The gasp you may have heard Tuesday night was the collective sound of America’s generals and admirals gasping for extra oxygen as they discovered that Donald Trump, the newly elected president, had selected Pete Hegseth as the nation’s next secretary of defense. Hegseth has served in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Army National Guard and was executive director of Vets for Freedom, a conservative advocacy group, but he has not held a senior military role or led a major organization. His resume is so thin that Senator Bill Cassidy, the Republican and staunch Trump supporter from Louisiana, responded to the news with one word: “Who?”

Trump’s attitude toward all things military has historically oscillated between effusive expressions of respect (think of his attempts, opposed by Pentagon leaders, to stage a Soviet-style military parade on Pennsylvania Avenue) and total contempt (recall his repeated criticism of John McCain: “I like people who haven’t been captured”). Trump himself took unusual steps to avoid military service — initially failing to clarify exactly which of his heels had the spurs that allowed him to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. But no decision more clearly reveals Trump’s contempt for his country’s armed forces than his choice of Hegseth as secretary of defense. In many ways, this is a classic Trump choice. Hegseth’s qualifications for managing three million employees of the world’s most powerful military machine fit Trump’s well-worn pattern: Simply put, Hegseth is on TV. Specifically, he appears on Trump’s favorite channel, Fox News, as the weekend host of the talk show “Fox & Friends.” And – he meets another Trump standard – looks and sounds like a loyal and eager follower. (Square jaw, nice hair.) Even those who know Hegseth are shocked by the decision. His former Fox colleague Gretchen Carlson tweeted: “From crazy dinner interviews on Weekend Fox & Friends to Secretary of Defense? I never thought I’d say I’d be baffled by any post-election choice, but nominating Pete Hegseth for this incredibly important role? Yes, he’s a veteran. . . And?”

Hegseth, who is forty-four, has been involved in Republican politics since college. His first battlefield was the leafy environs of Princeton, where he marched into the wars of journalism as publisher of the conservative campus magazine. The Princeton Tory. Founded in 1984, the Tory was an outlet for students, including over the years Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas; Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America; and Danielle Allen, the Harvard classicist and former Washington political columnist After. Like a slew of other conservative publications at elite colleges, the Tory was launched with funding from the Institute for Educational Affairs, a foundation founded by neoconservative Irving Kristol to galvanize right-wing voices on campuses.

“As publisher of the Tory, I strive to defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity,” Hegseth wrote in 2002. (Hegseth was perhaps better known on campus as a 6-foot-2 guard on the basketball team – he didn’t play much, but the coach, John Thompson III, said he had “just character.”)

The same year that Hegseth defended the West against diversity, he and the other editors of the Tory opined that the New York Times‘ The decision to publish notices of gay marriages had opened the floodgates to incest and bestiality: ‘At what point does the newspaper deem a ‘relationship’ unfit for publication? What if we “loved” our sister and wanted to marry her? Or maybe two women at the same time? A 13 year old? The family dog?”

Another one Tory article, published during Hegseth’s tenure, claimed that “boys can wear bras and girls can wear ties until we’re blue in the face, but it won’t change the reality that the homosexual lifestyle is abnormal and immoral.” In response, students wrote letters of protest and Princeton’s LGBT coordinator met with the magazine’s leaders. Hegseth, then a senior, responded to critics that the Tory’s “The argument is not that so-and-so is a bad person because he is gay. It is the lifestyle of homosexuality that we consider immoral.” (In 2012, Hegseth ran a short-lived campaign for the Minnesota U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Amy Klobuchar, and he told the Daily Princetonian that, back into his Tory days the magazine had used ‘some phraseology or term or language that perhaps (was) too sharp.)

The head of Princeton’s student government opposed the Tory’s anti-gay comments, writing: “I have many gay friends, and I worry that statements like this will make them feel even more alienated at a school like Princeton. In your ideal world, maybe gays wouldn’t exist. But this is America in the 21st century, and gays do indeed exist: they’re in your classes, they’re your teachers, and they’re even your friends.” Hegseth and the Tory‘, the editor replied: ‘An overwhelming majority of Americans agree with the idea that homosexuality and heterosexuality are not moral equivalents.’

During his first administration, Trump considered appointing Hegseth to head the Department of Veterans Affairs. It appears Hegseth’s collegiate scribbles didn’t stop him from getting that job. He apparently interviewed three times for the role but was passed over amid reports that he had two extramarital affairs with colleagues during two marriages. At the time, some Republicans in Congress also opposed Hegseth’s nomination because he seemed too extreme to win confirmation. He has often pressured Trump to pardon soldiers accused of war crimes, and he often speaks on TV about the evils of the “deep state.” Hegseth, who served at Guantánamo Bay during his first tour of duty, has also defended the treatment of detainees there and called for the detention center to be expanded.

Hegseth could struggle to be confirmed this time around, even with a Republican majority in the Senate, if senators’ initial skepticism is any indication. (“Oh, really?” said Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, when informed of the choice. “I’d have to think about that.”) But if Hegseth were to make it, he could be expected to that he acted according to his example. oft-repeated complaints that the military has sacrificed its warrior culture to conform to progressive notions of equality and inclusivity. In his recent book “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth writes that the U.S. military has been taken over by a woke mentality that has dampened recruiting efforts. “The Pentagon likes to say, ‘our diversity is our strength,’” Hegseth told Fox in June. “What a load of rubbish. In the military, our diversity is not our strength, our unity is our strength.” He has also called for the firing of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr. for being too “woke” and has advocated banning women from combat roles or “labor-intensive jobs.” ”

Hegseth, a graduate of both Princeton and Harvard (he earned a master’s degree in public policy from the latter in 2013), has since soured on his Ivy League preparation. In 2022, to protest the teaching of critical race theory at Harvard, he wrote:RETURN TO SENDER‘ during his studies, on live TV. But in 2017 he told the Daily Princetonian that his experience at Princeton was a place where “you can agree or disagree civilly, but respect each other’s differences. I have always thought that Princeton has done a pretty good job in promoting the free exchange of ideas.”

That courtesy extended to an on-campus practice match at noon for one of Princeton’s dining clubs. In his senior year, Hegseth said he was challenged to such a duel — no muskets, just paintballs — by the head of a left-wing campus organization, who was shocked by the Tory’s journalism. “I was in ROTC, so I was the better shooter,” Hegseth said. “It was fun.” ♦