President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Pete Hegseth, an activist veteran and longtime Fox News host, to be the next secretary of Defense.
“Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First,” Trump said in a statement on social media Tuesday evening. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice – Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.”
Hegseth served in the Army in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He has been a co-host on “Fox & Friends Weekend” since 2016, according to his biography on LinkedIn.
Hegseth previously led two veterans advocacy groups, Concerned Veterans of America and Vets for Freedom. And he worked at a pair of think tanks, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the Center of the American Experiment.
He graduated from Princeton University in 2003 and later received a masters in public policy from Harvard University.
Hegseth briefly ran for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota in 2012, but dropped out before the Republican primary that year.
In 2019, news organizations reported that Hegseth had campaigned successfully to get then-President Trump to pardon people who had been convicted or accused of war crimes while serving in the military, three of whom Trump pardoned in a controversial decision that year.
Hegseth had also publicly pushed for the pardons.
“The benefit of the doubt should go to the guys pulling the trigger,” Hegseth said on air at the time.
Hegseth also wrote a book titled “The War on Warriors” which Trump praised on Tuesday as a book that “reveals the left-wing betrayal of our Warriors and how we must return our Military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability and excellence.” Trump also emphasized that Hegseth’s book spent two weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list.
If confirmed, the 44-year-old Hegseth would join the ranks of the youngest to ever serve as secretary of Defense. Donald Rumsfeld was 43 years old when he became Defense secretary (for the first time) in 1975, and Robert McNamara was 44 when he took office in 1961.
With the announcement of his choice for secretary of Defense, much of Trump’s proposed top tier of national security leaders is assembled.
Key nominees whose names have yet to be chosen or at least announced include Trump’s choices for director of national intelligence and his picks for the service secretaries.
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