CNN
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In a dramatic Friday night purge, President Donald Trump took decisive action to avoid a repeat of his first term when he tussled with senior military leaders, by firing America’s top general and removing others in an effort to ensure he has a fully compliant Pentagon.
At a good time to try and bury major news— Trump’s most senior military adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown and the top US navy officer, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti were both fired. Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also announced he is seeking nominations to replace the top military lawyers at the Air Force, Army and Navy who sign off on the legality of US military operations.
None of these officials seem to have been fired for cause, such as poor performance on the battlefield or insubordination, other than a purported obsession with DEI in the case of General Brown, according to Hegseth’s 2024 book.
Trump wants to remake the Pentagon, so he has total control over it. Of course, he is the Commander in Chief so it’s his prerogative to do so, but by firing Brown who is Black and Franchetti who was the first woman to run the Navy, Trump signaled that unquestioned loyalty will be the key qualification for these jobs rather than providing the best military advice to the president irrespective of American domestic politics, which is meant to be the key function of the roles.
Trump has been obsessed with the US military from an early age. He attended a military-style boarding school in New York and one of his heroes is General George Patton, an aggressive battlefield commander during World War II.
So, when Trump took office in his first term, he quickly surrounded himself with senior generals; retired four-star General John Kelly was his second chief of staff; retired four-star General James Mattis was his first secretary of defense and active duty three-star Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster was his second national security adviser.
Trump reveled in talking about “my generals” such as “Mad Dog” Mattis, and he also took a boyish delight in the ceremonial aspects of being the commander in chief. Trump was wowed by the French display of military hardware that he saw at the Bastille Day celebration in Paris on July 14, 2016.
Trump ordered the Pentagon to put on a similar show for his “Salute to America” Independence Day speech on July 4, 2019, and the generals didn’t disappoint. During his speech, Trump did a play-by-play account of a fly-by of advanced US Air Force planes flying overhead, announcing, “You will soon see beautiful brand-new F-22 Raptors” and “a magnificent B-2 stealth bomber.”
But Trump’s bromances with his generals soured over time (nota bene, Elon!) because Kelly, Mattis and McMaster each in their different ways wouldn’t comply with Trump’s wishes, as I found when I was reporting my book, “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.”
McMaster wore out his welcome with Trump, in part, because he advocated for staying the course in Afghanistan and expanding the US troop presence there. Trump had long wanted to get out of Afghanistan and after McMaster was eased out after just over a year on the job, Trump authorized his team to start negotiating with the Taliban a total US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
For his part, Mattis worried that Trump would start World War III and when in 2017, Trump was ratcheting up his rhetoric against the nuclear-armed North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, Mattis “slow rolled” providing potential military options against North Korea. Mattis also delayed providing military options, for any kind of potential conflict with Iran.
Trump’s final break with Mattis came over the fight against ISIS in Syria. Mattis believed US troops should stay in Syria after ISIS’s defeat there to prevent any return of the terrorist group, while Trump insisted on withdrawing from Syria. Mattis also felt that this left the Syrian Kurdish forces that had been fighting ISIS vulnerable to attack by the powerful Turkish military and would mean abandoning an ally on the battlefield.
On December 19, 2018, Trump tweeted about his order to pull all US troops out of Syria. The following day Mattis met with Trump in the Oval Office and tried to persuade the president to reverse his decision. Trump wouldn’t budge so Mattis resigned.
Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, viewed his time in the White House by what he’d managed to prevent on his watch, for instance, Trump abruptly pulling US troops out of Afghanistan, or withdrawing from NATO. Trump hates being “managed” so his relationship with Kelly soured too and he left the White House in December 2018.
A decisive break between Trump and many US flag officers came during the nationwide protests sparked by the murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Just outside the White House grounds on June 3, police, with National Guard troops in reserve, attacked peaceful protesters near St. John’s Church. At the church Trump held up a Bible for the cameras.
After resigning Mattis had said little about Trump. Now he released a damning statement saying: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”
Trump’s then-Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, a former officer in the US Army who had replaced Mattis, publicly said that he would not support using active-duty US troops to quell protests which Trump had recently threatened to do. Esper was fired by tweet six months later.
Yet another break with the Pentagon happened following the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol by Trump supporters. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that there was no chance of the US launching a military attack against China. On Twitter Trump then suggested that Milley should be executed for his conversation with the Chinese general.
The scar tissue from Trump’s past fights with Pentagon leaders has resulted in Trump’s intention to take total control over the Department of Defense. We saw a hint of that in the final months of his first term when Trump installed an ultra-loyalist, Kash Patel, to the powerful job of chief of staff at the Pentagon. Patel was recently voted in by the Senate to become the new director of the FBI.
Trump expects nothing less than Patel-levels of loyalty in his generals and top officials at the Pentagon. And Friday night’s purge of six senior military officers is likely to be just the aperitif since Hegseth is now looking for tens of billions of dollars of cuts at his department and he’ll likely have to lose significant numbers of personnel.