Trump DefSec pick Pete Hegseth (Hint: He's not a nice guy. Nor competent for that office)

The Popular Information team of Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims have provided the following list of 13 helpful bullet points about Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.¹ And they provide additional details on each of them in their post. Including the tattoo photo shown below.

1. Hegseth says women should not be in combat roles

2. Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of rape to sign an NDA

3. Hegseth published a column in college that claimed having sex with an unconscious woman is not rape

4. Hegseth is a serial philanderer, making him a target for blackmail 

5. Hegseth criticized injured veterans who receive government assistance

6. Hegseth praised [the torture technique of] “waterboarding," blasted the Geneva Conventions

7. Hegseth dismissed moral concerns about the use of nuclear weapons

8. Hegseth pushed Trump to pardon service members convicted of war crimes

9. Hegseth said the United Nations should be shut down

10. Hegseth has a tattoo associated with white nationalists

    

11. Hegseth is a member of a Christian supremacist church

12. Hegseth said rising Muslim birth rates were causing "a slow motion 9/11"

13. Hegseth promoted editorial comparing same-sex marriage to bestiality 

One of his quirky positions is to rename the Defense Department:

He has … reportedly called for the Defence Department to be renamed the War Department and for a 10-year ban on generals working as defence contractors after leaving the military.

Those views have earned Hegseth many conservative fans, particularly those close to the president-elect. But some also question whether he is capable of running an agency that is considered one of the world's largest bureaucracies, with a budget of nearly $900bn (£708bn).²

Actually, the idea of banning former generals from working as lobbyists or defense contractors within 10 years of leaving their general’s post is not a bad idea. I very much doubt he’s serious about it though. This is the kind of extra slogans conservatives like to toss out when they want to sound a bit populist. Most of them never mean it. And it’s hard to imagine Hegseth does, either.

Also, from 1789 to 1949, that Department was named the War Department. “Defense Department” sounds a bit nobler. Whether its truth-in-advertising value was enhanced by the name change is another question.

His position on Ukraine sounds a bit mugwumpy. But nobody knows what Trump’s actual policy on Ukraine is, probably Trump himself least of all. Whatever Trump does on the Russia-Ukraine War would require some very complicated diplomacy tobe effective. A dogmatic rightwinger like Hegseth with zero experience in either senior management of a large organization or any “diplomacy” beyond repeating rightwing slogans isn’t likely to add much to such a messy diplomatic undertaking.

Not surprisingly from the positions described above, he is also a hawk on all things Israel:

He has argued for faster provision of more US weapons to Ukraine for its defence against Russia, but also called US Nato membership into question. His nomination is also a boost for the far right in Israel, as he has shown support for territorial expansion and suggested that Jews could build a new temple on the sacred compound around al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.

Hegseth told an audience in Jerusalem in 2018: “There’s no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.”³

The liklihood that Trump and his Cabinet of Creeps with be inclined to restrain even the worst impulses of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also looks remarkably small:

Now that Trump has confirmed Marco Rubio is his nominee for secretary of state, the vast majority of appointments have made supporting Netanyahu's war aims a central tenet of their public personas.

The top U.S. foreign policy officials could not have been better chosen by Netanyahu himself – whether that be Defense Secretary-nominee Pete Hegseth, who flippantly dismissed Palestinian civilian casualties during his Fox News hosting job that supposedly prepared him for overseeing the largest military in world history; U.S. ambassador to the UN-nominee Elise Stefanik, who based her entire public persona on defending Israel under the pretense of attacking woke culture; National Security Advisor-appointee Michael Waltz, who has publicly called to let Israel "finish the job"; or incoming CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who promoted unfiltered intelligence-sharing.⁴

Trump is assembling a strange menagerie of characters for his senior positions. None of them looks like a dove. On anything.

But looking at his record, I picked up a new term I don’t recall encountering before, “TheoBro.”

What Hegseth does have are connections to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.

Last year, the magazine Nashville Christian Family ran a profile of Hegseth, in which he mentioned being a member of a “Bible and book study” that focused on the book My Life for Yours by Doug Wilson, the 71-year-old unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros. Patriarch is the right word: When I interviewed Wilson a few months ago, he said that he, like many other TheoBros, believes women never should have been given the right to vote. …

In 2020, Hegseth turned his obsession with the Christian Crusades into a book, American Crusade. In a piece this week, Media Matters noted that one of its central themes is the destruction of Muslim holy sites in order to reclaim them for Christianity. Hegseth also rails against Muslims’ “well-documented aversion to assimilation.” Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religious studies professor who has studied the Reconstructionist tradition that the TheoBros are part of, told me she finds Hegseth’s fixation on the Crusades “really troubling—but also it’s completely consistent with the Christian Reconstructionists. That’s particularly troubling for someone who might have the biggest military in the world under his control.”⁵ [my emphasis in bold]

Yes, that is troubling! Christian Reconstructionism is a strong drug. With very bad side-effects.

1. 13 things everyone should know about Pete Hegseth. Popular Information (Substack) 11/18/2024. (Accessed: 2024-18-1024. The bullet-points displayed are exact quotes.

2. McCausland, Phil & Halpert, Madeline (2024): Trump's 'anti-woke' defence pick surprises Washington - here's why. BBC News 11/13/2024. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04lvv6ee3lo> (Accessed: 2024-18-1024).

3. Borger, Julian (2024): Pentagon stunned after Trump picks Pete Hegseth for defence secretary. The Guardian 11/13/2024 <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/13/pentagon-stunned-after-trump-picks-pete-hegseth-for-defence-secretary> (Accessed: 2024-18-1024).

4. Samuels, Ben (2024): Only Netanyahu Could Have Chosen a Cushier Trump Foreign Policy Team. Haaretz 11/13/2024. <https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2024-11-13/ty-article/.premium/only-netanyahu-could-have-chosen-a-cushier-trump-foreign-policy-team/00000193-25c9-d76b-afd7-a7d9336d0001?gift=57e086ba810440aa858c649c6f9e84ea> (Accessed: 2024-18-1024).

5. Butler, Kiera (2024): Trump’s Defense Secretary Pick Hopes for a Christian Crusade. Mother Jojnes 11/15/2024. <https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/trump-peter-hegseth-defense-secretary-pick-theobros-hopes-for-a-christian-crusade/> (Accessed: 2024-18-1024).