Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called President Donald Trump the “true and rightful heir” of Ronald Reagan at a defense forum named after the former president in Southern California on Saturday.
Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Hegseth based the comparison on Trump and Reagan’s shared “peace through strength” foreign policy doctrine.
“Like President Reagan, President Trump is dedicated to both sides of the peace through strength coin — not just using that phrase as a thin veil for warmongering,” he said at the Reagan National Defense Forum, touting Trump’s efforts to secure eight major peace deals since the start of his second term.
Of the international conflicts resolved so far, the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza is the most notable.
The cabinet secretary said Trump is “not finished yet” as his administration works to broker a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine nearly four years after the former country invaded the latter.
Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner were working on a security framework for a post-war Ukraine this week. Trump’s advisers met with Ukraine’s lead negotiators for a third day of peace talks in Florida on Saturday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had a “long and substantive” phone call with Witkoff and Kushner that day.
Hegseth then took a shot at the Biden administration, saying the Russia-Ukraine war “never would have started in the first place if [Trump] had been president.”
Hegseth also compared Trump to Reagan because both negotiated with foreign adversaries.
“Like President Reagan, President Trump is willing to talk to rivals — from Mikhail Gorbachev to Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping today,” he said.
“Folks in Washington like to criticize President Trump for doing so, but those critics forget that this is exactly what Ronald Reagan did,” he added. “And America was better off for it.”
After his keynote address at the forum, Hegseth defended his oversight of the highly scrutinized double strike operation on an alleged drug vessel in an interview with Fox News moderator Lucas Tomlinson.
When asked if he gave an order to leave no survivors, the Pentagon chief responded, “Of course not. Anybody that’s been in the Situation Room or been in the war room of the secretary’s office knows you don’t walk in and say, ‘Kill them all.’ It’s just patently ridiculous. It’s meant to create a cartoon of me and the decisions that we make and how we make them.”
US KILLS FOUR SUSPECTED DRUG TRAFFICKERS IN FIRST VESSEL STRIKE SINCE ‘DOUBLE TAP’ REPORT
He also criticized the Washington Post, the news outlet that broke the story on the Sept. 2 operation. “I don’t know where you get your sources, but they suck,” he said.
The Department of War is currently reviewing the full video of the “double tap” operation for a possible release, Hegseth revealed without providing a date for when the public gets to view the footage already seen by Congress. He stressed that the department wants to ensure an unclassified version of the video doesn’t put military operators in harm’s way amid the operation in the Caribbean.
