Donald Trump, claiming a mandate from his narrow popular vote win, intends to purge the U.S. military from top to bottom and put a Fox News host in charge of the whole thing, hoping to root out any “woke” dissenters and install loyalists in their place who will not object to his using America’s armed forces in ways that may be ill-advised, malicious or both.
As the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, the president-elect’s transition team has reviewed an executive order, which Trump could sign on day one, that would create a “warrior board” of retired MAGA military guys who would recommend or rubber stamp the firing of anyone in the chain of command who they deem lacking in “leadership qualities.”
The current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is as good as gone. In 2020, Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., who served as commander of the Pacific Air Forces during Trump’s first term in office, spoke out about racism following the police murder of George Floyd.
“I’m thinking about my Air Force career where I was often the only African American in my squadron or, as a senior officer, the only African American in the room,” Brown said in a video address at the time. The killing and subsequent conversation about institutional racism, Brown continued, had forced him to consider how he could better promote “the value of diversity.”
Such talk will not be tolerated anymore.
“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.” So says Pete Hegseth, who at the start of the week was a Fox News morning show personality but by Tuesday afternoon was Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense and its 2.8 million employees. Speaking on a right-wing podcast before he was chosen to lead the Pentagon, the 44-year-old veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made the case for a purge, calling for the termination of “any general, any admiral, whatever,” who had promoted “woke s**t,” per The Washington Post.
A former prison guard at Guantanamo Bay, Hegseth is best known for two things: Boasting that he does not believe in germs and acts accordingly — “Fox host says he ‘hasn’t washed hands in 10 years,’” the BBC reported in 2019 — and defending alleged war crimes. During Trump’s first term in office, the “Fox & Friends” alum was at the center of a to get the president to pardon soldiers who had been accused or convicted of murder.
Using his television platform, Hegseth tirelessly promoted the case for freeing Eddie Gallagher, who was accused by his fellow soldiers of brazenly murdering civilians. He was ultimately convicted by a military tribunal of “wrongfully posing for an unofficial picture with a human casualty” (an unarmed, teenage prisoner he had stabbed to death in Afghanistan) but found not guilty of more severe offenses; at Hegseth’s urging, Trump then granted him clemency and, overriding military leadership, restored his Navy SEAL Trident Pin — broadcasting that Gallgher’s sociopathic behavior was to be deemed honorable.
A member of the military must behave quite badly for their fellow soldiers, all trained killers, to turn them in. But in their raging against “woke” military elites, Hegseth and Trump are not merely concerned with diversity, equality and inclusion: no, liberal treachery, in their view, extends to the laws of war and the demands that U.S. soldiers comply with them.
That willingness to defend and indeed celebrate evil is no doubt a major factor in Hegseth’s rise; so too is his prominent jawline — he just looks like a military guy, which very much matters to a president who owes his rise to television — and the fact, too, that he is a relative nobody: “Who the f**k is this guy?” one defense lobbyist asked Politico. This is not a pick with sufficient gravitas to push back on a potentially illegal order, like a demand that U.S. troops go out and shoot protesters in the streets (as Trump considered doing amid the 2020 civil unrest, according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper), but rather someone chosen because he’ll just be happy to be there, signing off on whatever the president wants.
“From silly diner interviews on Weekend Fox and Friends to Secretary of Defense?” former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson posted on social media, saying she was “stunned” by the pick.
“This guy is clearly a sycophant for Donald Trump,” Rep, Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., commented on CNN. He is also clearly unqualified, Goldman said, a troubling fact that points to why he was chosen — to “get revenge on generals” and turn the state into his “own personal fiefdom.”
“I’m very concerned by this, and I’m very concerned about what it demonstrated about Donald Trump’s priorities,” Goldman said.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
It’s not just Democrats sounding the alarm. Journalist and author Jeff Shartlet argues that the selection of Hegseth is as troubling a sign as Trump’s pick for deputy chief of staff, signaling his intent to carry out mass deportations and ensure that the military answers not to the U.S. Constitution but to one 78-year-old man. “[T]his is a Stephen Miller-level appointment,” Sharlet wrote on his website. “Full fash.”
To back up that claim — that this is the “fascism” that John Kelly and others warned about — Sharlet cites a recent book authored by (or attributed to) Hegseth, in which he fully embraces the president-elect’s rhetoric about the “enemy from within.” Indeed, Hegseth himself refers to the left as “domestic enemies,” writing: “Antifa, BLM, now Hamas supporters and other progressive storm troopers have done their best to create little Samarras,” referring to a city he deployed to in Iraq.
“Marxists are our enemies,” he continued, and while they’ve made gains the real battle for America has not yet begun. “Leftists stole a lot from us, but we won’t let them take this. Time for round two — we won’t miss this war.”
In the eyes of the military, Hegseth has already been dubbed an “extremist,” as he himself admitted in an interview that aired earlier this year on Fox News. As a member of the National Guard, he was supposed to protect President Joe Biden’s inauguration, despite the fact that he denies the outcome of the 2020 election. “Ultimately, members of my own 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,” Hegseth claimed, feigning ignorance of the fact that cross has indeed been embraced by far-right activists who imagine themselves fighting a modern-day Crusade.
We do not know what 2025 will bring and forecasts of doom could well be punctured by the mere dismal reality of gross incompetence; the future may just be dumb. But what we can say for sure is that Trump has talked about using the military however he sees fit, including against immigrants and native-born dissenters, and he has now named to lead that military someone who has never once disagreed with him. It is not a good sign.
