“It’s great to be in Iowa at the Iowa State Fair, because I grew up at the Minnesota State Fair,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said after taking the stage at JR’s Southpork Ranch on Monday. “Every single year my parents took me to the Minnesota State Fair.”
There was some grumbling from the crowd at JR’s, but Hegseth, who grew up in southern Minnesota, wasn’t trying to stoke the interstate rivalry between Iowa and Minnesota over who has the best fair. He was building to a xenophobic joke targeting Somali immigrants and Somali-Americans in Minnesota, who have often been the targets of racist and xenophobic comments from President Donald Trump.
“Well now it’s the Mogadishu State Fair,” Hegseth continued. “So I’m happy to be at the Iowa State Fair. I’ll take it every day of the week.”
Standing behind Hegseth on stage, Rep. Zach Nunn laughed and clapped. So did the audience.
Before President Trump’s second term in the White House, it would been considered shocking for a sitting secretary of Defense — Hegseth and Trump prefer the term “secretary of War,” but it would take an act of Congress to actually change the title or the name of the Defense Department — to make a joke like that in public. But even as the Trump administration continues to ignore behavioral norms, it’s still surprising that a sitting secretary of Defense is actively campaigning for a candidate, since the Defense Department and the military have traditionally maintained a nonpartisan posture.
Hegseth came to the state fair to campaign for Nunn, the Republican who represents Iowa’s 3rd District in Congress, and who is locked in a close race for the seat with Democratic state Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott.
“It’s disgraceful that Zach Nunn and Pete Hegseth are partying together at a campaign stop in Iowa while our service members are under threat and facing poor conditions overseas,” Trone Garriott said in a statement after Nunn’s campaign event Monday. “Our leaders should be focused on ending this war and keeping Americans deployed overseas safe, not fundraising for Zach Nunn’s campaign.”
Hegseth was originally supposed to campaign in Iowa for Nunn in March at an event billed as “Top Nunn: A Salute to the Troops,” even though the United States and Israel attacked Iran in Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28. The country launching a war didn’t stop the planned campaign event, but deaths of six service members in Kuwait on March 1 did, according to reporting by the Des Moines Register.
“[T]he timing of the 2026 event, scheduled for March 14 in Ankeny, came under scrutiny as the U.S. went to war with Iran, and six American service members were killed in an Iranian strike, including at least two Iowans,” the Register reported on March 5, after the Nunn campaign announced “Top Nunn” would be rescheduled.
Between Hegseth’s originally scheduled appearance in March and his actual appearance on Monday, Vice President JD Vance came to Iowa to campaign for Nunn.
Speaking at the Nunn rally at the Ex-Guard manufacturing facility in Des Moines on May 5, Vance, echoing President Trump, called the war against Iran “a little blip in the Middle East.” More than three months after Vance’s dismissal of the conflict’s importance, it continues with no clear end in sight.
The Nunn campaign timed the rescheduled “Top Nunn” with Hegseth to coincide with Veterans Day at the state fair. Both Hegseth and Nunn are veterans (as is Vance).
Hegseth did acknowledge the Iowa service members who lost their lives on March 1, in his speech at JR’s Southpork Ranch.
“There is a cost to doing very difficult things,” he said. “To going out and defending your country and ensuring radical Islamist crazies don’t get a nuclear weapon.” He added that he is “not willing to look my kids in the eye and say we had a chance to do something about it but we didn’t.”
Hegseth told the audience “the biggest job I have is to ensure that my department is properly funded.”
The Trump administration is asking Congress to approve a $1.5 trillion budget for the Defense Department. It would be the largest Defense budget of the post-WWII era, bigger than the budgets during the Vietnam War or during President Reagan massive military build-up in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Testifying before a Senate committee last month, Hegseth said, “Not funding this department at $1.5 trillion, I believe, is the greatest threat that our nation faces.”
Hegseth is also asking Congress to approve an $87.6 billion supplemental funding request to help cover the cost of the ongoing war with Iran.
“When we need an ally who understands why it’s important to fund our military the way we need to fund it, but also do so in a fiscally responsible way, we call Congressman Zach Nunn,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth said the decision to campaign for Nunn was “a no-brainer” and praised Nunn for showing the sort of leadership that involves him faithfully following the president’s instructions and voting however Trump wants him to.
“What President Trump needs is rock-ribbed, solid, Bible-believing, red, white and blue-waving congressmen who have his back,” Hegseth said. “And that is Zach Nunn.”
Hegseth told the crowd how important Nunn’s loyalty to the Trump administration is to him as secretary of Defense, before adding that “even though, according to the lawyers, I’m only here in a personal capacity today, as a veteran and a patriotic American.”
“I had to say that for the public statement, for the lawyers,” Hegseth repeated, as Nunn and members of the crowd laughed.
It would be illegal for Hegseth to campaign for Nunn in his capacity as secretary of Defense, or to use government property or resources to boost Nunn’s candidacy. An exception to federal law was made, however, for how Hegseth traveled to Des Moines.
Hegseth is traveling on a government aircraft. According to the Defense Department, that was necessary because he is “mandated to use military aircraft for all travel, both official and unofficial, due to the continuous need for secure communications and responsive transportation for national security.”
Towards the end of his speech, Hegseth praised Nunn for the support he’s provided as the secretary tries to reshape what he calls the War Department and the U.S. military.
“We need guys like this man right here having our back in Congress as we get rid of DEI at the Defense Department [sic],” he said, pointing at a smiling Nunn as the audience applauded.
DEI has become a catch-all term the Trump administration uses when it wants take action against the rights of minorities or women, or terminate programs it believes benefits them in a way that doesn’t equally serve white men.
In March, NPR reported Hegseth personally “intervened to stop the promotions of several high-ranking service members including four Army officers, two Black men and two female soldiers, on track to become one-star generals.”
In June, Hegseth removed qualified Black and women Navy officers from the promotions list. Hegseth’s actions “appear to violate the rules governing a promotion system that is supposed to be apolitical and merit-based,” the New York Times reported.
Turning from DEI, Hegseth continued to talk about reshaping the military, and used a transphobic slur.
“At the Department of War, we do training, not trannies,” he said, as Nunn and some members of the audience chuckled and clapped. “It is a day-and-night difference. Training, lethality, accountability, discipline, readiness, the bedrock of what it means to be an American warrior is the only focus of our department.”
Seven days after being sworn-in for his second term, President Trump issued an executive order banning transgender people from serving in the military. The next day, GLAD Law and the National Center for LGBTQ Rights filed a lawsuit challenging the ban on behalf of six members of the military and two people attempting to join. In March 2025, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against Trump’s order. Two months later, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the injunction and allowed the anti-trans policy to go into effect while the case makes its way through the courts.
On June 1 this year, a federal appeals court found that the policy “appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group: persons who identify as transgender,” and is therefore illegal. The court temporarily stayed its ruling to give the Trump administration an opportunity to appeal the decision.
On June 30, a federal judge certified the legal challenge as a class-action lawsuit.
Hegseth didn’t mention these legal defeats during his almost 19-minute speech. Even though the event was meant to boost Nunn as a candidate and was scheduled on the day the fair honors veterans, Hegseth devoted more time in his speech to praising Trump than talking about either Nunn, veterans or active-duty members of the military. Although a sitting Defense secretary campaigning for a candidate is almost unprecedented — Hegseth campaigned in Kentucky in May for a Republican candidate backed by President Trump — praising the president at length is standard in all public speeches by members of the administration.
