Trump's Trials - Who is Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

Trump's Trials is now Trump's Terms. Each episode, host Scott Detrow curates NPR coverage of the incoming Trump administration.NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with New Yorker writer Jane Mayer about her latest article on Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth.Support NPR and hear every episode sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Scott Detro and you're listening to Trump's Terms from NPR. We will have really great strong people. Donald Trump is unstoppable. Make America healthy again. The future is going to be amazing. In this podcast, we bring you the latest news about the people who will advise and report to President Donald Trump in his second term. And one person who has gotten a lot of attention lately is Pete Hegseth. The former Fox News host

has been nominated to be Secretary of Defense. He's facing allegations of sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and other misconduct. All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly spoke to the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, who's been looking into Hegseth and his record. A conversation after the break. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com, T's and C's apply. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, offering over 300 independent

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It's Trump's Terms from NPR. I'm Scott Detro. And here's my colleague, Mary Louise Kelly. Your reporting cites documents, cites eyewitnesses to alleged sexual impropriety, also financial mismanagement, alcohol abuse. Start with that last one. Tell us what Hegseth's former colleagues told you about witnessing alcohol-related incidents in professional settings? What I was hearing was a fairly alarming catalog of specific instances that his former employees

at a veterans organization called Concerned Veterans for America saw and reported. A group of them put a report together that they sent to the managers of this group. And what it describes is about two years worth of moments where Pete Hegsith was repeatedly inebriated often to the point of almost blacking out where he had to be carried to his room. There was one particular description of him at one point as needing to be restrained from getting on the stage at a strip club where he tried to get up to dance with the strippers and a female employee had to pull him away he was about to be thrown out of the club according to this report this whistleblower report and another instance that was also kind of a standout was one where a different

former employee sent a letter to the managers saying that Pete Hegseth had closed down a bar at 2 30 in the morning in Cayuga Falls, Ohio where he was chanting with another person, kill all Muslims, kill all Muslims. And to be clear these are sources who you have been in direct contact with who are recounting these allegations to you? They actually are people who I've also interviewed, yes. Okay. I want to note Hegseth's advisor has waited on this. He calls these outlandish claims laundered through the New Yorker and added, and I quote, get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism. So a denial there from Hegseth's team. Jean Mayer, I want to ask you, from when are the most recent allegations of

problematic drinking that you were able to document? Is there any evidence that whatever he may have done years ago or not done years ago, he has since cleaned up his act? Well, the most recent allegations about his drinking really have been made by NBC News, which did its own investigative report and said that colleagues of Pete Hexlitz at Fox News were concerned about his drinking as recently as a month ago. I focused more on the veterans groups he was running because these are the only organizations he's run and he was basically shown the door at both of them

for mismanagement and conduct. Right, stay there for a second. These are the organizations are Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America. And among the issues you were reporting on is financial improprieties. What happened? Well, that first group, the Vets for Freedom,

was basically someplace he started working in about 2006, 2007. By 2008, he had run it really to the edge of bankruptcy. He had something like close to $500,000 in creditors he couldn't pay and $1,000 in the bank. He went back to the donors and said, you know, I need money or we're going to have to close this thing down and They gave him some money to tide him over

but they did what they described as castrating him to try to get him from Running this organization because he really had so many management problems There's a lot to get through here, but I also want to ask about reports of but I also want to ask about reports of sexism and a general hostile work environment for women who worked under Hegseth. Can you describe those allegations? Yeah, and they were of interest to me if in part because Pete Hegseth has been accused of raping a woman in 2017, a woman who was running a Republican women's conference in Monterey, California. And so I was interested in whether there was sort of a past history here of any sort. He has denied those allegations and the police investigated them and did not charge him.

The two people, he and the woman, have different points of view on what happened that night. He said it was consensual sex. She was married. Her family was right there in the same hotel and he wound up paying her a secret amount of money and having her sign a non-disclosure agreement. And what I could see in this whistleblower report is there are many instances where women felt that they were sexually harassed under his management and there was actually at least one instance where a woman tried to bring charges against another person in the organization and

felt that they were swept under the rug. Big picture, Jane Mayer. This would all be relevant information to consider when hiring anyone for any job. Secretary of Defense of the United States is not any job. The post involves managing the nuclear arsenal. It involves sending troops into combat, into harm's way. As you have reached out to senators who will be charged with confirming or not confirming this nominee to run the Pentagon, what do they tell you about the stakes? Danielle Pletka I mean, people are telling me that they consider this to be really serious and for obvious reasons.

For instance, there's a quote in the story from Senator Richard Blumenthal, who's on the Armed Services Committee and who was there way back in 1989, I guess, in the Senate when it blocked John Tower's nomination from becoming Secretary of Defense for somewhat similar kinds of allegations of drinking and womanizing. And what he said was, you know, we can all feel sympathy for someone who may have a drinking problem, an ongoing one particularly, but you don't want that person, he said, at the head of the most lethal and possibly the largest military in the world. The Secretary of Defense's job is a 24-hour a day job. There's not a sort of an

after-hours part of it. Emergencies happen in the middle of the night and as we all know it's a dangerous world out there and so there's a lot of concern about whether someone with these kinds of issues could be entrusted with that kind of power. HEG SETH says he spoke this morning to Trump and that the president-elect told him to keep fighting. That is what he has said. And you know, we're sort of in that moment where all you can say is we will see there are reports that six senators on the Republican side say that they're uncomfortable voting for him, which would be enough to sink his nomination

for sure. But now that Hegseth's mom has come out on TV and made a plea for him, we'll have to see if she changed any minds. It's certainly, I've covered a number of nominations. This is the first time I've ever seen a mom come out to plea for her son. Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, thank you very much for sharing your reporting with us. I've ever seen a mom come out to plea for her son. Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, thank you very much for sharing your reporting with us. So good to be with you. And before we wrap up, a thank you to our NPR Plus supporters who hear each show without

sponsored messages and of course who help protect independent journalism. If you are not a supporter yet, you can visit plus.npr.org to find out how you can get a ton of podcast perks across dozens of NPR shows, like bonus episodes, exclusive merchandise, and more. Again, that's plus.npr.org. I'm Scott Detro. Thanks for listening to Trump's Terms from NPR. Hi, I'm Laurel Wamsley and I cover personal finance for NPR. That means I report on some of the questions that might keep you or your loved ones up at

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