‘Senators call me up saying he’s fantastic’
President-elect Donald Trump said Friday that he’s been hearing rave reviews from senators about Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth and is confident he will be confirmed.
“It looks like Pete is doing well now,” Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, in a clip from her interview with the president-elect that will air Sunday.
“I mean, people were a little bit concerned,” Trump continued. “He’s a young guy, with a tremendous track record actually. He went to Princeton and went to Harvard. He was a good student at both. But he loves the military and I think people are starting to see it so we’ll be working on his nomination along with a lot of others.”
Hegseth, 44, has spent the last week at the Capitol drumming up support for his nomination amid allegations of past alcohol abuse, sexual impropriety and financial mismanagement.
Four “no” votes from Republican senators could sink his confirmation but GOP sources have told The Post behind closed doors “zero” senators were opposed to having the former Fox News personality and Army veteran lead the Pentagon.
“Yes I do, I really do,” Trump responded, when asked by Welker if he still had confidence in Hegseth.
“He’s a very smart guy,” he added. “I’ve known him through Fox, but I’ve known him for a long time. And he’s basically a military guy. Every time I talk to him, all he wants to talk about is the military. He’s a military guy.”
“A lot of senators call me up saying he’s fantastic,” Trump noted.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who on Thursday suggested that she wasn’t quite yet a “yes” on Hegseth, met with the nominee on Friday and plans to continue the conversation next week.
“I just had another substantive conversation with Senator Ernst,” Hegseth wrote on X. “I appreciate her sincere commitment to defense policy, and I look forward to meeting with her again next week.”
On the meeting, Ernst tweeted, “At a minimum, we agree that he deserves the opportunity to lay out his vision for our warfighters at a fair hearing.”
Earlier this week, Hegseth slammed the onslaught of anonymously sourced media reports that have imperiled his confirmation.
“It’s a textbook manufactured media takedown,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Will Cain, one of Hegseth’s former co-hosts at “Fox & Friends Weekend,” came to his ex-colleague’s defense Friday after the Washington Post downplayed the significance of Hegseth’s two Bronze Stars.
“Was just hanging out in [Hegseth’s] office (with his permission) and found this. Is this cool? I don’t know can someone ask [the Washington Post]?” Cain wrote in a tweet which included a photo of an Army Commendation Medal awarded to Hegseth in 2005.
The citation on the commendation noted that Hegseth’s “leadership and initiative directly resulted in the capture of two high value targets with ties to Al Qaeda in Iraq and effectively marked the end of an insurgent mortar cell.”