President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Fox News commentator Peter Hegseth, is a Christian fascist and advocate of unrestrained violence in war.

The Department of Defense, which Hegseth proposed to rename the “War Department,” currently employs about 2.8 million people, including 1.3 million active-duty soldiers and more than 810,000 National Guard soldiers. Hegseth has no experience managing a battalion, let alone an entire government department. Like all of Trump’s appointees, his main qualification is unwavering loyalty to Trump.

In addition to being a Fox News talking head, the 44-year-old is a 20-year veteran of the US Army National Guard who previously deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Guantanamo Bay torture camp.

Born in 1980 into a comfortable middle-class family in Minnesota, Hegseth’s fascist ideology was cultivated in the Ivy League and military deployments. After graduating from high school as a senior, Hegseth went to Princeton University, where he became active in conservative politics writing for Princeton Conservatory magazine. In 2003, Hegseth joined the Minnesota National Guard as an officer and Bear Stearns as a capital market analyst.

After deployments to Guantanamo in 2004 and Iraq in 2005, in 2007 Hegseth briefly joined the right-wing Manhattan Institute for Policy Research before leaving to work as executive director of Vets for Freedom, a Republican political group that first aired commercials in 2006, thanking then. Senator Joseph Lieberman for supporting the invasion of Iraq.

In 2012, Hegseth ran as a Republican for senator in Minnesota, but withdrew from the race before the primary. In the same year, it was also deployed in Afghanistan. After his failed Senate bid, Hegseth worked for other veterans groups, Concerned Veterans for America, which was founded by the Koch brothers. In 2013, he received a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University. Throughout the 2000s and up until 2016, Hegseth was a supporter of both the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions.

Bouncing from one billionaire patron to another, in 2014 Hegseth began working as a right-wing political commentator for Rupert Murdoch at Fox News. A “home” star, he became a regular host from 2017-2024 on the weekend show. The fox and friends.

In the program, Hegseth freely spread his far-right political ideology without pushback. Predicting the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Hegseth boasted in a 2019 episode: “I don’t think I’ve washed my hands in 10 years. Not really, I don’t really wash my hands, I inoculate myself. Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, so they’re not real.”