Letters from an American
Last night’s Friday Night
News Dump was a doozy: Trump has purged the country’s military leadership. He
has fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown, who Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested got the job only because he is Black, and
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who was the first woman to
serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire.” As
soon as he took office, Trump fired U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda
Lee Fagan, giving her just three hours to vacate her home on base. Last
night, Trump also fired the Air Force vice chief of staff, General James
Slife. In place of Brown, Trump
has said he will nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who
goes by the nickname “Razin”—as in “Razin Caine”—to be the next chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is the body of the eight
most senior uniformed leaders within the United States Department of Defense.
It advises the president, the secretary of defense, the Homeland Security
Council and the National Security Council on military matters. The chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in
the United States Armed Forces and is the principal military advisor to the
president, the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council, and the
secretary of defense. Caine has held none of
the assignments that are required for elevation to this position. His
military biography says he was a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty
and in the National Guard. Before he retired, he was the associate director
for military affairs at the CIA. The law prohibits the elevation of someone
at his level to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unless the president
waives the law because “such action is necessary in the national interest.” Marshall notes that Trump
is “reaching far down the pecking order to someone who isn’t even on active
duty in the military for the critical position not only as the chief military
advisor to the President…but the key person at the contact point of civilian
control over the military.” In Trump’s telling, his support for Caine comes
from the military officer’s support for him. “I love you, sir. I think you’re
great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir,” Trump claims Caine said to him. Trump
went on to claim that Caine put on a Make America Great Again hat, despite
rules against political messaging on the clothing of active-duty troops. Trump appears to be
purging military officers with the intent of replacing them with loyalists
while intimidating others to bow to his demands. It seems worth recalling
here that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) stalled the nominations of 451
senior military officers for close to a year in 2023. On February 10, Trump
purged the advisory bodies of the military academies for the Army, Air Force,
Navy, and Coast Guard, saying: “Our Service Academies have been infiltrated
by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years…. We will have the
strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals
to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!” The purge of military
leaders wasn’t the only news last night. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
indicated he intends to fire the judge advocates general, or JAGs—the
military lawyers who administer the military code of justice—for the Army,
Navy, and Air Force. “Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who
determine what is a legal order and what’s not,” Talking Points Memo’s
Marshall pointed out. “If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an
obvious obstacle.” “Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services,
the Justice Department, and the FBI,” military specialist Tom Nichols wrote
in The
Atlantic, “the military is the last piece he needs to establish
the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government.” National Security Leaders
for America, a bipartisan organization of people who served in senior
leadership positions in all six military branches, elected federal and state
offices, and various government departments and agencies, strongly condemned
the firings, and urged “policymakers, elected officials, and the American
public to reject efforts to politicize our military.” Observers point out how
the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military
loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism.
They note that Trump expressed frustration with military leaders during his
first term when they resisted illegal orders, saying, as then-chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did, that in America “[w]e don’t take an
oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an
oath to a wannabe dictator…. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take
an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America,
and we’re willing to die to protect it.” Observers note that
during his first term, Trump said he wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler
had,” apparently unaware that Hitler’s generals tried to kill him and instead
imagining they were all fiercely loyal. They also note that authoritarian
leader Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union purged his officer corps to make
sure it was commanded by those loyal to him. While the pattern is
universal, this is a homegrown version of that universal pattern. In order to undermine the
liberal consensus that supported government regulation of business, provision
of a basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, and protection of
civil rights, reactionaries in the 1950s began to insist that such a government
was socialism. A true American, they claimed, was an individual man who
wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to provide for
himself and his family. In contrast to what they
believed was the “socialism” of the government, they took as their symbol the
mythologized version of the western American cowboy. In the mid-1950s,
Americans tuned in to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Wagon Train,
and The Lone Ranger to see hardworking white men fighting off
evil, seemingly without help from the government. In 1959 there were
twenty-six westerns on TV, and in a single week in March 1959, eight of the
top shows were westerns. When Arizona senator
Barry Goldwater, in his white cowboy hat, won the Republican presidential
nomination in 1964, the cowboy image became entwined with the reactionary
faction in the party, and Ronald Reagan quite deliberately nurtured that
image. Under Reagan, Republicans emphasized that an individual man should run
his life however he wished, had a right to use a gun to defend his way of
life, and that his way of life was under attack by Black Americans, people of
color, and women. It was an image that fit
well with American popular culture, but their cowboy was always a myth: it
didn’t reflect the reality that one third of cowboys were Black or men of
color, or that cowboys were low-wage workers whose lives mirrored those of
eastern factory workers. The real West was a network of family ties and
communities, where women won the right to vote significantly before eastern
women did, in large part because of their importance to the economy and the
education that western people prized. In the 1990s that
individualist cowboy image spurred the militia movement, and over the past
forty years it has become tightly bound to the reactionary Republican project
to get rid of the government Americans constructed after 1933 to serve the
public good. Now it is driving both the purge of women, people of color, and
Black Americans from public life and the growing idea that leadership means
domination. Trump and Hegseth’s concept of “warfighters” in an American
military that doesn’t answer to the law but simply asserts power is the
American cowboy hideously warped into fascism. In a press conference in
Brussels, Belgium, on February 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told
reporters: “We can talk all we want about values. Values are important. But
you can't shoot values. You can't shoot flags and you can't shoot strong
speeches. There is no replacement for hard power. As much as we may not want
to like the world we live in, in some cases, there's nothing like hard
power.” That statement came after
a troubling exchange between Hegseth and Senator Angus King (I-ME) during
Hegseth’s nomination hearings. King noted that in one of his books, Hegseth
had said that soldiers—he referred to them as “our boys”—"should not
fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms 80 years ago."
