Pete Hegseth Is Not Fit To Be Secretary of Defense

I was very happy to hear that President-Elect Trump had nominated Pete Hogseth to be Secretary of Defense. I like his background, his political positions, and his guts, and though he lacks experience running a big hostile bureaucracy, I was ready to forgive that. That he was willing to come out and bluntly say that women should not serve in combat roles was enough of a plus to overcome lack of managerial experience or machiavellian cunning. I’d heard that he had paid off a woman who accused him of sexual misconduct in Monterey, California in 2017, but that doesn’t mean much— it does not mean he engaged in sexual misconduct, just that he is a public figure who is rich enough to pay someone saying bad things about him to go away.

But it seems that even if all the details of the woman’s accusations are not true— and they probably are— Hegseth admits to enough of them to disqualify him.¹ As Dilan Esper said yesterday on X,

It's worth noting Hegseth's version of the story is a couple of months after his new wife had a baby, he went to a conservative political conference, got really drunk, hit on many women who found him revolting, had an argument with this woman, then had consensual sex with her.

It seems, too, that Mr. Hegseth lied to Mr. Trump’s transition team by not telling them this story when they asked about whether there were any embarassing incidents in his past, even though there was a 22-page police report from 2017 and he paid the woman to keep silent.

From this I conclude that Pete Hegseth is immoral, hypocritical, unchristian, disloyal, a liar, and a fool. I’ve heard some people point out his immorality— notably Mr. Esper and Pastor Bayly— but not the other five defects.² Let’s go over them one by one. For this discussion, let’s take his version of the story— what he admits he did— and ignore the possibility that the act was not consensual because the woman was too drunk or he slipped a pill into her drink.³

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Pete Hegseth is immoral

Mr. Esper puts it well: according to Mr. Hegseth himself, he got really drunk, hit on many women who found him revolting, had an argument with the woman, and then had sex with her, even though both she and Hegseth were married. That’s adultery. Adultery is immoral.

Immorality is bad in itself. We can already tell that Hegseth is disloyal (to his wife) and a liar (breaking his wedding vows), two of the points discussed further below. But there are two reasons why this kind of immorality is especially bad for a Defense Secretary.

First, the Defense Secretary oversees the military, where adultery is a criminal offense.⁴ He will be the one ultimately in charge of adultery prosecutions, or approving or halting them. This is not theoretical. President Biden’s Secretary of Defense is currently in litigation because he tried to undo a plea deal a military prosecutor made under which a terrorist pled guilty in exchange for avoiding a trial and a possible death penalty.⁵

Second, as a commenter on Esper’s post said,

As SecDef this guy who can’t hold his liquor, trolls for any willing sex partner and cheats on his wife is a level 10 risk for blackmail. Not safe anywhere near the Pentagon.

So Hegseth is immoral.

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Pete Hegseth is hypocritical and unchristian

Mr. Hegseth is a member of Colts Neck Community Church in Nashville, which is a church in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), commonly known as “Doug Wilson’s denomination” after the famous blogger pastor from Moscow, Idaho. CREC is a conservative denomination and a good one. My own church in Bloomington thought about joining them, but CREC has certain flaws such as its willingness to give communion to children, so we formed our own denomination with ten other churches instead. Nonetheless, CREC is generally sound, and strict.

Mr. Hegseth said in 2023 (my boldface),

“About 2018 I entered the Colts Neck Community Church with my wife (who was wary of what evangelical Baptists were like), and faith became real. Within 20 minutes we felt at home. The pastor spoke about his broken family past—I’m broken, you’re broken, we’re all broken and careening around not living our faith and not being deeply rooted. I thought I had to be perfect. Let’s be candid about it: Seek Christ, fully submit to Him, and allow Him Kingship in life! God’s perfect law of liberty that sets me free is Jesus—not perfection, legalism, or anything else.

“Truly inviting [Jesus] into my heart—to command my life—has been edifying and liberating. I’m trying to reverse engineer that into my kids—waking up every day and knowing Who’s in charge, and it’s not me. Nurturing young kids and learning how to prepare them, and educating myself further through traveling to the Holy Land—where Jesus ministered—are vital parts of my life. . . .

“In a Bible and book study (Doug Wilson’s My Life for Yours), accountability in meeting with other men who can share openly—not some giant confessional—is a treasure. It’s a fortification of brotherhood. We wrestle with ‘Yes, the Bible is always the answer, but how do you apply it?’ Surrender and honesty—a brotherhood in Christ—something I miss a lot away from the military.”

