reportedly under consideration to run the Department of Veterans Affairs, but it did not come to pass. “When you don’t get the VA job, and your afternoon opens up…” he wrote on Twitter with a photo of a new tattoo of an American flag and assault rifle. He also has the words “We The People” and “Deus Vult” (Latin for “God wills it”) tattooed on his right arm.

In the years thereafter, Hegseth focused on his Fox platform, and fully transformed from a veteran’s nonprofit leader into a telegenic culture-warrior. Fox executives saw him as a homegrown star of sorts, and kept giving him more airtime accordingly, recognizing that the right-wing network’s viewers connected with his military service and pro-Trump crusade.

In 2019, he began hosting a homespun awards show for the network, the “Patriot Awards,” and last year the event was held in Nashville.

Hegseth regularly filled in on other Fox shows and co-hosted the network’s annual New Year’s Eve countdown telecast for several years. He also hosted an election night special for the Fox Nation streaming service from Nashville last week. When Fox projected Trump to be president-elect, Hegseth donned a red hat and pumped his fist in the air.

He regularly commuted from Tennessee to New York to host weekend editions of “Fox & Friends” and was on the air as recently as Monday to commemorate Veterans Day. His relationship with the network suddenly ended on Tuesday after Trump made the Defense Secretary announcement.

Hegseth, however, may face some opposition in the coming weeks, as his selection caught senators and other officials off guard.

Trump’s announcement also highlighted Hegseth’s status as an author. Hegseth wrote “Modern Warriors” in 2020 and “War on Warriors” earlier this year, both for Fox’s book imprint.

In a statement Tuesday night, Fox 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. We are extremely proud of his work at FOX News Media and wish him the best of luck in Washington.”

In the podcast interview with Carr, Hegseth said his work ethic has set him apart over the years. He alluded to his time playing basketball for Princeton and, more recently, running a summer basketball camp.

“I will stay up late enough to get it all done,” he said. “I will prepare for this mission more than anybody else is prepared for an air assault. I will – you just do the work. Build the plan, work the plan.”

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