Marc Maron (5:17)

Sweeping Changes at the Pentagon President Trump firing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country's highest ranking military officer, Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr. Only the second black general to serve as chairman, was serving a four year term that was set to expire in 2027. For months, Trump and his allies have vowed to immediately fire military leaders they deem too focused on diversity initiatives, often referring to Brown specifically.

John (5:45)

On Friday, President Donald Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Air Force General Charles C.Q. brown Jr. As part of a series of dismissals of top Pentagon officials. Shortly after Trump announced Brown's dismissal, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he would replace Admiral Lisa Franchetti, chief of US Naval Operations and general James Sliff, the Air Force's vice chief of staff, as well as the Judge Advocate Generals, the military's top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. Furthermore, the Pentagon said it plans to fire approximately 5,400 probationary employees and implement a hiring freeze in accordance with President Trump's executive orders. For context, the Senate confirmed Brown as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff following an 8311 vote in September 2023, making him the nation's highest ranking military officer and the principal military advisor to the president, the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council. The chairman's four year term typically spans presidential administrations, though Brown's future had been in question since President Trump's reelection. Trump thanked Brown for his service in a post announcing his dismissal, calling him a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, but did not offer a rationale for the move. The president said he would nominate retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan Raisin Kane to replace Brown, claiming that Kaine had been passed over for promotion by President Joe Biden. Kaine served as an F16 fighter pilot in the military, then as associate director for military affairs for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Director of Special Programs at the Department of Defense Special Access Program Center Central office at the Pentagon. If confirmed by the Senate, Kaine would become the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to come out of retirement to fill the position. Franchetti and Slif were also nominated for their roles by former President Biden, and Franchetti was the first woman to serve as the highest ranking official of the Navy. In a statement, Hegseth thanked them for their service, but also did not specify a reason for their dismissal. While the firing surprised some in the military community, they had seemingly been in the works from the beginning of Trump's presidential transition. In mid November, Reuters reported that Trump's team was drafting a list of top military officials to dismiss early in his term, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump had previously promised to fire woke members of the military, and he signed an executive order on January 27th directing the defense Department to end all diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and programs. Separately, Hegseth said in November that Brown should be fired due to his purported support of DEI initiatives in the armed forces. Senator Jack Reid, the Democrat from Rhode island, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, criticized the firings. This appears to be part of a broader, premeditated campaign by President Trump and Secretary Hegseth to purge talented officers for politically charged reasons, reid said. Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina defended the moves, saying President Trump, like every president, deserves to pick military advisors that he knows, trusts and has a relationship with. Today, we'll share reactions to the firings from the right and the left and then Isaac's take.

Isaac Saul (9:08)

We'll be right back after this quick break.

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John (10:46)