2018 is after 2017— though this is only 6 years later, not a long time in a man’s life. I could hope that Mr. Hegeth has repented, that he is sorry for his past sins and is trying to change his life. “The Christian’s entire life is one of repentance,” is the first and most important of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses.⁶ But part of repentance is confession and trying to put things right. It isn’t enough to just admit you’re a sinner, in general terms, that you’re broken— like everybody else— and careening around. It certainly isn’t enough to say, “I’m not perfect and I need accountability.” You don’t have to confess publicly, but when you do talk publicly, as Mr Hegseth does here, you shouldn’t imply that your only sins were that you come from a broken home and you are too much of a perfectionist.

Note, too, that Mr. Hegseth is on his third wife, and committed adultery with her, cheating on his second wife. Again: a Christian can have great sins in his past, such as adultery, and even rape and murder. But he must repent— and that means saying he is sorry, and trying to make it right to other people. Has Mr. Hegseth made it right with his first and second wives?⁷

It may be that Mr. Hegseth has indeed confessed to people at his current church, Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowhip near Nashville, Tennessee, lead by Pastor Brooks Potteiger, and has apologized to his previous wives. If so, they should tell us now that he did so. All his pastor has said is in response to this tweet, which came before the Monterey County story appeared and was just in response to somebody calling Mr. Hegseth “a godly Christian man” even though he had been an adulterer:

So Hegseth is hypocritical and unchristian.

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Pete Hegseth is a liar and disloyal

Transition teams always ask potential nominees to list any potential scandals or weak points. I’m sure they asked Mr. Hegseth. It is rumored— and in the newspapers— that they did, and he lied, keeping this story secret.⁸ This has severely embarassed President-Elect Trump (and, I expect, the transition team, which didn’t find the story out on its own either). They knew Matt Gaetz was a risk as nominee for Attorney-General, but they didn’t expect this kind of trouble from Pete Hegseth. Mr. Hegseth put his own career over loyalty to his cause and gratitude to the man who was considering him as a nominee.

We do not want someone like that as Secretary of Defense. If Mr Hegseth lied to the President once, he will do it again. If he was disloyal to his President, he will be disloyal to his country.

So Hegseth is a liar and disloyal.

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Pete Hegseth is a fool

Finally, it is incredible that Mr. Hegseth thought he could keep this scandal secret. It was written up in a police report! Everyone always checks police reports for dirt on nominees. And just because you pay someone to be silent doesn’t mean they’ll stay silent. I’d like to see the contract they wrote. I hope he didn’t pay her very much, because it would be a hard contract to enforce. Even if you included a clause that she had to pay liquidated damages if she violated it— e.g., that she had to pay $500,000 to him if she did spill the beans— she might decide to sell the story and pay the damages. Or, she could easily send a reporter an anonymous note suggesting he look up a certain police report, and there would be no way to track the leak back to her so she could be sued for the $500,000.⁹ In fact, the Trump transition team did receive such an anonymous note from “a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser.” Mr. Hegseth is not very good at making bargains, I think, as well as naive about his ability to keep secrets from surfacing.

So Hegseth is a fool.

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Thus, Pete Hegseth is immoral, hypocritical, unchristian, disloyal, a liar and a fool. Even if he is right on the issues, he should not be Secretary of Defense. There are lots of better choices out there.

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Postscript: After talking about this with someone, I’d like to add something for the personal dimension. I have not pulled any punches in this Substack. I have said many harsh things about Mr. Hegseth, including that he is unchristian. I think he should withdraw from consideration for Secretary of Defense. But what should he do after that? After that, he should repent. He should confess his sins, to his church and also publicly— though the confessions should differ in the degree of detail. He should confess to his church— to his men’s group, or a pastor, or the elders— sins that have not become public, and do whatever they advise to make up to anyone he has harmed. If he does that, those sins do not have to and should not be made public. He should ask his two ex-wives what they think is appropriate repentance over his sins towards them, and maybe do those things, maybe not, depending on what they say. He should talk about all this with his children, to the degree appropriate to their ages, since they will find out a lot anyway. He should not ask their forgiveness, or his current wife’s; he should just say he sinned, he repented, and what he did as a result of repenting. He is a member of a good church, and I have hope that he will be sanctified by this experience, which is all to the good of his soul. Indeed, without it, I think he would be lost. This scandal gives him the kick that he did not have when his sin was secret.

