It was a few hours after midnight on election night, and Fox News host Pete Hegseth was wearing a MAGA hat, leaping with joy and high-fiving colleagues at a bar in Tennessee. Hegseth was on the clock. Fox had dispatched the cohost of Fox & Friends Weekend to Kid Rock’s “Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock n’ Roll Steak House” in Nashville, where the MAGA rapper was holding a 2024 presidential election night party. Hegseth was hosting Fox’s digital coverage, drink in hand. “Trump elected president!” Hegseth cheered in a video posted to Instagram that showed him and his Fox colleagues celebrating the results.
Hegseth had reason to celebrate. His unequivocal support for Trump from his lowly perch on Fox had earned him the ear of the president throughout his first term in office. Now, with Trump set to return to the White House, that fealty would soon earn him a nomination to serve in one of the most powerful positions in the US government: secretary of defense.
Nearly two years later, Hegseth’s tenure at the top of the Pentagon has been marred by scandal. Signalgate, wherein Hegseth shared highly sensitive attack plans in a group chat that inadvertently included the editor in chief of The Atlantic, feels quaint in light of what’s happened since. He has overseen the disastrous military operation in Iran, which opened with the bombing of an elementary school that killed more than 150 children and is now mired in a costly stalemate. Through firings and forced exits, he has presided over the gutting of Pentagon leadership; most recently there was the resignation of Army secretary Dan Driscoll, who reportedly warned Trump on his way out the door that the chaotic management of the department risked calamity. Hegseth is the least popular wartime secretary of defense in history, holding a 23% approval rating in a recent poll.
Hegseth does not appear chastened by this reality. A Trump administration source tells Vanity Fair there are active discussions among his close advisers about a run for president in 2028. Last month, he joined a House Republican running for reelection at a campaign event in Iowa, a classic stop for presidential aspirants. NBC News reported soon after that Hegseth “has floated a White House run with close friends and associates.” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told NBC in a statement that Hegseth “is not running for president,” and Hegseth himself said in a post on X that the story “100% false.”
The prospect was met with contempt when I put it to a former Trump official who worked alongside Hegseth. “He has spent his entire tenure on self-promotion and culture-war theatrics,” the official said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly. “The damage he has inflicted on our military will take years to repair, and the sooner he goes, the better it will be for the country and for President Trump’s legacy.”
“Secretary Hegseth has been a transformative leader for the Department of War and, at President Trump’s direction, has ushered in a new era of Peace Through Strength,” Parnell said in a statement. “The entire department is unified behind the secretary’s vision and will continue working to put our warfighters and America first.”
To understand how Hegseth has operated at the Pentagon, it’s worth tracing back to the start of his public career. When he began appearing on Fox News in 2014, he was a fairly typical conservative, a protege of Bill Kristol and an acolyte of The Weekly Standard. During the 2016 campaign he was a voluble critic of the reality-TV host seeking the nation’s highest office, declaring him wholly unqualified for the job of commander in chief and utterly incoherent in his views of the world.