King noted that Hegseth was referring to “the Geneva Conventions,” a set of
international rules that try to contain the barbarity of war and outlawed
torture, and he wanted Hegseth to explain what he meant when he wrote:
"America should fight by its own rules, and we should fight to win or
not go in at all." Hegseth explained that
“there are the rules we swear an oath to defend, which are incredibly
important, and…then there are those echelons above reality from, you know,
corps to division to brigade, to battalion. And by the time it trickles down
to a company or a platoon or a squad level, you have a rules of engagement
that nobody recognizes.” “So you are saying that the Geneva Convention should
not be observed?” King asked. “We follow rules,” Hegseth said. “But we don't
need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win
these wars. And that's what President Trump understands.” Hegseth refused to say he
would abide by the Geneva Conventions. He refused to condemn torture. This idea that modern
warfare requires torture shines a harsh light on Trump’s January 29 order to
the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-bed
detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to detain
migrants Trump called "the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the
American people.” Rather than simply deporting them, he said, “Some of them
are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't
want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.” Now it appears the White
House is moving even beyond turning the military into cowboys with unlimited
powers. On Thursday the White House posted on X a 40-second video that
purported to be of migrants, in shackles and chains, faceless as the chains
clank, with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” As Andrew
Egger explained in The Bulwark, ASMR videos use video
cues to create feelings of relaxation and euphoria, or “tingles.” No longer is the cruelty
of utter domination a necessity for safety, it appears. Now it is a form of
sensual pleasure for its own sake. As Jeff Sharlet wrote in Scenes from
a Slow Civil War: “Listen to this, the White House is
saying. This will make you feel good.” It is, he points out, “a
bondage video” in which “[t]he sound of other people’s pain is the intended
pleasure.” Elon Musk posted over the
video: “Haha wow,” with an emoji of a troll and a gold medal. While MAGA seems to have
turned an American icon into the basis for a fascist fantasy, President
Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901 after the assassination of
President William McKinley, had actually worked as a cowboy and deliberately
applied what he believed to be the values of the American West to the country
as a whole. He insisted that all Americans must have a “Square Deal”—the
equal protection of the laws—that the government must clean up the cities,
protect the environment, provide education and healthcare, and stop the
wealthy from controlling the government. And, when Roosevelt
learned that American soldiers had engaged in torture in the Philippines, he
deplored those acts. He promised that “determined and unswerving effort” was
“being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our
troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger
measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence
of all such acts in the future.” — Notes: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/152 https://time.com/7260646/trump-fires-chairman-joint-chiefs-of-staff-other-military-officers/ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/us/politics/dan-caine-trump-joint-chiefs.html https://apnews.com/article/tuberville-senate-military-holds-b4d4fe19bada70a085208c9d82c35cb5 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/cq-brown-and-friday-night-massacre/681803/ https://www.nsl4a.org/nsl4a-announcements/nsl4a-statement-firing-senior-military-officers
The Cruelty
Isn’t the Point. It’s the Pleasure. Over
the years, we’ve piled up some indelible images of gutless Republican
surrender to Trump. Ted Cruz’s face of pure pain as he phone-banked for Trump
in 2016. Mitt Romney’s rueful smile at dinner with Trump after that election.
And now, a dead-eyed Marco Rubio cheerleading Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine
from… 4 days ago · 1075 likes ·
397 comments · William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Will Selber
My
phone buzzed: a text message from a friend. “WTAF.” Below that, a link to a
tweet. The official White House account. “ASMR Illegal Alien Deportation
Flight.” There was an emoji of a stereo speaker. I looked up ASMR, a term I’d
heard before but with which I wasn’t familiar. Recent vintage; it stands for
“autonomous sensory median response.” People ref… 3 days ago · 219 likes · 59
comments · Jeff Sharlet Donald Trump, Truth
Social post, February 10, 2025, 9:16 a.m. “Westerns,” Time,
March 30, 1959, p. 52. https://www.axios.com/2025/02/10/trump-military-academy-visitors-boards-purge https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-memorial-day-arlington-virginia https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/29/milley-farewell-speech-trump-dictator-00119130 https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ominous-3 Bluesky: televisionary.bsky.social/post/3liqdmunk622r jeffsharlet.bsky.social/post/3lik6ld4pnc2c YouTube: You’re currently a free subscriber
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© 2025 Heather Cox Richardson
|
The Bulwark
Scenes from a Slow Civil War
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