I’ve tried not to get too excited every time Donald Trump announces a nominee for a position in his new administration. We knew his choices would be absurd. We knew that most senior officials in his last administration supported Kamala Harris. We knew this would cause him to scrape the bottom of the barrel this time looking for sycophants and con artists. We knew it was coming.

And yet. Trump’s choice of Fox News host Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense is shocking. This is worse than when Trump floated Sarah Palin as a potential Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Where to start? Let’s start with the big one: Hegseth is not qualified for this role. He has no specific experience or expertise that would lead any reasonable person to put him in charge of the US military, including the largest government bureaucracy in the world.

Hegseth began his career as an analyst at Bear Stearns while serving as a commissioned officer in the Minnesota Army National Guard. He did basic things that all young soldiers of that era did: a rotation at Guantanamo Bay in 2003. A tour of Iraq in 2005. Then another tour with his Guard unit to Afghanistan in 2012.

In between, Hegseth became involved in politics, first working for an organization called Vets for Freedom (a group founded to support George W. Bush’s escalation of the Iraq War) and later for Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative-oriented veterans group . . Hegseth did a lot of fundraising, made many TV appearances and was generally in favor with the leaders of the Republican Party.

Because he was articulate, telegenic, and politically connected—rather than any specific military experience—Hegseth got the gig that would make him known to millions of Americans: He joined Fox News as a contributor in 2014 and is currently co-host of ‘ Fox & Friends” on the weekends.

And that’s it, my friends. That’s your candidate for Secretary of Defense. No experience in government outside of the military. No experience running a large organization. The Ministry of Defense has almost three million employees. It has an annual budget of $842 billion.

In addition to his complete lack of qualifications, Hegseth, like many around Trump, has a messy personal life. In August 2017, while married to his second wife, Hegseth had a daughter with a Fox News producer, a woman with whom he had an affair. His first marriage also ended after Hegseth was unfaithful. This is relevant because it is not clear that Hegseth can even get a security clearance, let alone the type needed to run the Department of Defense. This kind of behavior exposes people to blackmail and espionage, and many aspiring civil servants are denied clearance for much less each year.

Hegseth may also struggle to be cleared for the same reason he was barred from working at President Biden’s 2021 inauguration. Before that event, 12 National Guard members were removed from the inauguration security team after being targeted by the FBI vetted. Hegseth later relented that he was one of the twelve. “Members of my unit in leadership thought I was an extremist or a white nationalist,” he said, blaming his “Jerusalem Cross tattoo.” What may have caught the agency’s attention, however, is the “Deus Vult” tattoo on Hegseth’s bicep, a Crusader motto now widely used by white supremacists and Christian nationalists.

And yet these are only Hegseth’s lack of qualifications and his liabilities. His views are even more disturbing. The most glaring problem is that millions of voters claimed they elected Trump because of his promise to end wars. But where Trump implausibly claimed that he can bring peace through strength, Hegseth is a hawk through and through.

He has another tattoo in which he quotes Matthew 10:34 from the Bible: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” In his early years of activism, Hegseth often and publicly suggested that the US should escalate the war in Iraq by embracing President Bush’s “wave.” In 2017, he argued that there is “merit in a pre-emptive strike” against North Korea. In 2020, he encouraged President Trump to rewrite “the rules of war” and consider attacking Iranian cultural sites.

In other words, Hegseth is the opposite of the peacemaker Trump claimed to be during his campaign.

During Trump’s first presidency, Hegseth successfully lobbied for Trump to pardon U.S. military personnel and contractors accused of war crimes. Hegseth argued vehemently in favor of the pardon, a view that runs counter to the professional ethos within the Department of Defense.

Siding with war criminals is not the only view of Hegseth that will not sit well with the leadership of the Defense Department. Just six days ago, Hegseth told The Shawn Ryan Show that “every general involved – general, admiral, whatever that was – needs to go.” He also opposed women serving in combat roles in the military. “I’m just saying honestly that we shouldn’t have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. It hasn’t made us deadlier. It has made fighting more complicated… Throughout human history, men in those positions have been more capable.”

For a normal president, Hegseth would never get anywhere near the cabinet. But for Trump, Hegseth’s selection makes sense. His lack of qualifications and experience are an asset. It means Hegseth will be pliable, a yes-man who will do what Trump wants. That makes him a danger to the US military and the country as a whole. And while it all seems like a joke, we should take this nomination absolutely seriously. This is how republics fall. Placing a professional army under the control of a political apparatchik who wants to do the bidding of a president with self-proclaimed dictatorial tendencies will not end well. For that and all other reasons, Hegseth should not be confirmed.