Donald Trump’s second-term cabinet was always going to be weird. But his selection of The fox and friends host Pete Hegseth because the Secretary of Defense sent shockwaves through Washington, DC—even among Republicans and Hegseth’s cable TV colleagues.

Shortly after the news broke Tuesday night, two Republican senators issued messages Rolling Stone their dismay at Trump’s announcement, each questioning Hegseth’s confirmation and basic qualifications for the high-stakes job. “That doesn’t make sense!” said one of them. Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski couldn’t help but say, “wow,” when asked about Trump’s latest pick to fill the top ranks of his new administration, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) responded: “WHO?”

It wasn’t just Republican senators who were stunned by the news. “WHAT. THE. REAL. DAMN,” exclaimed a former colleague of Hegseth’s on Fox News Rolling Stone Tuesday.

Hegseth is a decorated veteran of the Army National Guard who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he has little management experience that would qualify him to run a massive government bureaucracy. He previously led a small group of veterans and a PAC they were accused of the lure and the misspent. He has no government experience and has worked for Fox since 2014. Trump praised Hegseth’s books spending time on The New York Times bestseller list when it announced the nomination.

Hegseth’s most important qualification may simply be that Trump likes him. The president-elect tapped him to lead the Veterans Administration in his first term. Instead, Hegseth emerged as an informal adviser to Trump’s first White House. In particular: Hegseth was a top player private lobby Trump to grant executive clemency to accused US war criminals – a move that would later spark chaos and dissent in the framework high ranks of the military and the Pentagon.

Also alarming: Hegseth is uncomfortably close to extremist movements. By his own accounting, Hegseth was “considered an extremist” and removed from a National Guard regiment tasked with protecting Joe Biden’s inauguration, because of troublesome tattoos. Hegseth claims the problematic ink in question is the giant Jerusalem cross tattooed on his pectoral, which he says is “just a Christian symbol”. But analysts of extremism have also pointed to a medieval crusader battle cry that has recently been appropriated by white nationalists. (The Crusaders also used the Jerusalem cross specifically in their heraldry.)

Hegseth also asked Fox News viewers look with sympathy about the motivations of the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 — insisting that “there was a reason these people were there.” (Hegseth condemned their “outright racism” but said it was reasonable that they felt their country was “slipping away”).

The Fox News host also broadcast live from the Ellipse on the morning of January 6, 2021, appearing to add weight to Trump’s big lie that the election was stolen while talking almost enthusiastically about the possibility of violence. “We are in a constitutional box,” he saidciting arrests from the previous day: “Is there going to be a fight tonight? That’s also a possibility.” Indeed, Trump supporters led a violent insurrection at the US Capitol that day, hoping to block Congress from certifying Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

More recently, Hegseth wrote a book about the defeat of the “awakened” culture in the army, titled The War Against the Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the People Who Make Us Free. He writes that the Pentagon has become anti-Caucasian (“they think . . . white people are yesterday”) and instead promotes “diverse recruits,” who he claims are “full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies” and who feature a risk to their fellow “healthy Americans” in basic training.

Hegseth has spoken openly about the crackdown on “DEI wake shit” within the military. Trump campaigned hard to do the same, featuring clips of R. Lee Ermey’s character in the Full metal jacket abusing soldiers as an example of the kind of behavior the military must embrace. Hegseth also said outright that he did not believe women should be allowed to serve in combat roles.

Hegseth was shot down as a nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs during the first Trump administration due to strong opposition from veterans groups. His appointment is likely to face strong opposition in Congress — which may be why Trump has lobbied the Senate to grant him recess appointment powers that would allow him to sidestep that body’s duty to advise and grant to candidates. John Thune, who will replace Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader, has suggested he is open to allowing these recess appointments.

Regardless of its viability, Trump’s nomination of Hegseth marks a return to the chaos and trollish provocation that defined his governing style. Indeed, despite the immediate surprise within the party and among some of Trump’s closest allies, Trump moving to appoint a longtime Fox News personality to the highest levels of the federal government would sound out of place only to those who did it. does not follow his first administration.