When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned around 800 top military officers to Quantico, Virginia, this week, there was widespread speculation about mass firings, new geopolitical priorities, even a declaration of war.
None of that happened. Instead, President Donald Trump showed up to deliver many of his usual boasts and grievances to a largely subdued group of service members. But Trump then pivoted to something new for the military: essentially asserting that they should be deployed to US cities, including San Francisco and Chicago.
“I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, cause we’re going into Chicago very soon,” Trump said.
Hegseth followed this with his own meandering speech, largely focused on restoring the military’s lethality and so-called warrior ethos.
The unusual gathering, and Hegseth’s speech, can teach us a lot about the defense secretary’s leadership style — and why his selection by Trump to run the Pentagon looms as an especially consequential choice. To explore further, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Kerry Howley, a writer at New York magazine who recently wrote a feature on Hegseth.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You wrote a great piece about Pete Hegseth. What was the headline? It was a great headline.
I believe it was called “Playing Secretary.”
“Pete Hegseth is playing secretary.” That was it. You spend a lot of time talking to people who know the secretary of defense and you painted a picture of a guy who is chaotic. Is that fair?
I think that’s an accurate description, yes.
Why is a guy who is chaotic in this job in the first place?
I think Pete Hegseth is in this job because he looks to Donald Trump like the kind of guy who should be in this job. Trump encountered Hegseth in his previous life as a Fox & Friends Weekend co-host, in which Hegseth would sometimes talk about military matters.
And I think it’s pretty universally acknowledged that Trump thought that’s the way a secretary of defense should look. I know it was very surprising to people in Hegseth’s immediate orbit that he was chosen for this appointment and I can only imagine it was also surprising to Pete Hegseth.
From what you’ve seen covering him over the past couple of months, how unorthodox is he in terms of his leadership of the Department of Defense?
I would say that he has fixations that are unusual for this position. This is a guy who came from television and his preoccupation continues to be maybe crafting a visual moment, social media, the way the department looks to the broader public, the kind of branding for the Department of Defense, and he spends a lot of time crafting that image.
He is someone who has a long history of issues with impulse control. There are the very well-documented substance abuse issues. There are sexual assault allegations. There are affairs. There have been accusations of financial mismanagement at, I believe, both organizations that he led prior to his job as the secretary of defense, where he leads one of the most complicated, largest human organizations in the world.
There have been kind of constant personnel issues, high-profile resignations, leak investigations. This is a very leaky department, and what that tells you is that people are concerned, but don’t feel that they can run those concerns up the ladder in an official capacity and so are talking through the press. There’s of course Signal Gate, and there was a second Signal Gate. Hegseth didn’t do himself any favors by kind of failing to acknowledge that anything had gone wrong. And there was this kind of panicked aggression that emerged in further interviews.
It seemed to be a problem even with crisis communications. It wasn’t clear to this department how to handle the crisis itself. This was a real focus of the administration: “Where are the leaks? We must find the leakers.” And that created a situation where different political factions who are kind of jockeying within his office could try to portray people they didn’t like as the leakers. So you had Pete Hegseth publicly blaming two close friends and a third top aide of leaking, of betraying him.
And then how do things change after the fallout from Signal Gate? What happens at the Defense Department then?
So what sources told me was that in the early days of this administration, of this tenure, Hegseth came in with ambition. He was curious, he was interested, even though he didn’t have the deep experience of his predecessors. There was kind of an openness to learn. And then after Signal Gate, the attitude was more of paranoia, fear.
“Instead of trying to solve some of the problems that Hegseth mentioned during his confirmation…the department stopped being creative, and it started being just a mechanism for implementing executive orders.”
His trusted circle became much smaller. You saw, kind of oddly, his wife was frequently in the office giving orders to the public relations arm of the department. His brother came on, his personal lawyer. And so instead of relying on this deep bench of people who have been there for a very long time, he’s surrounding himself with more of his kind of personal entourage.
It sounds like he may be looking for people who won’t betray him.
Yes. And the fear really, I would say it infected the ambitions that everyone had for the department. Instead of trying to solve some of the problems that Hegseth mentioned during his confirmation — things he might have been ambitious about reforming earlier, as someone described it to me — the department stopped being creative, and it started being just a mechanism for implementing executive orders.
In other words, he was just kind of waiting for Trump to tell him what to do.
Hegseth is not an ideological character. This is something that sources close to him emphasized. He used to have a more interventionist mindset. He wrote several books about how we should have been in Iraq longer. And as soon as he came into this administration, he started parroting some of these more isolationist points of view. He’s someone who’s willing to shift his ideology depending on who he might be talking to, and I think that’s particularly useful to someone who might want Hegseth to follow questionable orders.
This isn’t somebody who’s going to have a red line, because he is not someone who has strong ideas about what the military ought to be doing. So if Hegseth’s square jaw is ultimately what got him this job, what’s keeping him in the job is his demonstrated loyalty to the strong man at the top. I think he is here because Donald Trump trusts that when Donald Trump calls on Pete Hegseth to do something questionable, he is a guy who’s going to follow orders.
