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--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
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--:-- Noel King: President-elect Donald Trump is picking his national security team quickly and his choices run the gamut. There are respected nominees like little Senator Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. It's a tremendous honor to the president who places confidence in me in a position of such importance.
--:-- Dan Lamothe: Yeah, Mike Walls, a China hawk and advisor to Dick Cheney, who Trump chose as his national security advisor, is the first Green Beret in Congress. In our training, we have to learn multiple languages. We have to blend in. We have to specialize in certain parts of the world.
--:-- Noel King: Culture warrior, immigration hardliner, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem arguably has the experience to lead Homeland Security. When Texas and Arizona asked for help, that sent my National Guard troops down there to help.
--:-- Dan Lamothe: Then there are the provocative choices. The weekend Fox News host, Pete Hegseth. The fill-in Fox News host, Tulsi. Are they prepared for this moment? We're going to ask on Today Explained.
--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp. Let me tell you a true story. Last weekend, I got an email from a listener who wanted to discuss their problems with me. And I said, look, I don't think that this is about me personally. At least I hope it's not. Why don't you try BetterHelp.com slash Explained. Absolute truth.
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--:-- Noel King: This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Dan Lamothe of The Washington Post has covered the U.S. military and the Pentagon for the last 16 years. Dan, tell us what you know about Pete Hegseth, who Donald Trump has picked to lead the Pentagon.
--:-- Dan Lamothe: Yeah, Pete Hegseth is currently a Fox News host. He's one of the hosts of Fox and Friends Weekend. Prior to that, he led a couple small veterans nonprofits. And prior to that, he served in the Army National Guard. He had a pretty serious deployment to Iraq in an infantry unit and then also served as a military advisor in uniform for a deployment to Afghanistan.
--:-- Noel King: I served in Iraq before I deployed to Afghanistan. Before I left for deployment to Iraq, I had a pessimistic view of the war. Negative headlines were everywhere. We were told it was a quagmire. Instead, after a year of combat, I came home cautiously optimistic.
--:-- Dan Lamothe: No. Most typically, your defense secretary is not only somebody who's got experience around the Defense Department in some capacity, but often they've got very serious CEO level experience running major institutions.
--:-- Noel King: So why did Donald Trump pick him if he doesn't have the experience? I think first and foremost, they're aligned on a lot of the issues. I think this is someone who has the impulse to go after the Pentagon, go after the senior officers who have made decisions over the years that they disagree with.
--:-- Dan Lamothe: You reported this weekend that a fellow member of the National Guard at one point questioned whether Hegseth has ties to extremism. Why was this accusation made and by whom?
--:-- Dan Lamothe: This starts with, if we can set it, I guess, around the inauguration period of Joe Biden. On this hallowed ground where just a few days ago, violence sought to shake the Capitol's very foundation. We come together as one nation. We had January 6th, the attack on the Capitol that had just happened early in January.
--:-- Noel King: Yeah, Guardsmen that were sleeping in the parking garages of the city. I mean, they were kind of everywhere at that time. And Hegseth was a member of the D.C. Guard. The D.C. Guard was activated more or less in full.
--:-- Dan Lamothe: The D.C. Guard was activated more or less in full. And as that happened, Travis Akers flagged a couple of the tattoos that he had, and that generated an internal report to D.C. Guard leadership, basically questioning whether the tattoos he had would indicate that he may have been a white nationalist or had some sort of sympathies along those lines.
--:-- Noel King: What are those tattoos? Can you explain?
--:-- Dan Lamothe: There's two. And I think the challenge here is there is dual meanings for both of these things. These are things that have been co-opted. One of them is a Jerusalem cross. It's basically a cross with four smaller crosses around it. That's on Hegseth's chest. And then there's a saying, deus volt, that is on his bicep. And deus volt means God wills it. It goes back to the Crusades.
--:-- Noel King: So there's an investigation conducted into Pete Hegseth. And then what happens next? What happens to his standing in the National Guard?
--:-- Dan Lamothe: He left by choice. It's like, I don't need to be here. I don't need to deal with it. That sort of vibe to it. He has written basically that that helped motivate him to really scrutinize the military on whether it had become too political.
--:-- Noel King: So there was another big story this weekend about Pete Hegseth, and it has to do with a woman who claims he paid her off. Can you tell us what happened with this woman? What is alleged to have happened?
--:-- Dan Lamothe: So we're talking 2017. He was out giving a speech of sorts at a hotel in California. He appears to have met this woman in the bar nearby after doing the engagement. The allegation is that they ended up in the room. She alleges sexual assault. He says it was consensual.
--:-- Noel King: I think it's just the idea that these are not serious people. These are not serious nominees in the eyes of the overwhelming institution, the institutions they will lead, the people that work around them, the people that have spent their entire lives focused on this sort of thing.
--:-- Dan Lamothe: I think the counterpoint here, the fear here, is whether or not if the response to that very fair criticism is going to be, all right, we need to fire X number of generals. We need to more or less turn the clock back 20, 30, 50 years where you're like, this is culture war stuff that on one hand will make a point, but on the other hand actually turns off a significant number of people who may want to serve.
--:-- Noel King: That was The Washington Post's Dan Lamothe. Coming up, what Donald Trump's picks tell us about his priorities.
--:-- Noel King: Support for today show comes from Adio. What is Adio? Adio is an AI customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Noel King: Catherine Kuzminski is the Deputy Director of Studies and Director of the Military Veterans and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security, CNAS. Catherine, we learned in the first half of the show that Donald Trump likes Pete Hegseth, in part because he's a veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth is very critical of those wars, which America was in and out of for a generation. What does Donald Trump want when it comes to war?
--:-- Catherine Kuzminski: So there's a couple of things. One is in line with what we see in our current national security strategy that was rolled out during the Biden administration, a strong emphasis on deterrence against China specifically in terms of a near-peer threat.
--:-- Noel King: So let's talk about Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump's nominee for defense secretary. He says he doesn't think the U.S. should be fighting forever wars like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. What do we know about what he might mean for the Department of Defense if he's confirmed?
--:-- Catherine Kuzminski: There are things that are consistent with any nominee we would expect from President Trump. And then there are things that are specific to potential confirmation of Secretary Hagseth. So on the one hand, we would expect that any Secretary of Defense who is serving under President Trump, some of the first policies we'll expect are a rollback of the DOD abortion travel policy that was put in place by the previous administration.
--:-- Noel King: What does this mean for the military?
--:-- Catherine Kuzminski: The biggest challenges from a national security perspective is that particularly with your chairman and your joint chiefs of staff, so the uniform leaders of each of the individual services, their role is to seek out the blind spots the president might not be seeing.
--:-- Noel King: What effect might this move have on the way Americans think about the military and trust the military?
--:-- Catherine Kuzminski: One of the biggest challenges is that the military and general officers in particular, they are political instruments. They interact with foreign leaders. They interact with the civilians on the National Security Council. They interact with Congress. They interact with the other departments and agencies.
--:-- Noel King: This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
