Pete Hegseth called the man who would later nominate him as Secretary of Defense “an armchair tough guy.”
President-elect Donald Trump tapped the former Fox News host to lead the Pentagon last month, but the nominee has been dogged by allegations of sexual assault, public drunkenness, and serial adultery.
On Tuesday, CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski joined OutFront to share some of his findings about Hegseth.
“He was harshly, harshly critical of Trump in the 2016 Republican primary for lacking national security experience,” Kaczynski said. “He mocked Trump for relying on the cable news for military advice. He attacked Trump for opposing the Iraq War. He attacked Trump for saying the U.S. shouldn’t have gone into Afghanistan. And then Trump reversed himself on that.”
CNN then played a clip of Hegseth on Fox News in August 2015, two months after Trump announced his candidacy.
“You wouldn’t want a top-tier presidential candidate getting all of their military advice from watching Meet the Press,” Hegseth said at the time. “There’s a lot more nuance. There’s a lot more detail. Foreign policy and national security is not about TV shows… They’re gonna have to walk back a little bit from this idea that he gets it from the political shows.”
Kaczynski that he found an instance where Hegseth got more “personal” on Trump, including a dig at him for receiving five draft deferments during the Vietnam War.
“It’s typical Trump, all bluster, very little substance,” Hegseth said on Fox News in March 2016. “He talks a tough game. But then when pressed on it, he’s an armchair tough guy. I hate to say it, but this is a guy, who said that John McCain is not a war hero. Yet he sought his own five military deferments.”
During the 2016 campaign, Trump attacked Sen. John McCain.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in July 2015. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Watch above via CNN and Fox News.
