Pete Hegseth, Belligerent Drunk, May Be Too Much Even for Trump

The tabloid drama in the rogues’ gallery of prospective Trump cabinet appointments continues: Just over a week since Matt Gaetz’s wild downward ride from attorney-general designate to Cameo hustler, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense, may be next down the funhouse slide. 

Hegseth, a Fox News host, was one of Trump’s first “shock and awe” nominees to the president-elect’s incoming cabinet. He had quickly forfeited posts atop two veterans’ nonprofit groups amid charges of financial mismanagement, excessive drinking, and sexual misconduct, according to an investigation by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. From that inauspicious start in the military advocacy world, he landed his Fox gig, where he just as rapidly took up the same conduct, engineering a payoff and a nondisclosure agreement from a woman who alleged he sexually assaulted her at a right-wing conference in California where Hegseth was a featured speaker. The police complaint over the incident makes for a bracing read.

The complainant describes the sensation of awakening in Hegseth’s hotel room, which she didn’t recognize, in a disoriented state, suspecting that she had been drugged; she also recalls repeatedly saying “no” as Hegseth reportedly moved in on her for sex, and requested a rape test after the encounter. Hegseth denies the account and says the sex was consensual; his lawyer says he reached the financial settlement solely to protect his Fox gig. Still, Hegseth manages to stand out, even in Trumpland, as the only cabinet nominee denounced as “an abuser of women” by his own mother. 

The Trump White House was reportedly blindsided by the assault charges, but continued to promote Hegseth’s nomination and dispatched him to meet with senators on Capitol Hill to prepare for his confirmation hearings. After all, the president-elect is a self-confessed and court-certified sexual assaulter, and presumably expects prospective members of his cabinet to bluff through these scandals as he has. 

What appears to have tipped Hegseth’s nomination into Gaetz territory is an NBC report documenting a pattern of excessive on-the-job drinking at Fox—something that is likely a far brighter red flag to Trump, a lifetime teetotaler, than reports of brutal sexual predation. Fox employees spoke about Hegseth arriving just minutes before his early morning show went on the air, while others described the need to “babysit” the hard-partying Hegseth. One former Fox hand said, “We’d have to call him to make sure he didn’t oversleep, because we knew he’d be out partying the night before”; another flatly said, “He should not be secretary of defense. His drinking should be disqualifying.”

That these latest damning leaks are coming from the inner sanctum of Fox is another major strike against Hegseth’s nomination: Trump’s executive-branch picks reflect in no small part the president-elect’s own cable viewing tastes, with figures such as Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mehmet Oz logging many pundit hits on the right-wing two-minute hate delivery system. The official count of former Fox News personalities slated to serve in the second Trump administration is now up to 10. Hegseth being outed as both a belligerent drunk and an unprofessional Fox on-air personality is a likely bridge too far for Trump.

Amid the blizzard of scandal now surrounding Hegseth, it’s easy to overlook his flagrant lack of qualifications to run the US military in the first place. As my colleague Joan Walsh writes, “There is nothing to recommend Hegseth to take this job, running the nation’s military and weapons strategy and supervising a force of 2.1 military service members and more than a million civilian employers or contractors. (Does Hegseth even supervise his Fox producers? One or two?) Trump has his pick of qualified people, among them talented if loathsome conservatives. Hegseth is not one of them.”

In 1989, the Senate rejected George H.W. Bush’s nominee to run the Pentagon, John Tower, amid reports of rampant alcohol abuse—but Tower was at least a former senator who had chaired the inquiry into the Iran-Contra scandal and led arms-reduction negotiations with the Soviet Union. Hegseth, by contrast, has dedicated his bully pulpit on Fox to engineering pardons for US war criminals and calling for illegal mobilizations of the US military to quash domestic protests.  

Early indications are that, should Trump finally sour on Hegseth’s prospects, he’ll tap Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for Defense Secretary. DeSantis is a Navy veteran and a former US Congressman, and would likely be a readily confirmable and relatively scandal-free nominee. But just as Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi emerged after the Gaetz fiasco as a more superficially palatable version of the same brand of fawning and uncritical Trump loyalist, DeSantis would offer the Trump White House a blander, wonkier gloss on Hegseth’s pet obsessions. Like Hegseth, DeSantis is a diehard foe of the Pentagon’s alleged swoon into wokeness, offering up attacks on gender-inclusive personnel policies at DoD, and pledges to roll back climate-mitigation policies in the sprawling defense sector. “It is time to rip the woke out of the military and return it to its core mission,” he has written. And disturbingly, DeSantis shared with Hegseth a record of downplaying military abuses of power; as a JAG attorney serving in the extralegal detainment of noncombatant prisoners in the US war on terror in Guantanamo, Cuba, DeSantis supplied a “mirage of accountability” as detainees suffered grotesquely abusive treatment, Jasper Craven wrote in a 2023 expose for The Baffler. Former Guantanamo detainee Mansoor Adayfi recounted to Craven how, when he helped organize a hunger strike to protest conditions at the base and was coercively force-fed five times a day, DeSantis openly mocked him: 

We were crying, screaming. We were tied to the feeding chair. And [DeSantis] was watching that, he was laughing,” Adayfi recalled. During one session, Adayfi said, DeSantis approached the chair and told him, “You should start to eat.” He responded by puking on the young JAG’s pretty face.

In a group text chat that Adayfi organized among former detainees, one recalled that DeSantis was “with a group of the most vile officers that tortured us severely”; another dubbed him “real evil devil’s shit!!”

These charges don’t look to pose much of a challenge to a DeSantis nomination; the major reported sticking point in the initial negotiations to swap DeSantis in for Hegseth is whether the Florida governor will appoint Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law and designated RNC flunkey, to fill out Marco Rubio’s Senate term when he gets confirmed as Trump’s Secretary of State. In today’s Republican Party, after all, the standard career trajectory is to move up from “real evil devil’s shit” to standard-issue MAGA shit-eating. And that’s an area where Ron DeSantis is a battle-tested professional.