Pete Hegseth

Peter Brian Hegseth was born on June 6, 1980, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is of Norwegian descent, as his great-grandparents migrated from Norway to Minnesota before they had children. He was the first of three children of Brian Hegseth and Penelope Haugen. Hegseth's father was a basketball coach for high schools across Minnesota before retiring in 2019. Hegseth's mother is an executive business coach who has taught with the Minnesota Excellence in Public Service (MEPS) Series, a fellowship and leadership program for Republican and center-right women. Hegseth was raised in Forest Lake, Minnesota, and attended Forest Lake Area High School. He graduated on June 10, 1999, as valedictorian. Hegseth played on his high school's football team and was a point guard on the basketball team, where he set school records for career three-point shots, single-season three-point shots, and single-season three-point shooting percentage. He was named all-conference twice and earned all-state honors as a senior.

After high school, Hegseth enrolled at Princeton University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in politics in 2003. According to Reserve & National Guard Magazine, he chose Princeton over an offer from the United States Military Academy to play for the school's basketball team. Months before the September 11 attacks, Hegseth joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps. During his years at Princeton, Hegseth was the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Princeton Tory, the school's conservative student newspaper.

In April 2002, Hegseth declared that, as publisher of The Princeton Tory, he would "defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity". The editors of The Princeton Tory criticized Halle Berry for accepting the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Monster's Ball (2001) "on behalf of an entire race", and The New York Times for announcing that it would print gay marriage announcements, arguing that it would justify publishing marriage announcements for incestuous, zoophilic, and pedophilic relationships. In October, The Princeton Tory published an editorial calling homosexuality immoral. In response, the president of Princeton's student government, Nina Langsam, wrote a strongly worded email to Hegseth and The Princeton Tory's publisher, Brad Simmons. Her email was published in the following issue.

After graduating from Princeton in 2003, Hegseth was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army through the university's Reserve Officers' Training Corps program. He briefly worked as an equity-markets analyst at Bear Stearns. Hegseth completed his basic training at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, in 2004, and for 11 months he was a Minnesota Army National Guardsman at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. There, he led a platoon of soldiers from the New Jersey Army National Guard guarding detainees. By July 2005, he had returned to Bear Stearns; shortly thereafter, he volunteered in the Iraq War as an infantry officer, where he received a Bronze Star Medal. Hegseth served in the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment in the 101st Airborne Division, led by Colonel Michael D. Steele. He began his tour in Baghdad before moving to Samarra, where he served as a civil affairs officer, working with the city council and forming an alliance with council member Asaad Ali Yaseen. Hegseth has described a near-death experience in Iraq in which a rocket-propelled grenade hit his vehicle but failed to detonate.

In 2010, Hegseth deployed with the Minnesota Army National Guard as a counterinsurgency instructor. He volunteered to teach at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul, Afghanistan, for eight months, during the withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan; he taught one of the final classes at the school. After completing his tour in 2014, he was promoted to major and assigned to the Individual Ready Reserve. Through the reserve, he joined the District of Columbia Army National Guard in June 2019 as a traditional drilling service member, remaining in duty until March 2021. He was barred from serving on duty at the inauguration of Joe Biden after a guardsman flagged Hegseth as an "insider threat", noting a tattoo on his biceps of the words Deus vult. He left the Individual Ready Reserve in January 2024, writing in his book The War on Warriors (2024) that he resigned over the incident.

By August 2006, Hegseth moved to Manhattan and began working at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where he met a marine who was working for Vets for Freedom, a political advocacy organization. …

On November 12, 2024, President-elect Donald Trump named Hegseth as his nominee for secretary of defense, after Arkansas senator Tom Cotton announced he would not serve as secretary. Hegseth subsequently ended his contract with Fox News. The selection of Hegseth was seen as a sign that Trump sought to appoint a loyalist to lead the Department of Defense, and his relative lack of experience surprised officials in the department. According to Vanity Fair, Trump's transition team became aware the following day of a sexual assault allegation involving Hegseth that occurred in Monterey, California, seven years prior; The Washington Post reported that senior officials on the team were surprised by the allegation and reconsidered his nomination. Despite the allegation, Trump defended Hegseth and several Republican senators indicated that they would support him. His nomination was threatened by an article from Jane Mayer in The New Yorker detailing alleged financial mismanagement and alcohol issues while leading his veterans' groups, while an NBC News article reported that his drinking habits concerned his colleagues at Fox News; The New York Times reported in December that Trump had begun to consider Florida governor Ron DeSantis as an alternative.

