Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Pentagon has openly fantasized about a violent clash between the U.S. military and his political rivals, whom he describes as "domestic enemies."
Fox News host Pete Hegseth, the president-elect's choice for secretary of defense, published a book in 2020 imagining the outcome of that year's election would lead to “national divorce” and a "civil war" that would involve the military and law enforcement taking up arms against president Joe Biden's supporters, reported The Guardian.
“The fate of freedom is what is at stake in the 2020 election," Hegseth wrote in the book "American Crusade." "The immediate years that follow will, once and for all, determine whether the American experiment in human freedom – the America of our founding – will die, get a national divorce based on irreconcilable cultural and political divisions, or return to its founding principles.”
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“The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice," he added. "It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”
Hegseth conceded that would be a "horrific scenario" but could imagine how it could be avoided, and he said that political division would destroy “the only powerful, pro-freedom, pro-Christian, pro-Israel army in the world.”
"Communist China will rise – and rule the globe," he warned. "Europe will formally surrender. Islamists will get nuclear weapons and seek to wipe America and Israel off the map.”
Hegseth also describes in that book a 2019 conversation between him and Trump after he urged the then-president to pardon three service members who had been charged with committing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"[That phone call] ended with a compliment to me that I’ll never forget and might put on my tombstone: ‘You’re a f------ warrior, Pete. A f------ warrior,'" Hegseth wrote. "I thanked him for his courage, and he hung up.”