Democrats Assail Hegseth as Too Divisive, Inexperienced to Run Pentagon

Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post
Pete Hegseth testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) questions Pete Hegseth on Tuesday.

Senate Democrats on Tuesday hammered Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, in a tense confirmation hearing during which lawmakers scrutinized his romantic relationships and alcohol use, cast doubt on his qualifications, and condemned his political rhetoric and past assertions that women do not belong in combat.

The five-hour hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee was an early test of Republicans’ loyalty to Trump, as lawmakers take up the incoming administration’s slate of unconventional Cabinet picks, including several who, like Hegseth, have fueled murmurs of discomfort within the GOP’s ranks.

On Tuesday they showed they were up to the task, delivering a resounding defense of Hegseth’s selection, which has been plagued by claims of misconduct ranging from an alleged sexual assault in 2017 to accusations of financial mismanagement, excessive drinking and sexism in his previous jobs – all of which he denies.

Those allegations had fueled worries within the party that the 44-year-old former Fox News personality might not muster the votes needed to win confirmation in the Republican-controlled Senate. But by the end of a hearing void of Republican dissent, Hegseth appeared to have cleared those hurdles. The committee is expected to vote on his nomination Monday. A vote by the full Senate would follow.

Hegseth, a former soldier in the National Guard who has encouraged Trump to overhaul the Pentagon to remove the “woke” policies and people of the Biden administration, is a “breath of fresh air” and a purveyor of “fresh ideas to shake up the bureaucracy,” Republicans said Tuesday.

Hegseth had “acquitted himself,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) told reporters after the hearing.

Tuesday’s hearing was perhaps a preview of the confirmation hearings to come. It quickly became a heated rhetorical battle – marked at times by raised voices – as Democrats repeatedly quoted Hegseth’s divisive past statements and Republicans offered him opportunities to clarify controversial views, praised his claims of being a God-fearing and changed man, and chastised Democrats for “hypocrisy” and being “ignorant of the facts.”

“The totality of your own writings and alleged conduct would disqualify any service member from holding any leadership position in the military, much less being confirmed as the secretary of defense,” Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat, said during his opening remarks.

“Admittedly this nomination is unconventional. The nominee is unconventional – just like that New York developer who rode down the escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president,” the committee’s Republican chairman, Sen. Roger Wicker (Mississippi), said in his opening remarks, comparing Hegseth favorably to Trump.

But maybe that’s “what makes Mr. Hegseth an excellent choice to improve” the Defense Department, Wicker added.

Before his work at Fox, Hegseth led small numbers of troops while deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and he presided briefly over two veterans advocacy groups. Democrats spotlighted reporting in the news media that Hegseth had been forced out of his position at those organizations after complaints that he mismanaged their funds.

They noted, too, that he has never presided over a group of people larger than “a medium-sized American company” and called him unqualified to lead the sprawling Pentagon – where he would oversee more than 3 million military and civilian personnel, the vast U.S. nuclear arsenal, and an annual budget of more than $800 billion.

In his opening remarks, Hegseth said Trump has tasked him with bringing “the warrior culture back” to the Defense Department, and he contended that his experience in the National Guard and wartime service equipped him for that job. “He, like me, wants a Pentagon laser-focused on lethality, meritocracy, warfighting, accountability and readiness.”

But he offered few specifics during the hearing as to how he would run the Defense Department, or how he would address the complex threats that America faces from Russia, China, Iran and other adversaries.

Hegseth has authored five books and written extensively that women on the battlefield are a hindrance to war-fighting; that international laws meant to limit civilian casualties cost American lives; and that the military’s commitment to diversity has fueled a recruitment crisis by discouraging qualified “normal” men from joining.

Democrats took turns reading Hegseth his own past remarks and musings asserting that women in combat are “likely to be objectified by the enemy and their own nation in the moral realms of war” and that “moms” don’t make good fighters because they tend to discourage people from taking risks.

“What’s wrong with moms, by the way?” asked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York). “Once you have babies, you therefore are no longer able to be lethal?” She advised that Hegseth, if he is to succeed as defense secretary, must change how he views women – “and I don’t know if you are capable of that.”

His comments on women so far had been “silly,” “brutal” and “mean,” she said. “They disrespect men and women who are willing to die for this country.”

Hegseth answered those criticisms – which included his assertion days before Trump tapped him for the job that “we should not have women in combat roles” – with a seeming reversal of that view. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) called the pivot a stunning “11th-hour conversion.”

“Women in our military, as I have said publicly, have and continue to make amazing contributions across all aspects of our battlefield,” Hegseth said Tuesday.

