The Daily - The Metamorphosis of Pete Hegseth

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Now that Matt Gaetz has withdrawn from consideration as attorney general, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s most controversial cabinet pick is his selection of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.Dave Philipps, who reports on war and the military for The Times, discusses three major deployments that shaped how Mr. Hegseth views the military — and why, if confirmed, he’s so dead-set on disrupting its leadership.Guest: Dave Philipps, who reports about war, the military and veterans for The New York Times.Background reading: His military experiences transformed Mr. Hegseth from a critic of war crimes into a defender of the accused.What to know about Mr. Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Now that Matt Gaetz has withdrawn from consideration as attorney general, Donald Trump's most controversial cabinet pick is his selection of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Today, my colleague, Dave Phillips, on the three major deployments that shaped how Hegseth views the military and why, if confirmed, he's so dead set on disrupting its leadership. It's Tuesday, November 26th. Dave, welcome back. It's been a long time for me since we've last spoken and it's nice to see your face.

Oh, you too. So Dave, when it comes to the subject of what we're going to be talking about today, Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, what's probably best known about him at this point is that he faces a very serious accusation of sexual assault, which we will return to within this conversation. On top of that, that he lacks the traditional background for becoming Secretary of Defense. His latest job was as a Fox News host. But what's less well understood is what exactly he thinks about the United States military,

which he may soon command, based on his own experience as a member of the armed forces. And you have been trying to figure that out. Yeah, I mean, that's the big question for me. If he gets the job, what does he want to do and why? And the reason I ask is he does not have a lot of traditional Washington experience. He spent almost 20 years in uniform and he deployed three times. He's been to Iraq, he's been to Afghanistan, but most of his experience is just leading small groups of troops on the ground. He's never worked in the Pentagon.

He doesn't have a lot of time and big defense contractors, so he doesn't have some of the traditional experience that's normally the road to this type of job. And that's important because if he is confirmed, he's going to have to manage nearly three million employees and an annual budget of almost a trillion dollars. Well, tell us about those deployments. And I guess going back even further, how and why Hexeth went into the military and how taken together all those views are likely to shape the kind of defense department he would lead. Yeah.

So he grew up in Minnesota, has a very traditional church growing conservative childhood. And then he goes to Princeton University. And there too, he's kind of an outspoken conservative. In fact, he joins the university conservative political journal, which is called the Princeton Tory and writes a lot of really provocative essays, sort of taking on the issues of the day. You know, modern feminism, homosexuality, and he's really hard right on a lot of this stuff.

And he arrives there in 1999. So while all of this is going on, the attacks of September 11th happen. And so another hot political topic that comes right up to the top is, how does America respond to that stuff? And he really becomes outspoken in support of military intervention, not just in Afghanistan, but also in Iraq.

And it should be said that this is not just academic, because halfway through his college career, he joined ROTC and as soon as he graduated from Princeton in 2003, he became an army officer. So he knew he could be going to war, but he had faith that that was the right thing to do. So he's very much aligned, it would seem, with the Republican leadership of the United States in that era. I was in college during this period too. It's George W. Bush and he is making the case for war and asking as many Americans as are willing to sign up and do the patriotic thing and bring the war that had come to the United States on September 11th back to the

places where those attacks allegedly began. That's right. So he puts on a uniform as a national guardsman and he gets sent to Guantanamo Bay. And remind us what's happening at Guantanamo Bay at this early stage in those two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq? So at this point in 2004, the prison there is only about two years old. It's been very hastily set up as a place to store terror suspects until the military can figure out what to do with them.

And the idea is that the military is going to set up a commission and they are going to charge and prosecute these folks and very quickly reach outcomes, probably convictions, and it'll be dealt with. And Pete Hagseth is kind of a low level administrator. He's a platoon leader, but also does a lot of paperwork, spends a lot of time at a desk. And later he describes this deployment

as a long long boring duty. In fact, I think the only thing that happened that's noteworthy to him is that he saw a lack of action. What do you mean? Well, here's this prison that's been set up to deal with all these suspects, some of whom are very dangerous. And what he sees is not convictions. He sees the process going from swift to slow to essentially a standstill.

