Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may be contemplating a promotion. His Monday trip to campaign with Republican congressional candidates in Iowa, home of the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, spurred a Washington Post report that the visit is consistent with the belief among “officials familiar with Hegseth’s thinking” that he “is considering a run for president or some other political office after his time in the Trump administration is over.”
Hegseth, a bombastic former Fox News weekend host who spent years speaking directly to the Republican base through that MAGA propaganda network, may be uniquely attuned to the right's attention economy. He could become the presidential candidate of the right-wing media’s id, running a furious culture war campaign fixated on domestic political enemies that checks all the boxes for authoritarian-minded pundits indifferent to traditional policy issues.
Anti-Muslim. Hegseth has much to offer the MAGA pundits who casually declare that “Islam is here to kill us and convert us” and call for “using military force to start raiding mosques and removing these people from our country.” At home, he has decried the “Muslims’ birth rates” in multiple states and fearmongered about the success of Muslim political candidates, warning that “Islamists” are trying “to seed the West with as many Muslims as possible.” And abroad, he has written that “just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today” — then literally overseen U.S. forces bombing Muslims in Iran and Yemen as defense secretary.
Anti-DEI. At Fox, Hegseth was at the forefront of the right’s assault on policy initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, warning that such policies had weakened the military and calling for “a new commander in chief that’s going to get rid of all of this CRT, DEI nonsense, all the gender nonsense.” He’s now put that into practice at the Pentagon, firing or canceling the promotions of numerous Black and female senior officers, overseeing the banning and attempted expulsion of trans service members, and launching a study that seems engineered to ban women from serving in combat roles.
Anti-press. Right-wing media hate the traditional press, and Hegseth, who urged readers of his 2020 book to “disdain, despise, detest, [and] distrust” the news media, never misses an opportunity to demonstrate his contempt for mainstream reporters. He’s smeared news outlets as unpatriotic for not running headlines like “Iran increasingly desperate,” and mocked and derided individual reporters, even denouncing his former Fox colleague Jennifer Griffin as “the one who misrepresents the most intentionally.” Under his leadership, the Pentagon rolled out a stringent new set of rules for reporters and, when journalists at major news outlets turned in their press passes rather than signing them, replaced those reporters with right-wing influencers and staffers from MAGA outlets.
Anti-immigrant. Perhaps no current issue unites the right-wing commentariat like virulent attacks on immigrants — and Hegseth’s rhetoric aligns perfectly with them. “When you import the Third World, you get Third World hierarchy, values, and chaos,” he said in a November 2024 Fox segment, adding: “Your quality of life is going down. You feel less safe. Your resources are being drained. ... But don't speak up about that. If you do, you're the racist.” As defense secretary, he used a speech in France marking the anniversary of D-Day to attack the “invasion” of migrants hitting European beaches, asking, “When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”
Pro-war crimes. It’s not an overstatement to say that Hegseth has his current position because the president appreciated his Fox advocacy on behalf of U.S. service members accused or convicted of war crimes, which he seems to reject as a legitimate category. He wrote in 2024: “Should we follow the Geneva Conventions? What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism?” At the Pentagon, Hegseth “has fired and reassigned uniformed lawyers and dismantled many of the offices set up to prevent the targeting of civilians and related sites,” focused his public statements on the need for “lethality,” and carried out operations in the Middle East, Indian Ocean, eastern Pacific Ocean, and Caribbean Sea that experts say could include war crimes, as The New York Times reported.
Pro-Christian nationalism. Hegseth has “invok[ed] Christian theology in public statements about the war with Iran,” including urging the American public to pray “every day, on bended knee” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ,” and told a conference of defense ministers from the Western Hemisphere that “our nations” are “Christian nations under God,” the Times reported. He invited Pastor Doug Wilson, “a self-described Christian nationalist who wants to repeal a woman's right to vote, has defended slavery and believes homosexuality should be a crime,” to give a sermon at the Pentagon earlier this year.
Together with his abject loyalty to Donald Trump, those positions make Hegseth a plausible candidate for the GOP ticket. That could come in the form of a 2028 primary battle against Vice President JD Vance, who has fallen out of favor with much of the right-wing media. But the former Fox & Friends Weekend co-host is also just 46 years old — if Vance wins the nomination but loses the general election that year, Hegseth could easily spend a few years returning to the network as a contributor or hosting a podcast, sitting on defense industry boards, and campaigning for Republicans before running for the 2032 nomination.
Hegseth was manifestly unqualified for his current position, his stewardship of the Pentagon has been a series of rolling disasters, and he is among the most unpopular members of Trump’s widely reviled administration. But in a world in which the former host of The Apprentice is currently serving his second term in the Oval Office, it is worth taking Hegseth’s potential candidacy seriously.
