As Pete Hegseth prepares for confirmation hearings, a coalition of outside groups is pressuring Republican senators to confirm him as President-elect Donald J. Trump’s secretary of defense — or face dire political consequences if they don’t.
Mr Hegseth, an army veteran and former television presenter, is battling a string of damaging allegations – including bouts of drinking, financial mismanagement and sexual assault – which critics have used to question his fitness for office. At the same time, he is also dogged by concerns that he lacks the management experience needed to run a Defense Department with a budget of more than $800 billion and nearly three million employees.
Mr. Trump has so far stood by Mr. Hegseth, encouraging him to fight the accusations of his past behavior. Mr Hegseth denied committing a sexual assault, saying the encounter with the complainant in 2017 was consensual. He said he was the victim of a smear campaign. A phalanx of well-funded groups supporting Mr. Trump and his cabinet appointees, including popular podcasters and political advocacy groups, say Mr. Hegseth the right person for the job and that they helped make his political survival a thing of fame.
Some of those efforts are being coordinated with Mr. Trump’s senior advisers, according to several people involved, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the strategy.
A Trump transition official did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The concerted effort is a sharp departure from Mr. Trump’s first administration, when the efforts of his outside supporters were often scattered and underfunded.
This time, supporters of Mr. Trump and his agenda are “quite coordinated,” said Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser whose podcast, “War Room,” has discussed Mr. Hegseth and other elected officials from the cabinet.
“We know that one of the mistakes from the first time was that we didn’t really have any outside groups, and the ones that were around weren’t really on the side of the Trump agenda,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview. “This time it’s more sophisticated, it’s got more money, it’s got a whole media and ecosystem of influence, and it started earlier, because a lot of it came out of the campaign.”
Outside groups are promoting Mr. Hegseth in myriad ways.
Officials from a conservative advocacy group called Project Article III have appeared on television and in podcasts, including that of Mr. Bannon, to encourage listeners to use their website to contact senators in support of Mr. to Hegseth. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank and affiliated advocacy group, is spending $1 million on ads and other efforts supporting the potential defense secretary and other Trump nominees.
Building America’s Future, a nonprofit group that spent $45 million supporting Mr. Trump directly and through allied super PACs, aired more than $500,000 in ads on Fox News and elsewhere, saying Mr. Hegseth a victim of the “deep state” campaign. sink his nomination.
And on Tuesday, just before Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, a group of Navy SEALs and other veterans plans to rally in support of Mr. Hegseth at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington – an effort promoted by Mr. Bannon.
Mr. Hegseth is not Mr. Trump’s only Cabinet pick to face questions about his past behavior. Kash Patel, Trump’s choice for FBI director, has been accused by the former defense secretary of jeopardizing the rescue of a kidnapped American citizen in Africa in 2020 by fabricating information. Tulsi Gabbard, the presumptive nominee for director of national intelligence, expressed sympathy for Russia after its invasion of U.S. ally Ukraine, and in 2017 visited Syria’s authoritarian president, Bashar al-Assad, while serving in Congress.
But the closest parallel from the Trump era with the case of Mr. Hegseth could be the 2018 confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has battled allegations of sexual assault and excessive drinking in high school and college. Mr. Kavanaugh, nominated by Mr. Trump rejected the allegations during a lavish Senate committee hearing. A brief FBI follow-up investigation did not seem to back them up, and the Senate quickly confirmed him by two votes.
Now, six years and one return of Mr. Trump’s election later, supporters of the president-elect’s agenda believe they can be much more aggressive in supporting the election and the agenda of his cabinet.
“Our job is to represent the grassroots MAGA movement and help Republican senators find and keep their backbones,” said Mike Davis, founder and president of Project Article III and former chief counsel for Senate Judiciary Republican nominations. Committee during Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
In November, Mr. Davis wrote to X former legal and political opponents of Mr. Trump that he wanted to “drag their dead political bodies through the streets, burn them and throw them off the wall. (Legal, political and financial, of course.)”
Groups that support Mr. Hegseth and other government officials have deeper pockets and are better connected to the newly elected president than last time.
“I think they’re playing hardball, in a much more focused, targeted and calculated way,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and a longtime member of the Judiciary Committee. “You know, they learned from experience.”
He added, “It’s a lot of pressure on my Republican colleagues.”
Building America’s Future named Chris LaCivita, who helped run Mr. Trump’s campaign, and Tony Fabrizio, the campaign’s chief pollster, as advisers; also received contributions from billionaire Elon Musk, whom Mr. Trump appointed to lead new enterprise aimed at cutting government spending. Mr. Davis, who was briefly appointed state attorney, is in regular contact with Mr. Trump and is preparing several candidates for his cabinet for hearings in the Senate.
Charlie Kirk, founder of the local youth organization Turning Point USA, is also in regular contact with Trump’s inner circle, as well as key Republican senators whose “no” votes could sink Hegseth’s confirmation — a fact he has used to pressure them to support the potential nominee.
A super PAC called American Leadership PAC launched a $1 million ad campaign last week urging residents of five states to urge their senators to support Mr. Hegseth, according to a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity and was not authorized to disclose financial details. The super PAC, which bills itself as “anti-awakening,” is airing a television ad predicting that Mr. Hegseth will “ban the revivalist nonsense out of our armed forces” and “make our military great again.”
The bare-knuckle approach seems to be gaining traction.
Last month, while Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation is getting weaker, the supporters of Mr. Trump was attacked by Sen. Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa and a combat veteran who serves on the Armed Services Committee, which will hold confirmation hearings. Ms. Ernst was initially unconvinced that Mr. Hegseth should lead the Pentagon. But under mounting pressure — including digital ad buys from Building America’s Future and the threat of a 2026 primary challenge backed by Mr. Kirk – she made it known that she would be ready to support the nomination.
Project Article III officials say Republican senators are begging them to stop the phones ringing after an initiative in support of Mr. Hegseth generated nearly 31,000 calls, emails and social media posts. (Similar efforts by Mr. Patel and Ms. Gabbard also resulted in thousands of inbound messages.)
Mr. Bannon believes that the current grassroots advocacy is just the beginning.
The push for Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation is “a test run for other times when we will have to get people into the streets and into the halls of Congress,” he said.