Remember, there were hundreds of terror suspects there at the time. Almost none of them ever went to trial. So here we are almost 20 years later and nothing's happened. And if you're Pete Hegseth, if you're somebody motivated as he was to sign up after September 11th to avenge this horrible act that has killed more than 3,000 Americans, being there on the ground and knowing that just over those walls is a process that's grinding and not really going anywhere is probably very frustrating. Yeah.

Here's a died in the world believer who volunteered and put on the uniform to help and Nothing's happening. It's very frustrating and I think he goes home kind of disappointed. Dave, you mentioned multiple deployments. So where does Hegseth end up next after Guantanamo? Yeah, so he comes back from Guantanamo feeling like he didn't necessarily achieve very much. And he's watching the news. And this is 2005. And so Iraq, which was supposed to be an easy and quick victory, by that point is really falling apart.

And he feels like again, here's a chance for him to step in and help. And so he volunteers. And he joins the 101st Airborne Division as an infantry platoon leader, and he goes to Iraq. And what's his experience there? He arrives on the ground in what is essentially a mess that's getting worse every day. What had been a relatively swift invasion is now curdled into sectarian fighting, into roadside bombs everywhere, into mounting American

casualties. And the infantry troops that are on the ground like him, they're supposed to fix it. And he realizes how difficult that's going to be because he's getting some very conflicting instructions. What's an example of that? So lawyers in the army who are giving a briefing to him and all the soldiers that he's arriving with tell him essentially, hey, look, the rules are very strict.

You cannot fire on an Iraqi, even if you see them with a rocket launcher, unless that rocket launcher is actually pointed at you. On the other side is some of the leadership in his brigade, combat commanders who are saying, you should expect to fire on pretty much any military-aged male, and you don't even need to give warning shots.

Wow. So he's got some people saying, don't fire until it's too late. Some people say, fire way too soon. And he's a young infantry guy who's leading 40 soldiers who trying to figure this out. And whose advice does he ultimately take? What is his conduct? This is really interesting. He took a very moderate and measured approach. He's like okay we're just gonna be really careful. We don't want to shoot

anyone. We don't need to because that's just gonna make us so many more enemies in a war that we're trying to end. And so not only did he tell his soldiers, hey, we're not going to shoot unless we're sure, but he volunteered to be the first one through the door on raids they would go on because he didn't want to put that really difficult decision in the hands of some 21, 22 year old soldier who might make a rash decision. And people who served with him that I interviewed say he was flawless, careful, cared about what he did and his soldiers loved him for it. But something happens right after he leaves his infantry company.

There's a big operation, it's called Iron Triangle. And his infantry company, not his platoon specifically, but other platoons that are in this same little military group are going after an insurgent target and they end up shooting some civilians and executing some captives. And they were charged with crimes because in the military, if you go beyond the rules of engagement and kill someone who shouldn't be killed and you're definitely not allowed to kill captives, that's murder. At the time, Pete Hegsatz was really clear-eyed about how he felt about this. You

know, this will become important later in his career, but he was very outspoken saying, this is wrong. It's not the right way to do things. And he called it atrocities. And made clear that those are lines that you can't cross, not just because they're lines, but because they're deeply counterproductive. Yeah. He becomes a big believer during his time in Iraq in what the military calls counterinsurgency, which is a fancy word for rather than shooting the Iraqis, let's help them

rebuild their society. It's stuff like sewer systems, electrical, setting up a city council so that cities can actually run. And he worked daily on those projects and had a lot of success. And by the time he came home from Iraq in 2006, he was a huge believer in counterinsurgency. He's going on TV, he's speaking in panels, he's making a public case that, hey, we need to double down on this strategy.