Postpostscript: Who could replace him as nominee? I would like to see somebody with his exact same policy views, but with experience in machiavellian bureaucratic organizations, preferably the Pentagon, or at least the Army. There must be a dozen good retired generals available, and I bet good ones retire young. The nominee should also be brave and outspoken, like Hegseth (he does have virtues, remember). I would ask Hegseth himself who he’d pick, then ask if that pick was a friend of Hegseth’s, he would be, then ask him for the name of somebody he doesn’t know personally. (Hegseth’s instinct would be to suggest a friend who would repay him the favor.)

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Footnotes

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1. Besides the police report back in 2017, the Washington Post received an anonymous letter from a friend of the woman in 2024 and Mr. Hegseth’s lawyer wrote the Post a letter in response. See “Defense pick Hegseth paid accuser but denies sexual assault, attorney says; Documents obtained by The Post provide extensive detail about allegation and the response by Trump’s defense secretary pick,” Washington Post (November 16, 2024).

2. Revision: Bob Lonsberry mentions the lying on X.

3. Way too much emphasis is put on whether Mr. Hegseth committed a crime, or was charged with one. Rape is a very difficult crime to deal with. Getting proof beyond a reasonable doubt is difficult when it is just one person’s word against another’s. It is common to convict innocent men, and even more common to be unable to convict guilty men, because both purported victims and alleged rapists lie. Thus, prosecutors will often decline to bring charges not because they think the accused is innocent, but because they think that while every jury would think rape was possible, no jury would find rape was proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

4. Adultery is generally legal under state law. See my old article, "An Economic Approach to Adultery Law," Chapter 5, pp. 70-91 of Marriage and Divorce: An Economic Perspective, edited by Antony Dnes and Robert Rowthorn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. A long- term relationship such as marriage will not operate efficiently without sanctions for misconduct, of which adultery is one example. Traditional legal sanctions can be seen as different combinations of various features, differing in who initiates punishment, whether punishment is just a transfer or has real costs, who gets the transfer or pays the costs, whether the penalty is determined ex ante or ex post, whether spousal rights are alienable, and who is punished. Three typical sanctions, criminal penalties for adultery, the tort of alienation of affections, and the self-help remedy of justification are formally modelled. The penalties are then discussed in a variety of specific applications to past and present Indiana law. http://rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen_02.BOOK.adultery.pdf

5. Andy Worthington’s “Military Judge at Guantánamo Restores 9/11 Plea Deals, Rules Lloyd Austin Had No Right to Withdraw Them Three Months Ago” (2024) tells the story. The judge restored the plea deal because the Secretary of Defense had authorized the prosecutor to make plea deals, and having done so, the Secretary can’t renege on them after they’re made, as he tried to do.

It’s noteworthy that it took me quite a while to google a source that linked to the judge’s decision, even though *any* story about a judicial decision ought to link to the decision itself. The propaganda press did, not even Fox News, except for the New York Times story— and I dislike linking to the Times, because it is so often dishonest and unreliable. But the individual journalist Andy Worthington did, and wrote a better story too. Individual websites are the way to go nowadays if you’re looking for a good source.

6. More precisely, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ``Repent'' (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”

7. “What about Donald Trump’s first and second wives, and his adultery?” you may ask. That’s a good question, but one not relevant to the discussion here. Even if the President has defects, that doesn’t excuse defects in his nominees. (In brief, though: it seems Trump is on good terms with his past wives; lots more years have passed; he is old enough not to be likely to repeat these particular sins; he indeed ought to confess that he sinned; and even his old sins are relevant if not decisive in thinking about whether to vote for him.)

8. The Wall Street Journal says,

“Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team were blindsided by the latest details to emerge about a 2017 sexual-assault allegation against Pete Hegseth, increasing their frustration with the man nominated to lead the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.

The transition team, which hadn’t been told about the original allegation before announcing Hegseth, was surprised again late Wednesday night when the Monterey, Calif., city police released a report about the 2017 allegations.”

This sounds like an intentional “leak” by Trump. Note that since Hegseth betrayed Trump in this matter, Trump is released from the usual moral duty of a nominator to stand by his nominee. That also applies to any Senator who has said he will vote for Hegseth’s confirmation. Any such Senator will indeed keep his promise to vote for Hegseth, but will also be free to tell their undecided colleagues to vote against him, and to heavily pressure Trump to withdraw the nomination. I think Hegseth will go down.

9. Nondisclosure agreeements are a particular interest of mine. The way they are commonly written, the person to be paid off is paid in installments over a period of years rather than all at once, so if the agreement is violated, the unpaid installments can be stopped. My interest is in when such agreements are enforceable in court, since courts generally will not enforce “agreements against public policy”, contracts to do illegal things (e.g. contracts to buy fentanyl) or evil things (e.g., contracts to lie to the police about a crime you witnessed).