All right, first up, let's start with what the right is saying. The right is mostly supportive of the firings, though many say Brown's dismissal was the least defensible of the moves. Some frame the move as a shift in the military's focus away from progressive initiatives. Others say Trump's pick to replace the chief of naval operations will be a key test, the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote. Trump Sweeps out Biden's officers as commander in chief, President Trump has the power to fire and promote military advisers as he chooses. The question that occurs after his Friday evening purge of Pentagon leaders is whether he wants personal loyalty or honest military counsel, the board said such dismissals usually come with a specific reason or performance failure. Trump and Hegseth offered no reason for Friday's purge except for a general assertion that they will make choices based only on merit and war fighting ability, in that case firing C. Q Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs is unfortunate. He understands the challenge from China and he has thought about how to defeat it, arguing for more modern equipment and embracing new tech, the board wrote. Firing Admiral Lisa Franchetti as Navy chief is a closer call. The Biden administration did her no favors by making her elevation more about group identity than her command experience. The firing of the senior Judge Advocate generals, military lawyers or JAGs, is the least concerning. Despite the media panic that this will lead to an era of lawlessness. The JAG Corps had embarrassing prosecutorial mistakes in recent years in rules of engagement. They now can lean too far toward risk elimination over mission success. In the Federalist, Sean Fleetwood said the firings marked a major step toward restoring lethality and efficiency to the Pentagon. President Donald Trump fired his Joint Chiefs of Staff chair and other DEI pushing military officials on Friday night, marking a major step toward restoring lethality and efficiency to the Pentagon, fleetwood wrote. Trump's move is welcome news for Americans and service members concerned about the spread of neo Marxist ideology throughout the military. Shortly after Legacy Media broke the news about his impending nomination, the Federalist first reported about Brown's promotion of dei, diversity, equity and inclusion, which military specialists and veterans have argued hampers the force's overall readiness. The former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair has also pushed back on Republican criticisms of DEI in the military and signed off on a 2022 Air Force memo directing the Air Force Academy and Air Force Education and Training Command to develop a diversity and inclusion outreach plan aimed at achieving a force more representative of our nation, fleetwood said. Much like Brown, Slif and Franchetti have not been shy about their positions to promote DEI and other leftist ideology in the military. In Fox News, Rebecca Grant explored how the Pentagon purge can succeed even with Doge on the move. The firings of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff general C. Q. Brown and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti stunned Washington. In part, that's because no one got fired over national security issues during the Biden years. Not even when they deserved it. Not for the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. Not for bad estimates about Russia's intentions in Ukraine. Not for the open southern border. Not even for the lapse in nuclear command and control when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was in the hospital, grant wrote. The fact is, four star officers know they can be let go at any moment. It's a job risk. To be clear, Brown departs with great credit for the way he rallied American air power to defend Israel against Iran's two vicious drone and missile attacks last year. However, Friday's firings at the Pentagon can succeed if they lead to better preparedness against China. My real concern here is the Navy. This is a critical moment and the Navy is in dire need of strong leadership, grant said. With the chief of naval operations slot open, President Trump needs a carrier admiral to step in. It has been 25 years since a naval aviator led as chief of naval operations. During that time period, China has built hundreds of new Navy ships, including three aircraft carriers, and now poses a serious threat to the Pacific. Alright, that is it for what the right is saying. Which brings us to what the left is saying. The left criticizes the firings, arguing Trump is continuing to hollow out key checks on his power. Some say the message sent by the dismissals will make it harder for officers to give honest counsel. Others suggest Trump is putting loyalty over merit. In the Atlantic, Tom Nichols called the firings a Friday night massacre at the Pentagon. President Donald Trump tonight began a purge of the senior ranks of the United States Armed Forces in an apparent effort to intimidate the military and create an officer corps personally loyal to him, nichols wrote. Trump is the president who nominated Brown to be Air Force chief of staff in 2020. Biden appointed Brown as chairman in 2023. Trump gave no reason for the firing and Hegseth issued a boilerplate statement thanking Brown. Normally the chairman serves a four year term, the position that, like FBI director, is meant to bridge across administrations rather than change with each incoming president. Obviously, Trump has no use for such conventions and believes that every senior official in the United States should be a personal appointee of the president so long as that president is him, nichols said. Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department and the FBI, the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the US Government. In the Washington Post, Senator Jack Reid, the Democrat from Rhode island, wrote, firing military officers for perceived disloyalty endangers the nation. The implications for our national security cannot be overstated. A clear message is being sent to military leaders. Failure to demonstrate personal and political loyalty to Trump could result in retribution even after decades of honorable service, Reid said. In particular, firing the military's most senior legal advisers is an unprecedented and explicit move to install officers who will yield to the president's interpretation of the law with the expectation they will be little more than yes men on the most consequential questions of military law. The firings are sure to create a dangerous ripple up and down the ranks. Leaders might hesitate to refuse illegal orders, speak their minds about best practices, or call out abuses of power, reid wrote. A commitment to provide the best military advice exists at every level in the ranks. Commanders expect their troops to give them the facts straight and true because lives are on the line. But firing officers as a political litmus test poisons this military ethos. It sends an immediate signal to service members that the best military advice might have career ending consequences. The Economist criticized Trump's dismissal of America's top military brass. The sackings have little to do with kindling the warrior ethos, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vows to do. General Brown has clocked more than 3,000 flight hours, including 130 in combat. Admiral Franchetti had commanded not one but two aircraft carrier strike groups, the author said. Instead, they are casualties of the culture wars that the Trump administration is waging against diversity, equity and inclusion. General Brown is the most prominent black military officer. Admirals Fagan and Franchetti were the first women in their jobs. The military establishment is also under assault from the chainsaw of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The Pentagon hopes to cut 5 to 8% of the civilian workforce, starting with some 5,400 probationary workers. Mr. Hegseth has also asked service chiefs to present immediate plans to slice 8% from their budgets to make room for new priorities, the author wrote. What Mr. Trump demands, though, is personal loyalty, and his administration is sweeping aside norms across the federal government with surprising speed. Indeed, the sacking of the three Judge Advocates general raises worrying questions about how far the Pentagon is prepared to test conventional legal restraints. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take.

