Pete Hegseth

Biography

Pete Hegseth was born in Minneapolis in 1980 and grew up in Forest Lake, Minnesota. At Princeton University, where he graduated in politics in 2003, he published the conservative student paper The Princeton Tory and joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps. Commissioned as an infantry officer, he served with the Minnesota Army National Guard at Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, where he received a Bronze Star, and in 2010 as a counterinsurgency instructor in Kabul. He later earned a public policy degree from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Between deployments he worked briefly at Bear Stearns, then led the advocacy group Vets for Freedom and, from 2012, Concerned Veterans for America, which he left in 2016 amid allegations of financial mismanagement. He made an unsuccessful bid for a Minnesota Senate nomination in 2012. He became a Fox News contributor in 2014 and co-hosted Fox & Friends Weekend from 2017 to 2024, gaining influence with Donald Trump, and wrote several books, including American Crusade and The War on Warriors.

Trump nominated him as secretary of defense in November 2024. Facing allegations of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement and heavy drinking, which he denied, he was confirmed in January 2025 by the vice president's tie-breaking vote and sworn in on 25 January. His tenure has included the purge of senior officers and military lawyers, the 2025 leak of a Signal group chat in which he shared details of imminent strikes in Yemen, and lethal strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean that legal experts and members of Congress have criticised.