The strategy we're pursuing now, a counterinsurgency strategy implemented by General David Petraeus, is finally the right strategy to be using in that country. At the time, like America was kind of souring on Iraq, people were talking about pulling out and he very clearly said no. We stood up Iraqi armies, we held national elections and all of those things are incredible. We need more troops there, but we need to do it right.

Not only did I see security forces that were stronger, but I sat in on a city council meeting where I watched 18 members of the Samara City Council debate for four hours. Issues like electricity, water, sewage, rebuilding of civic buildings. Let's do counterinsurgency, help these people rebuild, and in doing so we will help ourselves because we will create a stable nation that will no longer be a breeding ground for violence. So as a pretty low ranking veteran of the war in Iraq, he somehow finds himself on TV advocating for specific approaches to these wars? Yeah, because he comes with a perspective of a Joe in uniform who has real ground combat experience.

And he's saying, look, I've seen these efforts work. Let's double down on this. And he's such a believer, he volunteers for a third time in 2011, this time to Afghanistan. And when he gets there, he's doing what he's advocating for. His job is to be a teacher at a counterinsurgency school where he will teach these methods to the officers of the Afghan army. But unfortunately, his timing there is a lot like his timing in Guantanamo. He's getting there right when the situation is twisting towards dysfunction. By 2012,

the United States military has decided it's going to pull out of Afghanistan, slowly but surely. And one of the first turnovers that happens is that Pete Hagseth turns over his counterinsurgency school to the Afghan government. And this effort that he's worked very hard on, within a year or two, it falls apart. Right. Which of course becomes a metaphor for the entire conflict in Afghanistan because by the end, the Taliban will return, take over American bases, take over American mess halls and tanks and equipment, and turn the entire U.S. war there into an exercise in futility.

Right. And so that's Pete Higgs' final deployment. So in three deployments, he's seen three different flavors of Pentagon dysfunction. And so pretty much his entire adult life has been spent on this effort that has come to nothing. And in fact, the only thing that he really has seen the military very expeditiously and successfully do is you remember those folks that I said were in his infantry company that got charged with war crimes.

I do. They were very quickly tried and convicted. And so he saw successful prosecutions against his own guys, guys that had been put in very, very difficult positions, but he had never seen any successful prosecutions against the people who were detained at Guantanamo. His front seat at all of this dysfunction really left him in bitter. He started out as a patriot who wanted to join the effort, and he left feeling like the people leading the military did not know what they were doing. Right. And the only people who he saw being held accountable through any kind of process were...

Were his own guys. Being punished by their own government. That's right. In the years afterwards, his experience really distills into a view where he's deeply supportive of the people who went and tried to make things work in Iraq and Afghanistan, and deeply, deeply distrustful of the leadership that made it all fall apart. And that informs his views as his platform becomes bigger and bigger. We'll be right back.

So Dave, what does this bigger platform for Pete Hegstass views of the military look like in the years after he leaves the service? So we started working for Washington, D.C. based veterans groups that push for all sorts of stuff, continued involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, better care for vets through the VA. And as part of that advocacy, he's repeatedly appearing

on TV, and I think it becomes pretty clear by about 2014 that he's good at TV. The troops have not been a priority of the left. They are not a priority of the left. Do you think that the Pentagon is becoming too politically correct? Well it certainly is not helpful if we've got a military trying more to be politically correct than the biggest baddest military in the world. Better ideas in and of themselves. Don't inevitably carry the day.

Ultimately, big guns and courageous people who carry them are the ones who carry the day. At this point, let's ask our Fox News contributor, Pete Hegsath. Hey Pete, good morning. Good morning. Thanks for having me. He gets his first official position with Fox News as a part-time contributor. And he starts getting more and more time.

He becomes a presenter. He eventually becomes a weekend host. And his time at Fox is a real mix of what he was doing at Princeton years before, sort of like provocative, culture war type of conservative conservative stuff and speaking out for veterans. You think women should not be in combat roles, correct? Because I think inevitably the standards will eventually be eroded by bureaucrats or by political He talks about getting women out of combat roles in the military. He complains about how wokeism has taken over the general core and you know a lot of the leaders are DEI hires.

