7 things to know about Minnesotan Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary

As President-elect Donald Trump’s second administration comes into clearer focus, one newly announced Cabinet pick has been ringing bells for some Minnesotans. Trump has tapped “Fox and Friends” host Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense.

While he’s known to most of America as a Fox News personality, here are seven things we learned from the Minnesota Star Tribune archives and other media reports about Hegseth, who grew up in Minnesota, and whose nomination was quickly clouded by controversy.

Hegseth graduated from Forest Lake Area High School in 1999, where he played football and basketball and set the school’s all-time scoring record and single-season record for three-pointers. He went on to attend Princeton University on an ROTC scholarship, where he continued playing basketball as a guard.

Hegseth described himself as a “slow 6-footer,” according to a Star Tribune dispatch from 2001. In 2010, his younger brother, Phil, became captain of the Forest Lake Area High basketball team.

Hegseth joined the Minnesota Army National Guard three days after he started at Bear Sterns — and two weeks after he graduated from Princeton — and served with the 101st Airborne in 2005-06, according to the Star Tribune archives. In 2005, the then-lieutenant spoke to the newspaper about the conditions of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, where he defended the facility against criticism.

“Photographers sometimes take pictures that make it look like American soldiers are putting the detainees in dog cages,” he told Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten. “That’s very misleading.”

A year before that, three British Muslim prisoners had reported several instances of torture, forced drugging and religious persecution.

Hegseth was the founder and longtime executive director of Vets for Freedom, a group that advocates for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In 2008, the Star Tribune reported that Forest Lake Area High School withdrew from an event organized by Hegseth over concerns that it would be overly political and the potential for protests.

Forest Lake High described the event as an academic classroom discussion about military service.

However, the organization’s website stated that the National Heroes Tour was about “rallying the country to complete the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.” When a Star Tribune reporter asked Hegseth if that line could be construed as political, he said the group would agree not to promote the “progress made in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The event moved to the American Legion Post 225 in Forest Lake, where more than 100 people showed up. About a dozen students from the high school sat in the front row, the Star Tribune reported at the time.

In 2014, during an interview with Fox News’ Megan Kelly, Hegseth decried the Pentagon’s decision to allow women in combat roles.

“It’s another variable that, as a platoon leader or a squad leader, you don’t want to have to deal with ‘Matt’s’ feelings toward ‘Mary,’” he said.

Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her at a California hotel in 2017, the Washington Post reports.

Trump’s transition team received a detailed memo about the encounter days after the Minnesotan was tapped to lead the Department of Defense. The four-page document revealed that Hegseth paid his accuser an undisclosed sum in 2020 as he feared for his job.

Neither side disputes that Hegseth and the woman, known as Jane Doe, had sex on Oct. 7, 2017, while he attended a Republican conference in Monterey. He claims it was consensual while she says the encounter was not. A friend of the woman, who provided the memo to Trump transition officials, said Doe “could not recall all the details” and said she believes that’s why there were no official charges filed when it happened.

The woman said her memory of the six to nine hours after she escorted Hegseth back to his room “was very hazy,” the Washington Post reports. She had previously received text messages from two women at the bar who said Hegseth was “getting pushy.”.

Hegseth’s attorney says “the Complainant had been the aggressor in the encounter,” although police have not confirmed the claim.

Hegseth has several tattoos that evoke his Christian faith and historical American imagery.

But two pieces of ink raised suspicion among fellow National Guard members and got the Minnesotan flagged as a possible “insider threat” in 2021, the Associated Press reports. Hegseth said he was pulled from the Washington D.C. National Guard unit that guarded President Joe Biden’s inauguration, saying on-air he was unfairly pegged as an extremist because of a Jerusalem Cross tattoo on his chest.

That symbol is of a large cross surrounded by smaller crosses in each quadrant.

But it was a tattoo of the words “Deus Vult” on his bicep that a fellow Guard member flagged in an email to the D.C. unit’s security manager. The term, which is Latin for “God wills it,” has been used by some extremists to express an anti-Muslim sentiment.

The phrase was a popular rallying cry for Christian crusaders during the Middle Ages, Reuters reports. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reported that the term was also found in notebooks that belonged to Mauricio Garcia, a suspected neo-Nazi sympathizer who shot and killed eight people at an outlet mall in Texas in 2023.

In 2012, Hegseth mounted a bid for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate. At 31, he was one year past the age requirement to run for the office. Then the executive director of the political advocacy organization Vets For Freedom, Hegseth tossed his hat in the ring to challenge U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who had just wrapped up “five controversy-free years” in Washington, per a Star Tribune report at the time.

Hegseth’s supporters urged him to run by mounting a “draft Pete” campaign on social media. While relatively unknown in Minnesota at the time, Hegseth had a burgeoning national profile due to his work as a fellow at the Center of the American Experiment. He raised $160,000 in the first month of his campaign.

“We understand the uphill battle,” Hegseth told a Star Tribune reporter. “We understand she’s perceived well. We understand she’s got a lot of money, and that a lot of other candidates have decided to hold off and not run against her. But I’ve never been afraid of long odds, I’ve never been afraid of the David-vs.-Goliath scenario.”

He withdrew from the race just after the party convention in May. The party’s eventual nominee, Kurt Bills, lost to Klobuchar that November.

Hegseth’s name also came up during the gubernatorial race six years later.

“We certainly need to win that race in 2018, and I’m honored and humbled to be mentioned,” Hegseth said.

Back in 2019, Hegseth went viral for claiming he hadn’t washed his hands in 10 years because he didn’t believe germs existed. His “Fox and Friends” co-hosts had just given him a hard time about eating day-old pizza on set. That’s when Hegseth said his New Year’s resolution was to say things on-camera that he usually reserved for backstage.

“Germs are not a real thing,” Hegseth said. “I can’t see them. Therefore, they’re not real.”

He later revealed that he was joking.