Pete Hegseth Is All of Us If We Were Loud, Wrong, and on TV

Proof that if you yell loud enough on cable, someone will give you the nuclear codes.

Some mornings I half expect Fox & Friends to turn into America’s Got Generals: military fans vote on who should lead the Pentagon, contestants sing “Anchors Away,” and the winner gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But shockingly, we don’t need an audience vote – the network has already produced its own candidate. Pete Hegseth, former cohost of Fox & Friends Weekend, was tapped to be Secretary of Defense despite a résumé that would barely embarrass a high-school yearbook editor. It’s a sign of our times: audiences seem to trust a scowling TV face more than actual experts. Indeed, a recent analysis warns that “American trust in journalism has never been lower” – nearly 3 in 4 Americans say they have little to no trust in mainstream news​. In that credibility vacuum, cable and social media personalities become the new gatekeepers of “news,” whether they have credentials or not.

Pete Hegseth’s rise exemplifies this sea change. Hegseth cohosted Fox & Friends Weekend from 2017 to 2024, making him a familiar face in conservative households. His background reads like a hybrid of “best-of” and “worst-of” magazine articles: he’s a Princeton graduate (Class of ’03) who played basketball and wrote for the school’s conservative paper. In fact, as editor of The Princeton Tory he penned an essay declaring “the homosexual lifestyle is abnormal and immoral” – exactly the kind of hard-right hot take that earns applause on Fox.

After college he joined the Army National Guard, served tours in Guantánamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and even earned two Bronze Stars. On paper that sounds impressive, but the details matter: those Bronze Stars reportedly came as a chaplain’s assistant, and his deployments were relatively brief. In short, he was a late-entry Guardsman whose actual military leadership experience was limited.

By 2014 Hegseth had parlayed his military vet bona fides into a TV gig. Fox News hired him as a contributor in 2014, and by 2017 he was cohost of Fox & Friends Weekend​. On the show he was unmissable for his bombastic style and Trump cheerleading. After the 2020 election he pushed Donald Trump’s baseless voter-fraud claims on national TV​, parroting lines that had no evidence. (This was part of a broader pattern: during Trump’s first term Hegseth frequently promoted conspiracy-minded views at Fox, with few fact-checks in sight.) In short, his only real “expertise” was being a media personality who could schmooze a MAGA audience.

Yet none of that stopped a newly empowered Trump from nominating Hegseth to run the Defense Department. Even Senator Tammy Duckworth – a combat-decorated veteran herself – put it bluntly on the Senate floor. She noted that the Defense Department has 3 million employees and a $900 billion budget, and said our troops deserve better than “a guy who was seemingly only nominated because he used to host Trump’s favorite show on Fox News.” In fact, Duckworth asked Hegseth at his confirmation hearing to name international defense agreements or nations in ASEAN – basic facts any Pentagon staffer would know – and he couldn’t do it. Her verdict: “Pete Hegseth is unqualified. He is unprepared. He is unethical. And most of all, he is unfit.”​ Ouch.

None of Hegseth’s handlers have championed his “credentials” beyond waving around those Bronze Stars. What sticks in his public profile instead is a grab-bag of controversies. Most recently, Fox News insiders have watched network management quietly spackle over multiple scandals in his past. As The Independent reports, “Pete Hegseth’s appointment as defense secretary [became] suddenly in doubt amid a bevy of startling stories detailing his alleged sexual misconduct, boorish behavior and financial malfeasance.” Reporters detailed a police report from 2017 in which a female acquaintance alleged that Hegseth forcibly cornered her in his hotel room during a GOP conference, preventing her from leaving while she “remembered saying ‘no’ a lot.” The story went viral when NPR published the report after Trump nominated Hegseth to run the Pentagon. Hegseth’s lawyers eventually negotiated a $50,000 settlement with the woman, but the bad press landed right as his name was on the table for a top job.

Even beyond that lurid tale, Hegseth’s track record shows a flair for mismanagement and frat-boy antics. Before TV fame he ran a Koch-backed veterans group called Concerned Veterans for America (CVA). Internal whistleblowers from that organization told The New Yorker that Hegseth was often seen drunk on the job, spent organization funds as if it were his personal expense account, and used CVA events to “hook up” with women on the road​. According to one memo, “the disgust for Pete was pretty high. Most veterans do not think he represents them nor their high standard of excellence.”. A former colleague summed it up: after years of watching him butcher promotions, “to have him at the Pentagon… it wasn’t ‘No,’ it was ‘Hell no!’”

