“President Trump Deserves Better”: The MAGA Tide Begins to Turn Against Pete Hegseth and His War on the Press

Years ago I traveled to the midtown Manhattan headquarters of Fox News for an interview with Pete Hegseth. It was 2017, during Donald Trump’s first term in office, and Hegseth was a middling cohost of Fox & Friends Weekend whose flamboyant commentary had attracted the attention of the president.

Sitting in an airy cafeteria high up in the News Corp building, I asked Hegseth where he got his news. “I read the failing New York Times,” he said. He then claimed, in all seriousness, that before reading the print edition of the Times every morning, he would take a Sharpie and write “FAILING” above the paper’s header.

The declaration struck me as absurd, and we moved on. I did not believe that this man, an ambitious cable-news host educated at Princeton and Harvard, wrote “FAILING” on his copy of The New York Times every morning. I did believe that he wanted a media reporter to think that he did that, and maybe the president to hear that he did that.

That penchant for performative press hatred is key to understanding Hegseth, who has, since our interview, ascended from Fox host to secretary of defense. He’s now in charge of America’s armed forces, running a department with an operating budget of nearly $1 trillion and close to 3 million employees, including about 1.3 million active duty troops.

In his time leading the Pentagon, Hegseth has focused much of his attention on turning his disdain into policy, treating the reporters who cover him as domestic enemies. (In two of his books, Hegseth advocates for a fight against America’s “domestic enemies,” a group he broadly describes as the left. In 2020’s American Crusade, Hegseth writes: “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.”)

The latest salvo in Hegseth’s war on the media came this week, with a deadline for those covering his department to sign a new set of unprecedented restrictions. The draconian rules include one barring reporters from seeking out even unclassified information that has not already been sanctioned for release, which effectively outlaws basic reporting. Nearly every media outlet refused; by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, journalists had cleared out their desks.

“He says he’s the secretary of war, but he’s not brave enough to take questions from us,” one reporter told me Wednesday afternoon as they left the Pentagon with their things.

For now, Trump is standing behind Hegseth. In a meeting during which Hegseth prevaricated about the new rules, casting them as so benign as to be obvious, Trump said that his defense secretary “finds the press to be very disruptive in terms of world peace and maybe security for our nation.” Trump mused that the press could be booted from the White House next and moved “across the street.”

Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, defended the new rules in a statement. “The policy does not ask for them to agree, just to acknowledge that they understand what our policy is. This has caused reporters to have a full-blown meltdown, crying victim online. We stand by our policy because it’s what’s best for our troops and the national security of this country.”

Trump and Hegseth seemingly have few allies in their quest to shield the Pentagon from the press.

Critics include House Republican Don Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general serving on the House Armed Services Committee, who said in a statement to Vanity Fair that he’s “not supportive” of the new policy.

“When the secretary of defense says media had unfettered access to the Pentagon, it’s not true,” he said. “I was stationed at the Pentagon twice, one time as a brigadier general, and saw firsthand that media had access to hallways and cafeterias, but not offices or classified areas where we’re working with our top national security information.”

“None of Hegseth’s predecessors, nor any of his fellow Cabinet secretaries, are doing anything like this, and it’s embarrassing,” John Ullyot, Hegseth’s former chief Pentagon spokesman, says. “President Trump deserves better.”

“We must cherish our freedom of the press and speech,” Bacon added. “The media is a good countercheck to the executive branch.”

Critics include at least one former Trump administration official. John Ullyot, Hegseth’s chief Pentagon spokesman before he resigned in April, said in an interview that he’s “never seen anything like this in over 30 years working in media relations in the public and private sectors, including serving as a senior communications adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign.”

“None of Hegseth’s predecessors, nor any of his fellow Cabinet secretaries, are doing anything like this, and it’s embarrassing. President Trump deserves better,” said Ullyot, a Marine Corps veteran who also served as a deputy assistant to Trump. “Hegseth should drop the Soviet-style restrictions, reopen the briefing room, and follow the lead of President Trump and every other Cabinet secretary by engaging regularly, confidently, and conversationally with reporters of all stripes.”