Isaac Saul (19:17)

All right. That is it for what the left and the right are saying. Which brings us to my take. So in my review of the first months of Trump's presidency, one of the things that upset a lot of people about my take, including one of my editors, was a line criticizing some of the overreactions to Trump's unimportant and meaningless nonsense. And I had a parenthetical that said, as many on the left are keen to do, a lot of tangle readers took exception to that line or assigned unintended meaning to it. Like that the left overreacts more than the right, which is not what I was trying to say. My point was that when people on the left blow things Trump says or does out of proportion, it does three things. One, it distracts from his more meaningful and potentially more dangerous actions two, it creates a boy who cried wolf dynamic that makes urgent warnings appear unimportant. And three, it also gives Trump exactly what he wants, since he's very good at provoking his political opponents and keeping them focused on less important things. Around the same time I was reading the criticism of that line, the story about Trump firing some military leaders came out. And then Representative Seth Moulton, the Democrat from Massachusetts, said this, quote, dictators or wannabe kings fire generals who don't agree with their politics. This isn't a banana republic. This isn't exactly the kind of overreaction I had in mind, but it's pretty close. As Vice President J.D. vance and even some Trump critical conservatives have already pointed out, presidents have the absolute right to fire and promote military leaders of their choosing. What's more, past presidents, including Barack Obama and Harry Truman, made similar firings. President Biden probably should have fired some staff after the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, but he didn't. To put this simply, Trump cleaning house of the military is not the stuff of a banana republic. It's not a constitutional crisis, and it doesn't make him a dictator. Trump himself didn't even justify his decision with his top shelf rhetorical fire. He thanked Brown for his service, calling him a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, and he wished him well. It all felt rather tame, to be honest. As I wrote on Friday, Trump is serving up plenty of other reasons for us to be concerned. Trying to clean house at the FBI and Department of justice, insisting he is above the law, elevating people like Musk who then call on journalists to be thrown in prison or fired, and so on. But here, Trump is well within his rights and even has some precedent to lean on to justify the firings. At the same time, the fact that these firings are constitutionally sound doesn't mean I have to like them. For starters, the defense by people like Vance is incomplete. Truman and Obama fired top generals, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they both had cause for their firings. The Trump administration did not, or at least no stated one. Indeed, Trump nominated Brown to be the Air Force Chief of staff in 2020, and Biden then appointed him to be chairman in 2023. The only reason apparent to me comes from Pete Hegseth, who suggested in his book that Brown may have only gotten the job because he was black. That sentiment was echoed by writers like Sean Fleetwood under what the Right Is Saying, who insisted that Brown's dismissal was part of some broader triumph over DEI in the military. I've got to say, a lot of people in Trump's orbit seem to be using DEI as a code word for black these days. Legitimate criticisms of DEI and DEI programs, many of which I share, are abundant. One can reasonably advance the opinion that the programs worsen race problems or elevate less qualified people to important positions or have tended to exclude or harm Asian Americans. But again, Brown was appointed by Trump and promoted by Biden. Yes, he is black. Yes, he has opinions about what being a black person in America is like, and he has stated them plainly. He's talked about how it's impacted his life and his career. It is also true that on paper he has all the experience one would want of a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In a sick twist of irony, of course, Hegseth, the under qualified Secretary of State who has trumpeted meritocracy has appointed a replacement for Brown, who literally needs a waiver from the President to take the job because he doesn't meet the minimum legal qualifications. As for the other military leaders and the judge advocates General and the military who were also fired, I honestly wasn't very familiar with their careers before Friday. So I won't pretend to be an expert on how impactful replacing them will be. But within the context of a focus on reduction in staffing at the Department of Defense, their firings seem incoherent too. As I've written in Tangle, if you want to reduce government expenditures and waste, you must include the military. So when I saw the news accompanying these firings that the Pentagon is planning to let go of 5,400 probationary employees and implement a hiring freeze, I thought, well, at least they are consistent. The bad news though, is that Trump and Republicans are simultaneously pushing a budget that will increase the debt and deficit by trillions of dollars over the next decade, while also further jacking up defense spending? I have a hard time following Trump's plan. What goal or objective is Trump hoping from the military that those fired weren't helping him achieve? When fit into a broader context of cuts, it seems like the administration's firings aren't helping them towards their stated objectives, whether it's releasing functional personnel to try to balance the budget or hiring amply qualified military leaders to try to improve the military. So while I think fears of a constitutional crisis are overblown, I also have no idea what exactly Trump's long term plan is. We'll be right back after this. Quick.

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John (25:58)

All.

