After 22 hours with Pete Hegseth, I see a man who could be president. But beneath the alpha swagger, I spotted weaknesses: JAMES ROSEN

Published: 16:30 EDT, 10 October 2026 | Updated: 16:46 EDT, 10 October 2026

Effortlessly, as though he could fly, War Secretary Pete Hegseth bounded down the front stairs of the blue-and-white airplane with the giant black letters reading UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, part of the Air Force One fleet. It was twilight at Joint Base Andrews, ten miles out of Washington.

The secretary sported a blue baseball cap with military insignia and a dark navy quarter-zip sweater, its collar popped over a white shirt and dark paisley tie. The tie was ever-so-slightly loosened, so it could pass for tied or untied, and the shirtsleeves were rolled up an impeccable six inches, revealing sculpted, tattooed forearms and a life-challenge wristlet.

His belt buckle, peeking out from under the sweater, bore the American flag over charcoal-colored slacks. His hair, as always, was swept back and tamped down with military-industrial-strength gel. The secretary was chewing gum.

He touched the railing with his right hand only briefly, before realizing, almost as though he’d made a mistake, that he was just fine using both hands to twirl the football he was carrying when he emerged from the aircraft door.

The pigskin was no idle prop but a visual reminder of where the secretary had just come from: the Air Force-Navy football game, played at Falcon Stadium on the sprawling campus of the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

At the foot of the AF1 steps, Hegseth casually tossed the ball, underhanded, to an officer in combat fatigues. With that, the SW – in the Trump era, the Pentagon’s official name is the Department of War, so the secretary is known as SW – indulged a slight grin before vanishing into his waiting motorcade of black SUVs.

That concluded my 22 hours with Hegseth last Saturday, covering his whirlwind daytrip to Colorado for Newsmax.

Besides my cameraman and me, the only other members of the traveling press contingent included a correspondent and photographer for OAN; a reporter from The Center Square; and an independent digital media personality who formerly worked at Infowars.

The pigskin was no idle prop but a visual reminder of where the secretary had just come from: the Air Force-Navy football game

There was no TV pool, as is traditional, nor any of the major newspapers or digital sites. Also tagging along was a Pentagon camera crew.

All of us dutifully recorded the secretary’s deplaning at Andrews, the whole Abercrombie & Fitch scene, which was meant to portray Pete Hegseth as – well, what exactly?

One could say ‘Kennedyesque,’ but that would be horribly out-of-date for what Hegseth embodies. The better word is: presidential.

As a Trump Cabinet officer, and the civilian leader of the world’s greatest military, the war secretary knows better than to concede – ever – that he harbors any visions of a possible future in electoral politics. But it sure looked like he does.

If the rest of Hegseth’s Pentagon tenure were to unfold as it has to date, the uneasy mix of success-and-failure in Iran juxtaposed with headline-grabbing announcements of cost-cutting measures, new forays into AI and autonomous warfare, the elimination of DEI practices, and stricter enforcement of physical-fitness standards, the SW can reasonably reckon he will have the record he needs.

The same segments of the electorate who approve of Hegseth’s record will also likely support his decision to livestream the execution by firing squad, scheduled for December, of Nidal Hasan, the former US army major and physician convicted of shooting 13 unarmed comrades at Fort Hood in 2009.

Our coverage of the Colorado trip began in predawn darkness inside the US Air Force Academy’s cavernous Holaday Athletic Center. Clad in the kind of athletica that only the physically fit can pull off, Hegseth sweated through 30 minutes of squats, pushups, planks and sprints with the USAF cadets.

Then it was on to the equally cavernous chow hall. There the SW delivered a speech from a balcony that literally and figuratively distanced him from the nearly 4,000 rank-and-file, undermining the walk-the-walk, PT sympatico he had cultivated on the turf, with the consequence that the speech fell flatter than normal.

Perhaps sensing the waning energy, Hegseth channeled his boss, pointed to the small media riser at center hall, and played us for foils. The press was there, Hegseth explained, so he could showcase the cadets’ service. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added, ‘they’re not all fake news.’

Our coverage of the Colorado trip began in predawn darkness inside the US Air Force Academy’s cavernous Holaday Athletic Center

All of us dutifully recorded the secretary’s deplaning at Andrews, the whole Abercrombie & Fitch scene, which was meant to portray Pete Hegseth as – well, what exactly?

Before we knew it, we were dodging football players twice our size along the sidelines at Falcon Stadium, where signs warned of high altitudes and low oxygen.

‘Pete! Pete! Pete! Pete! Pete!’ the cadets – and their parents – cheered, pleading with the secretary to come their way, take selfies, sign autographs.

Unfailingly, the SW obliged, wading into the stands amid the tackles and whistles of the on-field action, happy to give each supplicant, even the purple Falcon mascot, a smile and thumbs-up, hitting The Pose every time.

At one point, under brilliant sunshine, Hegseth removed the tweed jacket in which he had addressed the chow hall and performed the game’s coin toss.

Swathed in love, Hegseth was lured into his one unforced error of the day. A wild cadet in a front-row seat stood before a stack of Mountain Dew cans, popping them one by one and chugging their contents. When he bade the SW to join in – he did. In a single fluid motion, Hegseth ripped open the can, threw his head back – all strands of hair dutifully in place – and chugged the soda in seconds. It didn’t require a feverish imagination to envision some tech-savvy Hegseth hater manipulating the image to turn Mountain Dew, online, into Budweiser.

