“You can’t be ready for that,” Brian Hegseth said when reflecting on the moment he learned his son, Pete, was President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense.
“He went to a Starbucks down the street and he called me and he was like, ‘Dad, I’m going to be picked for DOD,’” Brian said. “We’re just Minnesotans, raising kids and grandkids, and they go off and do special things. It’s pretty cool.”
But Brian described the months that followed that conversation as a “rollercoaster ride,” one that revealed the ugly side of politics and deepened the Hegseth family’s faith.
“It became real pretty quick that this was a huge honor, but you better be carrying a shield all the time because they’re coming, they’re coming for you with everything, to discredit and harm, maybe simply Pete personally, but ultimately to harm the Trump administration,” Brian told Alpha News from Pete’s childhood home in Forest Lake, Minn.
He said his son’s story, from Princeton and Harvard to tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, highlights the “redemptive element” of life.
“Pete is completely a different person than he was six years ago. Nobody would be in a better position to know that than his mother and me,” Brian said, noting that Pete and his wife, Jenny, are “living their faith now in a way that I don’t think Pete ever could have envisioned himself doing.”
As a kid, whether it was in sports or school, or even his time in the choir, Pete “was always focused on being the very best he could,” Brian said.
That drive led Pete to Princeton and the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps before he was commissioned as an officer in the Minnesota National Guard and volunteered for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He then became a New York Times bestselling author and a familiar face on Fox News.
Now, he’s officially been confirmed and sworn in as the 29th U.S. secretary of defense, overseeing the most powerful military in the world.
“He’s young. He’s a change agent. He’s a disruptor. He’s a truth-teller. And those are things that, call it the swamp or the establishment, do not want,” Brian said. “They see him as an extension of what Trump wants to do and I think there’s a lot of people very threatened by that.”
Liz Collin
Liz Collin has been a truth-teller for 20 years as a multi-Emmy-Award-winning reporter and anchor. Liz is a Worthington, Minnesota native who lives in the suburbs with her husband, son and loyal lab.