Critics include pro-Trump media personalities. “I’m MAGA, and I’m conservative, and I want this administration to succeed,” Gabrielle Cuccia told me. In May, she said, she was fired from her job as chief Pentagon correspondent at One America News after she criticized policies that restricted reporting on the department. She later explained that she had argued that the restrictions were “not based on any credible threat from the Pentagon media present every single day, but rather a growing desire to control how, and when, the public receives information.” She told me: “What does that say when we start to accept agreements in which a government is telling us what is approved to be spoken of and what’s not?”

Critics include Fox News, one of the president’s favorite networks and Hegseth’s former employer, which joined every major news network, both cable and broadcast, in refusing to agree to the new rules. In a joint statement, Fox and other news organizations said the policy “threatens core journalistic protections.”

“The policy was just unacceptable to folks,” said one Fox News editorial staffer. On the air, Bret Baier, Fox’s most prominent newsman, criticized the new rules in an interview with retired US Army general Jack Keane. Keane, a Fox analyst who worked in the Pentagon when Baier covered it as a correspondent, disputed the accuracy of Hegseth’s claims. “It doesn’t seem like the whole story is being told to our viewers here,” Keane told Baier. “What they’re really doing, they want to spoon-feed information to the journalists, and that will be their story. That’s not journalism.”

“It’s so ham-fisted,” the Fox staffer added. “I expected Fox wouldn’t support it. I don’t see why [Hegseth] thought that was a good strategic move, because it just rallied the media against him—including Fox.”

One former Defense Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the rank and file at the Pentagon don’t agree with the policies either, as “they feel the previous rules for media access and reporting have worked perfectly for over 75 years.”

The near-universal rebuke is a blow to Hegseth, who has spent his time at the Pentagon engulfed in controversy. It was not lost on the sources I spoke to that Hegseth’s crackdown, for the stated reason of national security, comes just a few months after he played a prominent role in the fiasco now known as Signalgate, in which he shared highly sensitive and detailed attack plans in a group chat that inadvertently included the editor of The Atlantic.

“Did we all forget about that disaster?” asked the Fox News staffer. “Because I didn’t.”

Ullyot pointed out that Hegseth is also under investigation for sharing sensitive information in a group chat that included his wife, a former Fox News producer. “Hegseth’s invoking national security for banning reporters from nonsensitive public spaces and limiting what they report is curious for someone who brings his wife to sensitive, closed-door official meetings and who is currently under investigation for texting her sensitive, reportedly classified national security information,” he said. (Hegseth has repeatedly denied sharing any classified information in the group chats.)

On Wednesday, with the 5 p.m. deadline looming, reporters hurriedly cleared out their desks and handed in their badges. “We had to pack up our desks, and the junior press officer, a guy named Joel Valdez, kept prowling the hall saying that he was just checking our progress on getting out of the building,” said the Pentagon reporter with whom I spoke.

The reporter added that they see little reason for a communications team at the department now that the press has been kicked out. “Honestly, I don’t know why any of them would be needed anymore and why the Trump administration would think that this media office, which has done nothing but generate negative headlines for his defense secretary, would be an asset to the Trump administration anymore.”

In the labyrinthine halls of the Pentagon, officials stopped journalists in the halls to voice their objections to the rules, the reporter said. After walking out of the Pentagon, possibly for the last time under this administration, the reporters headed to a local bar.

“It always feels performative,” the Fox News staffer said of Hegseth’s actions. “Like, ‘The harder I am on the media, the more Trump might get off my back.’” I thought back to my 2017 interview with Hegseth, and his theatrical claim about defacing A1 of the Times. Now he’s no longer a host on Fox News but the head of the largest government agency, the leader of America’s armed forces—can it still be considered posturing?

As I was calling around on this story, I spoke with one anchor who worked with Hegseth at Fox News. “I’ll give you an anecdote about how Pete views the press,” the anchor said. “When he would anchor Fox & Friends, you would sit down on the curvy couch at six o’clock in the morning and there would be a bunch of newspapers that they would lay out for each anchor. There’d be the Journal, the Times, the Post, the New York Post…. And every morning Hegseth would pull a Sharpie out of his suit pocket and he would write on the top of the New York Times masthead, in capital letters, ‘FAILING.’”