The Meaning Behind Trump Cabinet Pick Pete Hegseth’s Christian Tattoos
Pete Hegseth wears his Christian pride on his sleeve — literally, and sometimes in Hebrew.
The Minnesota National Guard veteran, Fox News personality and now nominee for U.S. secretary of defense has a slew of religiously inspired tattoos that have drawn attention as Hegseth's public vetting for a senior position in President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet has begun.
Hegseth, 44, has a litany of ink that points to his military service and penchant for patriotism, including the U.S. Constitution's famous opening phrase “We the People,” a “Join, or Die” snake from the American Revolution, an American flag with an AR-15 rifle and a patch of his regiment, the 187th Infantry.
Other tattoos are religious in nature — and raising eyebrows over their potential implications.
One of his most prominent tattoos is a large Jerusalem cross on his chest, a symbol featuring a large cross potent with smaller Greek crosses in each of its four quadrants. The symbol was used in the Crusades and represented the Kingdom of Jerusalem that the crusaders established.
Crusader symbols have also grown popular on the far-right, which sees the imagery as a nod to an era of European Christian wars against Muslims and Jews. The shooter who committed the 2019 New Zealand mosque massacre had adopted symbols of the Crusades, and a crusader symbol also appeared at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in the U.S. Capitol as well as at the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Hegseth has said his tattoo kept him away from President Joe Biden's inauguration just two weeks after Jan. 6.
“I was in the National Guard during the inauguration of Joe Biden, so I served under Bush, served under Obama, served under Trump, and now was going to guard the inauguration because I was in the D.C. guard,” he told Fox News in June. “Ultimately, members of my unit in leadership deemed that I was an extremist or a white nationalist because of a tattoo I have, which is a religious tattoo. It's a Jerusalem cross. Everybody can look it up, but it was used as a premise to revoke my orders to guard the inauguration.”
Hegseth also has “Deus Vult,” Latin for "God wills it," tattooed on his bicep. The phrase was used as a rallying cry for the First Crusade in 1096. It is also the closing sentence of Hegseth's 2020 book, aptly titled “American Crusade.”
The slogan has also been used by members of far-right, white supremacist and Christian nationalist groups. The perpetrator of the 2023 Allen, Texas, mall shooting had it tattooed alongside neo-Nazi tattoos, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which said elsewhere that the phrase had been “adopted by some white supremacists.”
Hegseth also has a cross and sword tattooed on his arm, which he says represents a New Testament verse. The verse, Matthew 10:34, reads, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
He later added “Yeshua,” or Jesus in Hebrew, under the sword. Hegseth told the site Media Ink in a 2020 interview that the tattoo was Jesus' Hebrew name, which he mistakenly said was “Yehweh,” a Biblical spelling of God's name.
He told Media Ink that he got the tattoo while in Bethlehem, Jesus' birthplace, which is located in the present-day West Bank, where he was reporting for Fox Nation.
“Israel, Christianity and my faith are things I care deeply about,” Hegseth told Media Ink.
“It was something I had planned to do as part of the story,” Hegseth said. “We were doing a story about how the Christian population in Bethlehem has been dramatically reduced. The guy running it does a lot of tattoos for Christian tourists who come to see the birthplace of Jesus. It was, one, to get the tattoo but more to tell the story of what it's like to be a Christian in Bethlehem today who has a business just feet from where Jesus was born but also the mosque that's there in Manger Square.”
This article was originally published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
This story is provided as a service of the Institute for Nonprofit News’ On the Ground news wire. The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) is a network of more than 475 independent, nonprofit newsrooms serving communities throughout the US, Canada, and globally. On the Ground is a service of INN, which aggregates the best of its members’ elections and political content, and provides it free for republication. Read more about INN here: https://inn.org/.
Jacob Gurvis is JTA’s audience engagement Editor and sports reporter, based in Los Angeles. He graduated from Boston University, where he studied journalism, Jewish studies and political science. Jacob has written for The Boston Globe and The Beverly Hills Courier, and he produced an award-winning sports talk show in college.
Asaf Elia-Shalev is a senior reporter with JTA and is based in Los Angeles. He is also the author of "Israel's Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth," which was published by UC Press in 2024.