Letters from an American - February 22, 2025

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

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February 22nd, 2025. 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 US 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 Cain, who goes by the nickname Raisin, as in Raisin Cain, 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. Cain 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. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo 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 Cain 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 Cain said to him. Trump went on to claim that Cain 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, a Republican of Alabama, stalled the nominations of 451 senior military officers for close to a year in 2023. On February 10th, 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 indicates 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 points, 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 US government. National Security Leaders for America, a bipartisan organization of people who served in senior leaderships 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, we don't take an oath to a king or a queen or to a ty 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 26 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 40 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 war fighters

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 13th, 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's 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 Hengagseth and Senator Angus King, an independent of Maine, during Hagseth's nomination hearings. King noted that in one of his books, Hagseth 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 Hegson 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 Hegson 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. Hegson explained that there are rules we swear an oath to defend which are incredibly important and then there are those echelons above reality from you know core 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. or a squad level, you have a rules of engagement that nobody recognizes.

So are you 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 29th 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, illegal alien deportation flight. As Andrew Egger explained in the bulwark, ASMR videos use audio 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's a form of sensual pleasure for its own sake. As Jeff Charlotte 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 the sound of other people's pain is the intended pleasure. Elon Musk posted over the video, ha ha wow, with an emoji of a troll and a gold medal. While Magus 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 health care, 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 that have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.