THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

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 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.Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement. Hegseth regularly proselytizes, both for Trump and for his right-wing evangelical beliefs, from the Pentagon podium. He has intervened in Army promotions, recently culling four colonels—two Black men and two women—from the list for advancement to brigadier general. (This may be the tip of the iceberg: NBC is now reporting that Hegseth has also cancelled the promotions, across multiple services, of at least a dozen minority and female officers.) When two Army helicopters buzzed a political rally and then flew to MAGA favorite Kid Rock’s house, Hegseth short-circuited the Army’s suspension of the pilots and squashed an investigation into their actions. In keeping with the best American civil-military traditions, George and other senior military leaders have been remarkably disciplined in keeping their thoughts out of the public eye.Of course, the tone at… [TheTopNews] Read More.

After Pam Bondi’s ouster today, which followed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s firing last month, Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials were anxiously eyeing their phones, wondering whether they’d be next. One top official didn’t have to wait long: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the chief of staff of the Army, General Randy George. Several people familiar with the White House’s plans told us that there are active discussions about others leaving the administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters, said that the timing is uncertain and that President Trump has not yet made up his mind. But what was once an unofficial motto of the second Trump term—“no scalps”—no longer applies.Trump had been reluctant to get rid of any of his top lieutenants, viewing firings as a concession to the Democrats and the media. Even in the past few months, there had been an edict that no Cabinet officials would be removed prior to the midterms, though a series of dismissals were planned for after Election Day. But the president’s declining support since he launched the Iran war has changed the political calculus. The odds of confirming replacements, advisers know, are only growing longer. One person close to the White House told us that Trump was buoyed by the reaction to his decision to remove Noem and that it made him more likely to move ahead with Bondi. (Still, an administration official cautioned that after Noem’s ouster, optics were a concern; officials worried that getting rid of Bondi would be viewed as jettisoning only the most “attractive” women, while keeping the men.)During her 14 months on the job, Bondi tried so hard to do everything right. She titillated the MAGA base by appearing on Fox News and promising that the Jeffrey Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now,” awaiting her review for release. She relinquished all pretense of leading an independent Justice Department, going after Trump’s political foes and enemies, even when other prosecutors might not have brought charges. And to the president and his allies, she continued to project the perky, kind, warm Florida persona that had once earned her the girlish nickname “Pambi.”Bondi did everything right—or, at least, everything Trump asked her to do—but in the end, it was… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have been fighting for more than a decade to roll back Obama-era restrictions on the hours that long-haul truckers can work. Since 2014, their Wisconsin-based business-supply company, Uline, has spent $870,000 on lobbyists registered to push for a reversal of policies that Elizabeth Uihlein has said cause “increased inefficiencies and expense.” As the fourth-biggest disclosed donor to conservative and Republican groups in the 2024 election cycle, their views carried some weight.After incremental erosion of the restrictions during President Trump’s first term, the latest victory came last summer, when Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced two pilot programs to allow truck drivers greater flexibility in the hours they work. “We’re getting Washington out of your trucks and your business,” Duffy said when he announced the change in June.But Duffy was also working on a side project. Four months later, he transferred $1 million from the dormant campaign committee that had funded his congressional races in Wisconsin to a new group, called Northwoods Future PAC. The next month, Richard Uihlein became the only other donor to Northwoods, giving $1 million, according to public filings. As of the end of last year, Northwoods Future PAC had spent nearly $1.2 million on mailers and television ads to promote Duffy’s son-in-law, Michael Alfonso, who is running for the congressional seat previously held by the Cabinet secretary. The ads cast Alfonso, a 26-year-old who recently moved to the Duffy family home after working on a podcast in Florida, as a “working-class fighter” who would crusade against insider political machinations. “Time and time again, Washington politicians get rich,” one Northwoods ad for Alfonso begins, “while Wisconsin gets ignored.”The donation is just one example of how Duffy has maintained unusual relationships with representatives of the companies he regulates. In December, the secretary was listed as a “special guest” at a campaign event for Alfonso that was sponsored by transportation lobbyists, including those for Delta Air Lines and BNSF Railway, a decision that former ethics advisers to Presidents George W. Bush, Obama, and Biden told me they would not not have allowed or would have tried to reverse. Duffy has also embraced President Trump’s call to use corporate money, sometimes from companies that have transportation interests, to promote efforts by the department to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.Duffy’s advisers deny any quid pro quo or impropriety, and say all of his actions have been cleared by… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In 1961, William F. Buckley Jr. had a problem. The preeminent intellectual of the conservative movement was being outflanked to his right by the John Birch Society. Founded just three years earlier, the group had grown to tens of thousands of members, fueled by its claim that Communists had infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government. Buckley reportedly complained at the time that he was incessantly asked about the organization.By 1962, Buckley had had enough. In what conservatives have since heralded as a principled maneuver, Buckley used the pages of his magazine, National Review, to excoriate Robert Welch, the society’s leader, as a ham-fisted operator who was unable to understand nuance, who was incapable of leading a proper right-wing movement, and who “anathematizes all who disagree with him.” Buckley’s diatribe is credited with limiting the influence of the Birchers, as they were known, in mainstream politics.Buckley’s fight has been replicated by high-brow conservatives in other eras when they believe that the conspiratorially minded among their brethren have gone too far and risk turning off those who might otherwise be persuadable. In the 1990s, the writer Norman Podhoretz tried his best to stymie the influence of the populist paleoconservative commentator and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, whom Podhoretz saw as anti-Semitic. In 2017, as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement was consuming the right, the respected conservative columnist George Will wrote that conservatism had been “hijacked” by “vulgarians” and “soiled by scowling primitives.”And today, many of the conservative cognoscenti are again fed up with the right-wing hoi polloi.In October, Politico published racist and misogynistic group-chat logs from members of the New York Young Republicans Club. The conservative writer James Lindsay, who made his name by opposing what he viewed as overly sensitive “woke” culture, chastised his fellow right-wing scribes for not taking the revelations seriously. “The group chat exposé is the tip of a very nasty iceberg, and your denialism isn’t helping a damn thing,” Lindsay wrote on X. Later that month, the conservative commentator and conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza wrote that he was seeing more “vile” anti-Indian racism on the right than he had ever encountered in his 40-year career. In December, the right-wing writer Scott Greer complained that the right’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination “exposed the idiocy and weaknesses of the modern conservative movement,” as well as “its addiction to conspiratorial thinking.”  Richard Hanania has been one of the loudest and most… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Americans have been waiting for their president and commander in chief to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. For weeks, Donald Trump has offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his primetime address this evening was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. Trump’s critics (including me) have castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation of the war to the American people. But given his performance this evening, perhaps he had the right instinct. His address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.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 Iranian terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani in his first term, and for cancelling 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.[From the May 2026 issue: Someday in Tehran]But back to the war: What is America fighting for?… [TheTopNews] Read More.