In short, Hegseth’s persona on and off camera reads like a parody of the Fox News pet veteran: tattoos and all. (Yes, tattoos. He was actually removed from National Guard duty during the 2021 presidential inauguration because of a Jerusalem cross inked on his arm – a symbol tied to Christian nationalism​.) Even his famous Bible verses – Deus Vult (“God wills it”) – have been turned upside-down by white-supremacist groups, the New Yorker pointed out. His public image is often one of a blustering flag-waver who enjoys bashing enemies on TV rather than displaying any nuanced policy understanding. As Duckworth noted, Hegseth once asserted that women are unfit for combat; she countered that he’s the one who “won’t even say whether he’d refuse an unlawful order.”

Why, then, does a guy like Hegseth keep getting airtime – and now even real power? The short answer is: because audiences like him. In today’s fragmented media landscape, personality often trumps expertise. Fox News still towers over its competitors: in 2024 it commanded about 56% of the cable-news audience in primetime (averaging 2.38 million viewers)​. That’s more than CNN and MSNBC combined. A Gallup/Knight study in 2023 found that nearly 9 in 10 Americans follow some public figure or personality for news, not just traditional outlets​ In fact, the top 10 most-cited “public individuals” for news are mostly cable-news hosts and entertainers, not credentialed reporters​. Why? Viewers say it’s because they like the person’s personality (80%) and trust them (79%)​. More than 70% admit they rely on these personalities for “a perspective I can’t find in traditional news outlets.” In short, people choose relatability and opinion over expertise and nuance.

This appetite for “relatable pundits” is a broader cultural shift. Social media and 24-hour news have turned every news show into a talk show, where charisma and candor are the currency. Content creators of all kinds have learned to build trust by sharing personal stories and engaging directly with followers, even if they’re not journalism-trained. (A recent Harvard report notes that the biggest audiences for news are now on YouTube and TikTok, in the form of partisans and influencers rather than nightly anchors​) We’ve essentially outsourced our political commentary to the Twitter/Loudermilk generation. Traditional gatekeeping has collapsed: if you can talk emotionally and post a catchy meme, you can be a “journalist.” In the 1990s, a Fox anchor might have had a law degree or a long newsroom career; today, Fox News hires ex-Lifetime Movie hosts, comedians, or failed politicians as pundits. There’s even a term for it: punditocracy – an era where opinions count more than actual credentials.

The Hegseth case also highlights a longstanding trade-off in American media: the more we treat news as entertainment, the less we demand rigorous expertise. Cable executives know viewers flip channels during dry policy discussions, so they emphasize outrage and familiarity. As one commentator observed, in a 24-hour cycle “there is a constant need to get faces in front of a camera that will be predictable ‘experts’ and keep the flow coming.” In other words, networks crave guests who will say the same red-meat soundbites every time, rather than challenge their hosts with facts. The result is a feedback loop: personalities like Hegseth become trusted insiders simply by echoing the audience’s views and sharing personal anecdotes (war stories, trucks, church, etc.), even if those comments lack broader context or data.

This pattern isn’t entirely new — yellow journalism has sold sensationalism since the 1890s — but the scale has grown. Today’s Fox audience sees Hegseth not as an iconoclast, but as just another everyman they know from breakfast TV. They want someone who “gets them,” even if he learned all he knows from teleprompters. The irony is that while Americans claim to prefer real news, they disproportionately consume “news” from entertainers: the same Gallup survey found 61% of U.S. adults get at least some news from following public personalities​, whereas trust in actual journalists is at historic lows​.

The societal implications of this dynamic are profound. Elevating figures like Hegseth dilutes public discourse. It teaches citizens that expertise is optional, that bluster and relatability suffice. Policy debates become competitions in performance, not problem-solving. We risk making grave decisions (military strategy, public health, climate policy) based on popularity, not prudence. Worse, it feeds mistrust in institutions: why bother reading a nuanced report when a cable host can shout a simpler storyline? Meanwhile the demographics of media influence shift, often against diversity: Fox’s bench of relatable hosts tends to be older white men, reinforcing a cycle where people of color and women have to work twice as hard to be heard as credible experts. For young readers like me – who grew up building library campaigns for diverse authors – seeing an Ivy-League-educated veteran turned TV clown ascend to the Pentagon is demoralizing. It signals that in the “culture war” our voices lose to loud personalities wielding a camera.

In conclusion, Pete Hegseth is far from an isolated oddity; he’s the culmination of a trend. In the era of infotainment, the line between pundit and policymaker is blurring. Hegseth’s success is not just his own doing, but a mirror held up to a media ecosystem that prizes loyalty and likeability over learning. As one analyst put it, mainstream news is dying while partisan content creators flourish online​. The real challenge for society is deciding whether we want our leaders vetted by facts or by focus groups. For now, Hegseth’s ascent suggests we’ve chosen the latter – with all the absurdity, and danger, that comes with it.