In that case you're not improving war fighting capability necessarily. You feel better about yourself. And this is a story we've covered extensively on this program. Many of our nation's warriors are finding themselves in trouble for doing the job they were hired to do. Fight a war and kill the enemy. He does something he's never really done before, which is speaking out on behalf of soldiers and other service members who have been charged with war crimes.

As a warfighter, you assume that your military will have your back. Instead, they come after you. Absolutely. Always framed in like, hey, this was a good person trying to do their job and in the fog of war, forced to make a split second decision, they did the wrong thing. And now the military is trying to hang them for it, and that's not fair.

What is the biggest charge you may face? And what is the lightest charge you would face? There's only one charge and that's premeditated murder. It started out with an army green beret named Matt Goldstein who'd been accused of executing a suspected Taliban bomb maker. And it grew to include... Clint Lawrence, brand new platoon leader, orders his platoon to fire on the men in the motorcycle.

They're killed. He's charged with murder because there's no weapons found on those individuals. A young lieutenant named Clint Lawrence, who had been convicted of shooting civilians in Afghanistan. Well, let's right now bring in for his first exclusive interview Navy SEAL operations chief Eddie Gallagher, his wife. And probably the best known is Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who'd been turned in by his own platoon

for allegedly shooting at women and children in Iraq and executing a captive. Right, and Dave, this is a story that you have told several times on our show as the saga of Eddie Gallagher has played out. Yeah, this was the first time that Pete Hagseth came across my radar because he was inviting these people on, people whose cases I had written about.

And honestly, I looked at it pretty dumbfounded because I can absolutely understand the idea of, hey, I'm going to stand by the ground troops and give them the benefit of the doubt. But what really complicates that is that in a number of these cases, these folks had been turned in by their own platoons. The people who understood the fog of war and the situation on the ground more than anyone else had looked at what had happened and been like, man, that's messed up, and had turned them in. Right. In other words, they had crossed lines in the eyes of those who were on the ground with them and Pete Heksef doesn't seem interested in those nuances.

In his mind, it's kind of like, America right or wrong, and I refuse to accept that they did anything wrong. Right. And what's really interesting about that is he knows all about these nuances, because he's been a lieutenant leading ground troops in Iraq. And he has seen his own guys be prosecuted for this stuff. And at the time, before he was on Fox, he said very clearly, hey, this is wrong. It hurts us more than it helps us. But fast forward to when he's on Fox and that's no longer the case.

Well, how do you account for that change? Because in your reporting, you seem to find very clear evidence that Hegseth, when the idea of these war crimes first emerges, is very unsympathetic to those who have allegedly committed them. Now, all of a sudden, he's not interested in the nuances, and he basically just wants to make sure these guys get off scot-free. Yeah, I think that three deployments just made him lose so much faith and so much trust in the Pentagon that he no longer believed that the leadership could make good decisions or fair decisions

towards the people on the ground. CNN has learned that a Fox News host encouraged President Trump to consider pardons for some military members accused of war crimes. So, Hagseth and President Trump basically become a two-man military court. They're not war criminals, they're warriors who have now been accused of certain things that are under review. Where he puts the cases up and Trump makes the decisions.

Newt and I, President Trump pardons two soldiers with connections to Fort Bragg. Major Matthew Goldstein, who you see there on the the left accused of killing a suspected bomb maker who was not a legal threat. Now Lawrence was released Friday from the U.S. military prison Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Tonight, President Trump intervening again to defend in battle Navy seal chief Eddie Gallagher saying he will not let the Navy strip Gallagher of his status as a seal.

let the Navy strip Gallagher of his status as a seal. I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state. So what clearly starts to take form here is a partnership, a direct pipeline between Hegseth and Trump. And I suppose you have to add on top of that, the fact that Hegseth's view of post-9-11 U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, his disillusionment with them is very much shared by Trump, who is so openly disdainful of how the US military leadership and even civilian-elected leadership entered those wars and conducted those wars. So it does not seem at all like a surprise that Hegseth would be his choice to be a senior figure in the military, the Secretary of Defense.

