Unpacking Trump's military purge

There's no analogy to this in U.S. history

Feb 24, 2025

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Last Friday, Trump cleared out the senior ranks of the U.S. military. He fired General Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Lisa Franchetti. He also chucked in dismissals for the top lawyer in each military service branch. And don’t forget that he already fired Coast Guard Commandant Linda Lee Fagan some weeks ago.

I’ve seen some debate about whether it is appropriate to call this “a purge”, a phrase we might usually associate with the Nazis or Joseph Stalin. But if by a purge we mean a series of politically-motivated firings to ensure that an institution is loyal, then that is exactly what this is.

Two things led to this purge. The first is MAGA’s attempt to restore what it sees as traditional race and gender hierarchies. According to the logic of MAGA, any African-American or woman in a senior position is only there because of “DEI” and is inherently untrustworthy. As a result, it is necessary to reassert the competent rule of the white man. MAGA hides this behind its critiques of “wokeness” and “DEI”. But it is notable that the haters haven’t actually come up with any specific examples of how Brown and Franchetti’s supposed commitment to these things has made them bad at their jobs. This is about who they are, not what they did.

However terrible this is, it’s arguably not as bad as the second thing going on here: Trump’s attempt to make sure that the military becomes an instrument bent to his will. The firings of the top lawyers of each military service branch were followed very quickly by an announcement that the Trump administration will detain migrants at military bases across the country. The administration was clearly expecting or already experiencing pushback from within the military to its actions, and it acted to clear the road.

Even more important to Trump is making sure that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a personal loyalist. The chair of the JCS is not just America’s most senior uniformed officer, but also the president’s personal military advisor. They have tremendous power and authority not just over the military but also as the second key node (after the president) of civil-military relations.

Previous JCS chairs have made it clear that they would refuse illegal orders and maintain their loyalty to the constitution. Mark Milley, who held the position during Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election, behaved in an exemplary fashion. He made it clear that the military would stay out of politics and that he would refuse orders to spuriously invoke the Insurrection Act and crush dissent. He was branded a “traitor” by Trump as a result.

Like the velociraptor in Jurassic Park who eventually figured out how to open a door, Trump learned from his experience with Milley that he needed a loyalist in the JCS chair. And so it’s no surprise that he has now picked for the job a relatively unknown retired one star general, Dan Caine, for the position.

Caine is not qualified for the position according to the established legal standard, which requires the JCS chair to have previously served as vice-chair, the top officer of a military branch, or the head of one of the U.S. combatant commands. Trump has long raved about how much Caine supposedly loves him, including spreading a story that Caine wore a MAGA hat while in uniform. By picking him rather than one of the qualified senior officers currently serving in the military, Trump is sending the message that he wants someone beholden to him - and him alone.

Despite all of this, Caine himself remains something of an enigma. He may not have risen right to the top, but his career appears to have been exemplary. People who know him say he is apolitical and that the MAGA hat story is not true. I haven’t been able to find any record of him expressing political opinions or criticizing diversity programs. He must realize that the manner in which he is assuming office compromises him, but perhaps he really is planning to stand up to Trump and try to protect the integrity of the military. If that’s the case, I fear he won’t last long. Trump has made it clear what he wants, and eventually he’s going to get it.

Defenders of Trump make a few points. They say that the president has the technical right to fire high-ranking officers and replace them with people who he trusts. They add that the firing of generals is hardly unheard of - Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, and going back even further than that, Abraham Lincoln fired George McClellan during the Civil War.

None of these points are entirely false, but they still miss the mark. Presidents do have the right to fire senior officers, but they have generally refrained from doing so because this signalled that they wanted the military to remain an apolitical institution. It avoided creating a situation in which top-ranking officers had to worry too much about politics or personal relationships rather than focusing on their mission. Just because this was a norm rather than an explicit rule doesn’t make it any more right to transgress it.

When presidents have fired generals in the past, it has usually been due to insubordination or gross battlefield incompetence. Consider in turn the examples of MacArthur, McClellan, and Stanley McChrystal.

MacArthur was fired because he invaded North Korea after Truman told him not to and then wanted to drop “30 or so atomic bombs” on China. He also wasn’t shy about airing his disagreements with the president publicly. Given that MacArthur had a huge public following and was appealing to it over the head of the president, he represented a grave threat to the principle of civilian control of the military. The Senate later concluded that "the removal of General MacArthur was within the constitutional powers of the President but the circumstances were a shock to national pride".

Stanley McChrystal’s firing as head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, by Barack Obama in 2011, had some similarities. McChrystal and his aides partied with a bunch of Rolling Stone journalists who then quoted them hurling abuse at various officials in the Obama administration, including Vice President Joe Biden. Again, this was a challenge to the principle of civilian control, and McChrystal was soon gone.

McClellan’s firing during the Civil War is perhaps the most interesting. For a time McClellan was the Union’s top general, leading its army against the Confederates. He and Lincoln didn’t like or trust one another, and McClellan was often accused of having sympathies for the South. When he failed to pursue and destroy Confederate forces after the Battle of Antietam, he stood accused of gross incompetence, possibly caused by his Southern sympathies. Lincoln fired him, and he went on to run against the president in the 1864 election.

In each of these cases, there was a major problem of trust, competence, or both, during a major war. That makes these examples completely unlike Trump’s purge.

But if you consider that MAGA seems to want to wage a war of its own on the American constitution, you can maybe understand why Trump wants to make sure he has loyal soldiers in position first.

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