The first interview with Pete Hegseth

Trump's SecDef nominee breaks his stunned silence

“Spot me?” asks Pete Hegseth of me as he grips the bar above him, which is racked with like 1,200 pounds of plates. He’s laying shirtless in camo short-shorts on a bench in a private gym in Chelsea, NYC, and I am standing above him next to his trainer, his longevity doctor, and two young blond women who don’t seem to have a role other than to smile at him when he casts a glance at them.

“Yep, ready when you are,” I tell him, even though I am not in any way qualified to help him bench press the equivalent of a bison, but qualifications are silly.

Pete sort of grunt-howls and lifts the bar from the rack, drops it to his shaved chest (I realize, now, that this is the role of the two blond women: body shaving staff), and presses it back up. My hands vestigially follow the bar up and down six times. Pete shouts, “Murica!” at the top of each rep. He racks the bar and immediately stands.

“Fuck Iran!” he shouts, flexing for us. The two blond women jump up and down repeating him, fuck Iran! Pete’s longevity doctor rushes over to him brandishing a long needle attached to a syringe filled with blueish liquid. Pete lowers his arms and looks down at his belly as the longevity doctor jabs the needle into it and releases the liquid, which is probably just B vitamins or something totally legal. Pete’s eyes roll into the back of his head. “Fuck, that’s a rushhhhh,” he says, which is what people always say when their longevity doctor injects them with B vitamins or something totally legal.

Pete has granted me his very first interview as President-elect Trump’s nomination for Secretary of Defense (SecDef), a position in which he will oversee 3.5 million military and civilian defense personnel, which is a bit more than double the maximum number of people who have ever watched Pete talk about stuff on the weekend edition of Fox & Friends. Pete has talked about stuff on TV since 2014. Prior to talking about stuff on TV and after graduating from Princeton, which admitted him definitely not just because he could bounce a basketball, Pete worked as a finance bro at Bear Stearns, the investment bank that was not only the first to collapse during the 2007-2008 financial crisis but also paved the way for the collapse of many other investment banks. Knowing that numbers were hard, Pete was simultaneously commissioned in the Minnesota National Guard, which is where he cultivated his interest in wearing camouflaged clothing and accessories.

Pete’s eyes roll back to the front of his head, and he tugs the elastic waistband of his camo short-shorts away from his lower belly and peers below the waistband. He looks at his longevity doctor.

“This shit isn’t shrinking my balls, is it?” asks the potential future SecDef.

“It definitely is, but you look fucking fire when you’re on TV talking about stuff,” replies his longevity doctor.

“I guess it’s worth it,” says Pete. The two blond personal shavers smile and nod, repeating him—worth it. Pete looks at me.

“I’m going to fucking pound a protein shake, and then I’m getting a new tattoo, so we’ll have like four hours to talk while I get inked,” he tells me. “You good with that?”

“I’m good with that,” I tell him. I follow Pete into the kitchen-laboratory of the private gym where a team of private chefs put several things that are both inanimate and very animate into a three-foot industrial blender.

“Yummy,” says Pete. The whine of the blender almost drowns out the brief shrieks of the things inside it. Pete seems unphased by the smoothie carnage, but then he is no stranger to being near but not quite responsible for carnage.

Shit almost got moderately real for Pete in 2004 when he was summoned to work as an operations person in offices that were almost dangerously close to where soldiers were holding weapons. It was in these offices, which were near things that were happening, that Pete honed his skills as someone who talks about stuff. Pete did this kind of thing for about 10 years before joining a news network called Fox where he learned to read a teleprompter, not blink for extended periods of time, and channel his roid rage into fanboying Donald Trump.

“Having people you hire disagree with you takes a lot of energy,” says Pete after a long, final slurp of his kitten smoothie through a camouflaged straw. He is still shirtless but now lays on his belly while a tattoo artist puts even more ink into his back. “Esper and Mattis were way too fucking much up in DJ’s grill about stuff. He wants a SecDef who won’t squish his sparkle in meetings and won’t say bad stuff about him on TV.” Pete turns his neckless head and smiles up at me. “I’m his guy for that.”

Pete has demonstrated his loyalty to people other than Donald Trump, too, having pledged eternal commitment to three different wives over the last 20 years.

The tattoo artist pulls his ink needle away from the ten-foot expanse of Pete’s back and holds one mirror in front of Pete’s face and another above his back. Pete grins. I move closer and read the letters that are now inked into the flesh between his shoulder blades: S E X D E F.

“Get it?” he asks me. “It’s a play on words. It’s like, one letter off from my new job, but it’s also my motto.”

“I get it,” I say.

“Fucking sick, right?” Pete stands up, and his personal shavers bring him a camouflaged t-shirt that matches his camouflaged short-shorts. “No, I’m good,” he says, waving off the t-shirt. “I’m going to get a spray tan now anyway.” He looks at me with a serious expression. “I want you to know that I’m taking this new job super seriously. I’m going to make America fight again. Like MAGA, only with an F. Get it?”

“I get it,” I say.

And now I totally get why Donald Trump chose Pete Hegseth to be his SexDef.