Well, and remember during Trump's first term, he clashed repeatedly with various generals who were in his administration, including Secretary James Mattis, who now hates President Trump, called him unfit to be president. And so President Trump and Pete Hagseth both share this disdain for the military establishment.

And so when Trump looks around for someone who shares his view and can act, who has some military experience but is also deeply mistrustful of the military, Pete Hagseth is his natural choice. But what has become clear in the days since Trump picked Hegseth to be his Secretary of Defense is that neither Trump nor those around him seemed to know about some of the alleged problematic personal conduct that Hegseth engaged in since becoming a Fox News host. That's right. There's some episodes that really call into question his judgment. He actually

had a baby with a producer in 2017, a Fox News producer, while he was married. That same year, he was accused of sexual assault by a woman who he had sex with at a conservative political convention in California. Police investigated, they didn't file charges. He says it was consensual, but a few years later, he paid her an undisclosed amount of money as part of a settlement over this. In addition, during President Biden's inauguration, Pete Hickseth was removed from what would have essentially

been a security detail there because another person in his National Guard unit who had seen some of his tattoos wrote a letter to the command saying, hey, these tattoos are related to white supremacy and Christian nationalism and this guy Pete Hagseth may be an insider threat. And so he was removed from that detail. Now, a couple years later, actually this year, Pete Hagseth left the National Guard, but he has said publicly,

like I was forced out over that, essentially. Like they pulled me out of that. He feels he was targeted and it was unfair. But all this to say that there are a number of things that really are raising eyebrows about this guy who could be in charge of the entire military. Right. And for all those reasons, we don't know if Pete Hegseth is going to make it through the Senate confirmation process that lies before him in the next couple of weeks. Like

Matt Gaetz, he could end up having to drop out because of accusations of sexual misconduct. But so far, Senate Republicans who have met with Hegseth on Capitol Hill seem to be optimistic that he could make it through. And for the sake of argument, let's act as if Pete Hegseth does become Secretary of Defense. How transformational would that be for the U.S. military to have someone who clearly sees himself as such a champion of the soldier and such a challenger to the military establishment? What do we think? You know, I think it really depends. On Fox, he's this culture war bomb thrower who talks about getting rid of all women in combat positions, which, you know, there are thousands of people that might affect.

So it's unclear how things like that could actually happen without being completely disruptive. You know, on the other hand, when he was in uniform, everybody I talked to said he was just a hard-working, nonpartisan, common-sense guy. So are you going to get a mix of the partisan bomb thrower and the common sense officer? Are you going to get one or the other? I think that's up in the air. What's clear is that in the rank and file, there is some recognition that for the past 25 years, the status quo hasn't really been working

and they're hungry for change. Right, and that would seem to be what Donald Trump is banking on here, that for too long, even in his own first administration, his recipe of self-disruption stopped at the military. He never thought to put someone like this in that role. And this time he's rolling the dice that not only it will work, but that it has to work.

That this is a place that does need that kind of disruption. No more generals, no more admirals. He's putting in someone who's top line on their resume for the job is that I don't trust the people that have been running this. And so he's all but promising disruption. Well, Dave, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, as expected, special counsel Jack Smith dropped his indictments charging Donald Trump with plotting to overturn the 2020 election and illegally retaining classified documents. Smith, in court filings, explained that long-standing Justice Department policy makes it impossible to pursue prosecutions against a sitting president. But Smith wrote, the decision to drop the cases, quote, does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged,

the strength of the government's proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the government, he wrote, stands fully behind. In a post on social media reacting to the news, Trump called both indictments quote, empty and lawless. Today's episode was produced by Diana Wynn, Carlos Prieto, Mary Wilson, and Asta Chaturvedi.

It was edited by Lisa Chow and Michael Benoit. Fact Check by Susan Lee contains original music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Runberg and Ben Lansferk of Winterley. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you tomorrow.