In an effort to retain his nomination amid controversies, Hegseth began a campaign that month. Advisors to Trump privately sought to persuade him to support Hegseth in fear that it would embolden recalcitrant Republican senators, while he could not garner support for DeSantis, according to The New York Times. In addition, the Times reported that Vice President-elect JD Vance had led a group of Republicans, including Donald Trump Jr., former Trump aide Steve Bannon, political activist Charlie Kirk, and Breitbart News reporter Matt Boyle, to support Hegseth's nomination. Trump allies took a direct approach to addressing the controversies, including an interview with Megyn Kelly that impressed Trump. Hegseth appeared at the United States Capitol in December; Trump publicly reaffirmed his support for Hegseth afterwards. The visit gave Iowa senator Joni Ernst, who had threatened his nomination, a positive impression of Hegseth.

Hegseth appeared before the Senate Committee on Armed Services on January 14. …

Hegseth holds strongly conservative views and has been regarded as a Christian nationalist by critics. In his book American Crusade (2020), Hegseth characterized "Americanism" as being opposition to movements such as feminism, globalism, Marxism, and progressivism, equated democracy to a leftist demand, and expressed support for gerrymandering to "screw Democrats". He described progressives and Democrats as enemies of freedom, the United States, and the Constitution. Hegseth has said that victory for America includes the end of, communism, socialism, Islamism, globalism, secularism, "genderism", and environmentalism. He has repeated false claims of electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential election and spread conspiracy theories about Antifa involvement in the January 6 attack. As defense secretary, Hegseth promoted culture war issues, derided "secular humanism", and promoted conservative evangelicalism.

Hegseth initially supported Florida senator Marco Rubio in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, later favored Texas senator Ted Cruz, and ultimately endorsed Donald Trump. He defended Trump's policies in his first term, including his interactions with North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un, the 2020–2021 US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. In 2016 on Fox News, Hegseth criticized Hillary Clinton for her email controversy, stating that her "recklessness in handling information" would usually lead to job firings and potential criminal charges, while also risking foreign access to sensitive information and harming relationships with allies.

In a March 2012 interview with National Review, Hegseth advocated for premium support in Medicare, opposed contraception mandates, and described the Keystone Pipeline as a choice between jobs and environmental impact, asserting he would "always side with jobs." On Fox & Friends in 2019, Hegseth described climate change as an attempt at government control. In March 2025, he canceled climate change studies and decried the phenomenon as "crap" on social media. That month, he sought to eliminate climate planning from the Department of Defense but included an exception for extreme weather preparation.

In November 2009, Hegseth supported sending additional forces into Afghanistan during the War in Afghanistan. …

While attending Forest Lake Area High School, Hegseth began dating classmate Meredith Schwarz. They were voted "most likely to marry" by their graduating class. After they both graduated in 1999, they got married in 2004 at the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Minnesota. Schwarz filed for divorce in December 2008 after Hegseth admitted to five affairs.

In 2008, Hegseth began dating Samantha Deering, whom he had met at Vets For Freedom. Hegseth married Deering in 2010 and the couple had three children. Deering filed for divorce in 2017 after it came out that Hegseth fathered a child to a producer on Fox & Friends, Jennifer Rauchet.

In 2019, Hegseth married Rauchet at Trump National Golf Club Colts Neck in New Jersey, an event attended by the Trump family. Rauchet has three children from a previous marriage. Hegseth fathered a child with Rauchet while he was still married to Deering.

You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years)

In November 2024, Vanity Fair reported that Hegseth had allegedly sexually assaulted a woman at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa on Del Monte Golf Course in Monterey, California, in October 2017, when he was scheduled to speak at the California Federation of Republican Women convention. According to the Monterey Police Department, Hegseth was investigated in connection with two incidents of sexual assault that occurred shortly before midnight and 7 a.m. the following morning. He was not criminally charged. The Washington Post reported that Hegseth had paid the accuser as part of a non-disclosure agreement after she threatened litigative action in 2020. In addition, the paper obtained a memorandum provided to Donald Trump's presidential transition team by an associate of the accuser, a 30-year-old conservative group staffer, that alleged that Hegseth raped her. Hegseth's lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, later confirmed the reports, but said that the staffer was attempting to extort Hegseth, a purported "victim of blackmail and innocent collateral damage", during the #MeToo movement, risking his career. …