Isaac Saul (25:59)

Right, that is it for my take. Which brings us to your questions answered today. I'm actually going to use this section to respond to reader feedback that did not have a direct question attached to it, but caught my eye anyway. I saw this comment from a reader named Denise on part one of my review of Trump's first month, and it was voted as the top comment on the article via People Liking it. This is what it said. Generally, I agree with much of what you wrote, but I am surprised and disappointed that there was not even a mention anywhere of his executive orders targeting the freedoms of transgender Americans, which are devoid of even a basic understanding of human developmental biology, attempt to take away the responsibility for health care of children from doctors and parents, and even accuse transgender soldiers in our military of being immoral and dishonorable. He has gone so far as to attempt to remove the TQ from the general terminology of lgbtq. I realize this is a small percentage of the population, but that is precisely why they should not be targeted. So I'm always of two minds about this kind of feedback. Since Trump got inaugurated, I've noticed that most of the top comments in Tangle's comment section are often arguments that strike me as kind of bad faith or straw man points to what we have written, which as an observer was pretty frustrating. On the other hand, it's a totally reasonable thing to say, you're looking here, you should be looking there. In fact, it's the kind of feedback I typically find most useful. Comments like this are helpful in that way because they give us a sense of the kinds of stories our readers might think are more important or help us uncover stories not getting enough coverage. So let me respond to the feedback directly first. We already dedicated a whole issue to the story, and broadly speaking, my take is not that far off from what Will Kbach wrote. I don't think the federal government should be dictating rules for every sport at the top level. They seem to know this at least in some capacity, as even Trump's order requires representatives of the governing bodies of major sports to standardize their eligibility requirements within 60 days. My ideal situation would be to extend this approach across the country. Let sporting governing bodies in state and local school districts decide how to handle this on their own. To give one simple example, I absolutely agree that trans women who went through male puberty participating in collegiate wrestling would be a major issue for several reasons. But on a personal note, I play Ultimate Frisbee, a sport that has a very progressive ethos at the REC level and even elite levels. I have teammates in mixed ultimate who are trans women and as a community the athletes, leaders and governing body of the sport are supportive of them playing concurrent with their gender identity. I don't think that the federal government should be trying to strong arm those leagues into doing something that athletes and community leaders don't want to do. Second, just to contextualize the absence of this issue from my review, I think it's worth pointing out a few other things that also weren't included. I didn't write a sentence about Trump fulfilling his promise to take executive action that was supportive of IVF or the cuts to the Department of Education or the confirmation of Cash Patel or even the early stages of Republicans massive spending fight. But these are each huge stories in their own right, and their absence is less evidence of apathy than it is evidence of how difficult it is to respond to everything from the last four or five weeks. Even when we publish a two part 10,000 word edition, we can't get to it all. All right, that is it for your questions answered. I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the pod. Good to be back with you guys and I'll see you tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace Foreign.

John (29:30)

Thanks Isaac here's your under the Radar story for today, folks. On Friday, the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said the securities and Exchange Commission had agreed to withdraw its lawsuit against the company without any financial penalty, potentially ending one of the most significant legal challenges to the crypto industry. The case began in 2023, when the SEC alleged that the digital currencies sold on Coinbase's platform were unregistered securities that posed a financial risk to consumers, one of several legal actions the SEC took against crypto companies under former chair Gary Gensler, the SEC's commissioners still must approve the lawsuit's dismissal. The New York Times has this story and there's a link in today's episode description all right, next up is our numbers section. The year the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff position was created was 1949. The number of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United states history is 21. The number of the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been fired before General Charles Q. Brown Jr. Was zero. The year the Chief of Naval Operations position was created was 1915. The number of chiefs of naval operations in US history is 33. Before Admiral Lisa Franchetti's dismissal, the most recent year that a Chief of Naval Operations did not complete their full four year term was 2007, and that was Admiral Michael Mullen. The percentage of Americans who say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the United states military is 60%, according to a June 2023 Gallup poll. And the percentage of Americans who said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the military in 2013 was 76%. And last but not least, our have a nice day story. Amanda Burrows has been a park ranger in San Francisco since 2021 tasked with the specific challenge of removing homeless individuals living in the parks. Unlike many park rangers, Burrows decided against using citations or force, instead focusing on compassion, patience and trust, building a relationship with her clients clients and helping them find more stability and housing. Bar estimates that since 2021 she has helped close to 60 people accept services to help them both leave the park and better their lives. The San Francisco Standard has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. All right everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, Please go to readtangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day. Peace.

Isaac Saul (32:17)

Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by Dean Thomas. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback Daily Saul and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was made by Magdalena Baco, who is also our social media manager. The music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. And if you're looking for more from Tangle, please go check out our website@readtangle.com that's reedtangle.com.

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