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Pete Hegseth has spent the past several years on daytime television, hawking grenade-shape soaps, hurling axes, and boasting about never washing his hands. Now he’s preparing for confirmation hearings as Donald Trump’s next secretary of defense. It’s a radical career jump that speaks to Trump’s desire to put loyalty above résumé in assembling his second cabinet—and, perhaps, the influence and trolling instincts of the people around him, including “first buddy” Elon Musk.
It’s also a reminder of just how much Trump—despite his highly touted campaign dalliances with the world of bro podcasts and social media—is still largely a media traditionalist. As CNN’s Brian Stelter noted last week, the “Fox-to-Trump pipeline” has always been a well-oiled machine. In the first term, Mercedes Schlapp (communications director), Sebastian Gorka (deputy assistant), John Bolton (national security adviser), and Heather Nauert (State Department spokesperson) were among the dozen or so people who appeared regularly on Fox before being tapped for administration posts. This time around, Tom Homan—who served in the first Trump administration before taking a contract as a Fox News contributor—is cycling back, to run border policy; and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a frequent voice on Fox, is poised to become the ambassador to Israel.
Trump owns his own social media company, and he’s back on Musk’s X, where he regularly posts his familiar all-caps screeds. After the election, Business Insider’s Peter Kafka wondered if Trump’s connection to Musk might result in X having a stronger influence on his second-term decision-making, and concluded that it probably would not. “The big unknown I’m thinking about right now is a pretty simple one: Does Donald Trump know, or care, about what’s happening on Twitter?” Kafka wrote. “My hunch…is that he’s getting his information the way he always has—by watching and reading Old Media.” (A new, cozy “documentary” of Trump’s 2024 campaign recently captured how he engages with the platform: commenting out loud about whatever he’s seeing on television, while a nearby aide types his thoughts into a phone.)
Indeed, Trump’s true allegiance has always been to cable TV, and especially Fox. Former aides have consistently remarked on how often Trump was glued to a screen during his first term. “I think that if you could clock the amount of time he spends actually in the Oval Office versus the amount of time he spends in the little dining room off the Oval Office with the cable news networks in one form or another on, it would be a very interesting statistic,” Bolton said in 2020. In late 2017, less than a year into his presidency, the Washington Post sought to tabulate how much time Trump spent watching Fox News, by collecting all of his tweets that seemingly referred to a live broadcast. The Post found that he’d referenced the channel or its guests on 108 of the 313 days he’d spent in office to date. (Axios later reported that up to 60 percent of Trump’s day as president was spent on unstructured “executive time”—in large part, watching television.) Eighty-eight of the tweets the Post identified were specifically about Fox & Friends, the morning show that Trump regularly calls into, and where Hegseth is a weekend host.
Hegseth’s time as a TV personality means that his provocative views are well known to Trump—and the rest of us. Hegseth has described progressives and leftists as “domestic enemies” and made it clear that he views mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post as “left wing” and “out to get” Trump. In 2021, he walked out of a podcast interview with Mediaite after thirteen minutes of questioning about vaccines and who won the 2020 election—declaring the outlet to be “part of the trash heap” of journalism. On the military, he has said he wants to eliminate anything that appears to represent “woke” values, including diversity initiatives, and has promised to fire “a ton of generals” if they stand in the way. He fought aggressively (and successfully) for Trump to issue pardons to several service members convicted by military courts of war crimes. He thinks that women should not serve in combat roles. (There are also some things the Trump team apparently didn’t know, including, as the Post reported over the weekend, that Hegseth paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017. No charges were ever filed.)
His nomination also stands out because of the distance between his starting point—as a lighthearted if opinionated weekend talk show host—and where he would end up: at the top of a nearly trillion-dollar organization with some three million personnel, many of them engaged daily in matters of life and death. “When you get to flag rank, the general officer level, that’s where the fun stops and the hard work of managing the future of the service or your department starts,” Paul Eaton—a retired two-star general who is now a senior adviser at VoteVets, a left-leaning advocacy group, and has become a familiar face on cable news—told me. “When you sit through some of those meetings, particularly where it goes down paths that are very technical, it’s a struggle to keep up with some of the super bright people who are laying it all out. But you gotta do it. The days are long, and it’s tiring. It’s hard government work.”
Eaton is one of several former military officers who transitioned into television with whom I spoke for insight into what Hegseth might face. Mike Lyons, a military analyst for CBS who previously served in combat roles during the First Gulf War, said that when he started doing television, he had to learn how to simplify weighty subjects into camera-ready bites. “It’s kind of like acting,” he said. “I’m not briefing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I’m taking a complex issue and trying to dumb it down to explain it in thirty seconds.” Still, Lyons, who, like Hegseth, held the rank of major before retiring, thinks Hegseth might do a decent job of making the reverse transition, in part because some of his ideas about restoring a “traditional” military resonate with many in the armed services. “He’s a smart guy. He’s got experience; he understands the culture,” Lyons said. “I think it’s going to depend on who his assistants are. Guys like that at the top set policy, set intent, but he’s never run anything big before, so it remains to be seen if he’s successful.”
Others were less optimistic. “Being a guy that talks about things in a media environment doesn’t mean you really know about those things or can act on them,” Mark Hertling, a retired lieutenant general who is now a regular analyst on CNN, told me. “There’s an expression in the army that ‘talking ain’t fighting.’ It’s the equivalent of saying you’re all hat, no cattle. You can talk about things a lot, but if you haven’t really done it, you don’t know how hard it is.” Some of the cultural positions that Hegseth has fixated on, Hertling said, suggested that he would be in for a rude awakening when faced with the actual responsibilities that come with being the Pentagon’s top official. “They’re going to ask him questions about policy and acquisitions and budgetary crises,” he said. “I’m not sure Hegseth’s commentary on DEI is going to go very far in terms of true military readiness.”
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