It didn’t hurt him in the stands, though. The rowdy cadets mobbed him. No SecDef in memory produces such scenes of identification and adoration. As a veteran of many VIP trips, it was clear that one selfie with ‘Pete! Pete! Pete!’ means more to active-duty personnel than ten visits from old men in rumpled suits bearing greetings from the commander-in-chief.

The warriors see the Iraq War vet, though ‘only’ a member of the Minnesota National Guard, as one of their own; to them, with the push-ups and tattoos, the bro-swagger and unswerving loyalty to President Trump, Pete walks the walk.

The SW delivered a speech from a balcony that literally and figuratively distanced him from the nearly 4,000 rank-and-file, undermining the walk-the-walk

‘Pete! Pete! Pete! Pete! Pete!’ the cadets – and their parents – cheered, pleading with the secretary to come their way, take selfies, sign autographs

I wondered afterwards whether the armed forces can ever afford to go back to secretaries – of defense or war – who fall short of the Hegseth standard.

Even in this couldn’t-be-friendlier environment, however – a service academy football rivalry, with cadets and midshipmen, flyovers, parachute jumps, brass bands, cheerleaders, mascots – Hegseth’s vulnerabilities emerged.

One is his contempt for the news media. It is all-consuming. Even his ‘State of the Force Address,’ delivered at Marine Corps Base Quantico two days before the Colorado trip, was studded with sneering insults: ‘the hyper-ventilating media’…’the delusional media’…’the anti-American losers in our media’…’our so-called press which makes Iranian state media look reasonable.’

For all that loathing, Hegseth and his handlers never figured out how to co-opt the media they hand-selected and brought with them. Despite working up a minute-by-minute schedule, no one on the SW’s staff gave the slightest thought to carving out time for the traveling press contingent to feed material back to our outlets or report live from the scene – which would have allowed us to publicize the PT session and chow hall address.

Instead, Hegseth’s team led us, with cameras and tripods, on a long march around Falcon field, then up and down a set of 311 consecutive steps in low oxygen, to record for posterity the selfies Hegseth spent 90 minutes taking in the stands, along with some other, more ceremonial engagements.

Our presence for this was 100 percent superfluous, as the Internal OSW/PA crew was already shooting all that.

At the end of the day, the secretary granted a ten-minute news conference on the tarmac at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado – the most valuable news content of the trip. But like everything else, it was made to wait until our return to Andrews for feeding out.

‘Iran ought make the right choice,’ Hegseth said, with surprising formality, near the top of the Q-and-A. ‘If they don’t, the president’s going to have all the options he needs on the table.’

Wary the White House might catch him veering Off Message – his last sentence sounded an awful lot like a suggestion that President Trump could restart the Iran war, further raising gas and fertilizer prices – the SW sought cover.

‘But he’s not going to let these things extend unnecessarily because he understands what the mission is.’

Unfailingly, the SW obliged, wading into the stands amid the tackles and whistles of the on-field action, happy to give each supplicant, even the purple Falcon mascot, a smile and thumbs-up, hitting The Pose every time

Officials had asked him to practice the coin toss beforehand; Hegseth later told me he hadn’t needed any practice

Hegseth was having it both ways: dangling the possibility of renewed strikes against the Iranian regime while depicting the president as opposed to that course.

‘So,’ I asked, ‘he still believes, and I take it you believe, that this conflict can have a military solution to it?’

It was a tricky question: Answer yes and Americans fear Iran turning into a forever war; answer no and America loses its leverage at the negotiating table.

Hegseth understood this instinctively. He saw that his only play called for an all-of-the-above approach, the only downside to which, also immediately clear to him, was that it could produce word salad. But that was better than Off Message.

‘Well, it could be resolved in multiple ways. The president has given Iran every opportunity to do it at the table. But militarily, we’ve laid out time and time again how devastating our attacks have been.’

‘And the more we step back and the dust clouds clear, Iran’s economy, its defense industrial base, its ability to reconstitute – it’s just not there.’

It was a deft performance: options preserved, headlines averted. He showed the same deftness, and command of particulars, when asked about the US footprint in Central America and the benefits afforded to military spouses.

From this access to the secretary, whom I had known cursorily and genially when we overlapped at Fox News, my prime takeaway was how impressive, quite apart from his calling card of physical fitness, Hegseth can be.

Yet seeing the secretary up close yielded one other insight, discerned during the news gaggle that marked our final engagement with him: Each of his fingernails was chewed to the quick.

It was jarring: Here stood this avatar of men’s health and fitness, all of forty-six and still lithe and limber, perfectly turned out, an Abercrombie & Fitch ad unto himself – and his nails looked like they belonged to a terrified sixth grader.

There it was: what poker fiends call ‘the tell,’ the one outwardly visible sign of some core inner truth, of internal upheaval, of roiling anxiety beneath the carefully crafted, hard-earned image of alpha superiority and serenity. The revelation conjured an image of the SW seated behind the partition aboard the AF1 plane, browsing briefing papers while waging war on his fingers and thumbs.

Could it be the byproduct of working for so mercurial a boss? An image of the commander-in-chief screaming at Hegseth in the Oval Office that went viral earlier this year turned out to have been fake; but is that a stressor for the SW?

As with many ‘digital’ stories, the origin(s) of this one are likely never to be fully learned. But for the mere mortals along for the ride, there was something mildly reassuring about it.

James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent for Newsmax and the author, most recently, of Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986-2001.