President-elect Donald Trump this week announced plans to nominate Fox News host, military veteran and Minnesota native Pete Hegseth as his secretary of defense.
Hegseth, 44, has developed a national profile as a conservative author and TV presenter and was considered a potential pick for secretary of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration.
Before his Fox News gig and making shortlists to head agencies for Trump, Hegseth was a conservative activist in Minnesota politics, writing opinion pieces, hosting a local radio program and even launching a short-lived bid for U.S. Senate in 2012, when he sought the GOP nomination to run against Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
Over the years, he headed a veterans group that backed George W. Bush’s troop surge in Iraq, advocated for public money for private schools, or “school choice,” and railed against overregulation. Though in recent years, he has turned his sights more on what many conservatives see as an invasion of leftist values in institutions like education and the military.
Vets for Freedom
Hegseth was born in Minneapolis and lived in Forest Lake, where he graduated at the top of his high school class in 1999. He then attended Princeton University, where he studied political science and played basketball.
While at Princeton, he got involved in conservative causes, including writing for the student conservative magazine the Princeton Tory. He also was involved with ROTC.
After graduating from Princeton in 2003, Hegseth worked in finance and commissioned as an officer in the Army National Guard. He deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and later to Iraq.
One of Hegseth’s early forays into Minnesota’s political spotlight was in 2008, when he attempted to bring Vets for Freedom to Forest Lake High School, where he had graduated from less than a decade before.
Amid threats of antiwar protests, school leaders canceled the event, which was set to feature veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as former Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. It was part of a national veterans school tour.
Vets for Freedom, which Hegseth led and helped found, supported continued U.S. military involvement in Iraq, though Hegseth denied the event had a political or recruitment motivation, the Associated Press reported at the time. Forest Lake school district leaders said they were concerned the event would be a political rally rather than a discussion about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bigger things
In addition to his work with Vets for Freedom, Hegseth led the Charles and David Koch-backed Concerned Veterans for America and the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank based in Golden Valley.
Katherine Kersten, a longtime opinion columnist and policy fellow at the center, first met Hegseth around two decades ago. She said he first came to her attention for his work on military issues, and he seemed to have his sights set on bigger things.
“I think he was looking for a stage on which it would be possible to call more attention to these, what I think he would feel, are vital principles,” she said.
In February 2012, he entered the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Minnesota, but withdrew after losing the state Republican Party’s Senate endorsement to Kurt Bills. At the time, Hegseth, who was 31 and living in Marine on St. Croix, had significantly outraised his opponent, pulling together around $160,000 to Bills’ $34,000.
He honored the GOP’s endorsement and continued his activism, penning opinion pieces, including in the Pioneer Press. He also returned to active military duty in 2012 and deployed to Afghanistan. He currently holds the rank of major.
It wasn’t long after his Senate bid and deployment that Hegseth launched a national media career. He started working at Fox News as a contributor in 2014 and eventually became a “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host in 2017.
Stillwater radio
Around this time, Hegseth also hosted a show called “Education Nation” on the now-defunct Stillwater radio station KLBB and authored a 2016 opinion piece in the Pioneer Press calling for “education reform” in Minnesota, promoting public funding for parents to send their kids to private schools and criticizing the DFL and teachers union for pushing for funding increases.
Hegseth has railed against what he has called “woke” ideas in the military, such as providing transgender medicine to soldiers or allowing women in combat roles, and he’s had similar critiques of the American education system, which he explores in his 2022 book “Battle for the American Mind.”
For his championing of conservative ideas on the airwaves, he got attention from Trump during his first administration and was interviewed as a potential secretary of Veterans Affairs.
Hegseth hasn’t lived in Minnesota for years. He lived in New Jersey before moving with his third wife to Tennessee two years ago, according to the Nashville Tennessean.
Controversial choice
Hegseth is among Trump’s more controversial Cabinet picks, as he has no administrative or high-level command experience. His nomination “stunned” the Pentagon and broader defense world, the Associated Press reported.
Hegseth’s nomination also brought to light an accusation that he sexually assaulted a woman in 2017 at a California hotel. Local police took a report on the case, but no criminal charges were filed, and Hegseth called the allegations false.
RELATED: Trump Pentagon pick had been flagged by fellow service member as possible ‘Insider Threat’
Secretary of defense
The secretary of defense is in charge of policy, planning, management and program evaluation for the nation’s military.
The U.S. Department of Defense — headquartered at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. — is the largest bureaucracy in the world with a $841.1 billion budget. It has 3.4 million service members and civilians as well as 4,800 DOD sites in 160 countries across the globe.
Minnesota companies with defense contracting ties
The Department of Defense awarded at least $1.4 billion in contracts to companies in Minnesota in 2023, according to a report from the agency.
The biggest recipients included BAE Systems, in Fridley, and Northrop Grumman, in Plymouth and Minnetonka, each of which received more than $200 million.
Other companies involved in the aerospace and defense industries, according to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, include: American Precision Avionics in Duluth; Cirrus in Duluth; Cummins in Minneapolis and White Bear Lake; General Dynamics in Bloomington; Greystar Electronics in Duluth; Honeywell in Minneapolis and Coon Rapids; Minnesota Wire in St. Paul; PaR Systems in Shoreview; Polaris in Plymouth, Roseau and Wyoming; SteinAir in Faribault; Superior Aerospace in Fridley; Tanis Aircraft in Glenwood; United Technologies/Collins Aerospace in Burnsville and Minneapolis; and Vista Outdoor in Anoka.
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