Hegseth, who faced his critics in a blue suit bearing an American-flag-patterned pocket square, dismissed allegations of past personal misconduct as the machinations of a biased news media out “to destroy” him.

“And why do they want to destroy me? Because I’m a change agent, and I threaten them if Donald Trump is willing to choose me, to empower me, to bring the Defense Department back to what it really should be,” he said.

“Anonymous smears,” he responded repeatedly as Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) read from a list of allegations, reported in news outlets, that Hegseth had to be carried out of events because of intoxication.

Hegseth’s allies said ahead of the confirmation hearing that one of the most important tasks before him was to keep his cool in the face of blistering questions from Democrats.

He managed to do that Tuesday but seemed rattled when Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) launched into descriptions of Hegseth’s admitted infidelity. Hegseth impregnated a woman while he was still with his second wife, Kaine noted. Then: “You cheated on the mother of that child less than two months after that daughter was born, didn’t you?” he asked, referring to the alleged sexual assault in 2017 – which Hegseth told a police investigator was consensual – as the mother of the aforementioned child, Hegseth’s now-third wife, Jennifer, sat behind him.

“I maintain that false claims were made against me,” Hegseth said about the alleged assault. The child, he told Kaine, is a “child of God.”

Republicans expressed outrage at Democrats’ line of questioning and sought to poke holes in their criticism, maligning the negative allegations as coming from anonymous sources and suggesting that few senators on the dais had managed more people than Hegseth had, and yet no one was questioning their qualifications. They offered sympathetic accounts written by female service members and former colleagues of Hegseth’s to be entered into the hearing’s official record.

“How many senators have got a divorce for cheating on their wives?” asked Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma), accusing Democrats of hypocrisy. How many have cast votes while drunk, he asked, after Kaine questioned Hegseth about his personal life. “We’ve all made mistakes.”

“I’m not a perfect person, but redemption is real,” Hegseth told the committee.

In the most promising sign for his chances of being confirmed, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), also a veteran, who had previously expressed skepticism about Hegseth, focused her questioning on his interest in auditing the Pentagon and stressed that they’d had good conversations about his views on women in combat. Hegseth can lose only three Republican votes and still get confirmed, given that he’s unlikely to pick up any Democratic votes.

Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have not indicated whether they will vote for Hegseth. Ernst said in an interview Tuesday evening that she would vote for his nomination.

Encouraged by sympathetic Republicans on Tuesday, Hegseth reiterated his commitment to eliminating “woke” ideologies, including diversity, equity and inclusion programs, from the military, along with the people who promote them. And he predicted a “recruiting renaissance” after Trump takes office and reverses policies advanced by President Joe Biden.

Hegseth said he wants to see the military disentangled from the Middle East and refocused on China, a common refrain in Washington from both sides of the aisle in recent years. He said he wants the war in Ukraine to end and hopes it will be on terms favorable to Kyiv.

In the Middle East, where 15 months of war has killed tens of thousands of people and upended regional stability, Hegseth said he supports Israel “destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.”

Pressed for details on foreign policy, Hegseth faltered. He struggled to identify a single country that participates in ASEAN, an international organization of Southeast Asian nations, after Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) quizzed him on it. And when another senator asked him to assess the most strategically significant U.S. military bases in the Pacific, he named the island of Guam and left it at that.

He avoided answering questions about whether he would defy any illegal orders from the president, or if he would use the military to staff migrant detention centers, as Trump has proposed. He deferred to Trump’s decision-making on whether the Defense Department would cover the expenses of service members who must travel out of state to seek abortions.

And Hegseth dodged queries from Democrats when they brought up his opposition to international law and rules of engagement governing the use of force on the battlefield, which he has said restrict U.S. forces from doing what they need to do to win wars.

“Modern warfighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he wrote in his 2024 book, lamenting that men swept up by his unit in Iraq, and whom he guarded at Guantánamo, benefited from access to lawyers. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys. The fact that we don’t do what is necessary is the reason wars become endless.”

“Your definition of lethality seems to embrace those who do commit war crimes, rather than those who stand up and say, ‘This is not right,’” Reed, the committee’s top Democrat, said during the hearing. He then pressed Hegseth to define a “JAG-off” – a crass term Hegseth used in his last book to deride military attorneys who advise commanders on the rules of engagement to minimize civilian casualties. JAG is short for judge advocate general.

After some reluctance, Hegseth explained what the term meant.

“It would be a JAG officer who put his or her own priorities in front of the warfighters. … Those making the tough calls on the front lines.”