Pete Hegseth's Axe Throwing Video Captured a Genuinely Scary On-Camera Moment

Of all of Trump's cabinet appointees, Pete Hegseth might have had the worst first few months in the administration. He has been caught up in multiple stories about his use of the Signal app to share obviously classified materials, in one case doing so with a journalist by mistake. He's also faced allegations of leading the Pentagon erratically and reversing himself on many of his initial policies.

Given how rough things have been for Hegseth, many are looking back on an incident that helped to define him in the public imagination long before he was in Trump's cabinet. You might recall that Hegseth was one of the weekend hosts of Fox & Friends before he got the job as Secretary of Defense. It was in that job that he had a fairly notorious axe-throwing incident. Here's what we know about it.

In 2015, when Fox & Friends was doing some axe throwing outside of the studio, Pete Hegseth went viral for missing the target altogether and instead throwing his axe over the back of the axe-throwing display and hitting West Point drummer Jeff Prosperie. Thankfully, no one was killed or seriously injured, but there's a reason that places where you can throw axes typically have lots of protective barriers surrounding the actual event.

Although many have come to blame Hegseth for the incident, in part because of all the things he has done since, the reality is that the axe-throwing setup was a mistake to begin with. You had to know there was a possibility that the axe would hit something other than its intended target, and the fact that they took no steps to protect against that is a failure of the show's producers.

According to reporting in The Associated Press, Hegseth and Fox News were both named in a lawsuit that was filed by Prosperie after the incident. The lawsuit was dropped in 2019, and Hegseth's attorney said, “The parties have resolved the matter and will make no further comment.”

Fox News immediately apologized to Prosperie and offered him medical treatment, which he declined.

Prosperie has also returned to the network to perform with the West Point band.

Ultimately, then, this incident seems like just an unfortunate and embarrassing accident that Hegseth is only partly to blame for. It might feel easy to lay this at his feet, but he just happened to be the Fox News host to make the worst throw on display.

What seems more relevant, though, is the fact that a man could go almost instantly from hosting the weekend edition of a morning show on a cable network to leading one of the biggest bureaucracies in the world. It's fair to say that Hegseth's first few months on the job have been rough, and given the fact that he did not have much experience as a leader of huge organizations, that's to be expected.