Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments -- now including a war in the Middle East.
Tom Nichols on the Defense Department in wartime:
The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.
Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out,” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.
Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI hires. He pushed for the removal of the then–chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C. Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men. But dumping the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards. George is a decorated combat veteran who was slated to stay in his job until 2027, and he has never publicly feuded with Hegseth—despite having good reason to do so.\
On Trump's bad address to the nation:
A speech that should have been a clear explanation of why the United States is fighting a nation of 92 million people began instead in shambolic style. He discussed the operation that captured the president of Venezuela, perhaps hoping to make listeners believe that the Iran war will be a similarly short operation. He then said that Iran has taken losses never seen “in the history of warfare”—as if the destruction of, say, the Axis in World War II had never happened.
Trump offered little that was new, instead repeating the same lines from a short video presentation the night that he ordered attacks on the Islamic Republic, more than one month ago. He listed—rightly and correctly—the various offenses that the fanatical Iranian regime has perpetrated against the United States and other countries for nearly a half century. But he couldn’t help himself: He patted himself on the back for killing the Iranian terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani in his first term, and for canceling the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama. (“Barack Hussein Obama,” of course.) The United States, Trump claimed in a strange moment, had emptied out all the banks in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia as part of that deal—“all the cash they had”—to send that “green, green” currency to Iran.
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