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. The president fired General C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a remarkable move but also one that Trump and his MAGA allies signaled was coming.  

Brown has been the target of criticisms from some Republican senators as well as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, all of whom argued that he was too “woke” and too concerned with diversity in the armed forces. In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth suggested that Brown, who is Black, may have risen to his position through racial preferences. “We’ll never know,” he wrote, in a classic just-asking-questions dodge.

But Trump should know. He’s 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—who is only the second African American, after the late Colin Powell, to hold the position of chairman—for his distinguished service.

The chairman is the most senior officer in the United States and by law the principal military adviser to the president. He does not direct military forces and is not in the chain of command. Normally, the chairman serves a four-year term; the position, like that of FBI director, is meant to bridge across administrations rather than change with each incoming president—specifically so that the chairman (again, like the head of the FBI) does not become a partisan political appointment.

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. If U.S. military leaders are in any doubt about the necessity of absolute loyalty to Trump, they need only look to Brown’s replacement. Instead of tapping another serving four-star, Trump has reached out to a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine, whom Trump tonight said was unjustly passed over for his fourth star by “Sleepy Joe Biden” despite being “highly qualified and respected.”

Trump apparently met Caine on a trip to Iraq in 2018. The president later recalled that first meeting during remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019. He claimed that Caine—call sign “Razin” Caine—was insistent that ISIS could be defeated in a week if America committed enough force to the effort. Trump said that Caine then donned a MAGA cap, and said: “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.” Trump added that he told Caine he was not allowed to do that, “but they did it.”

If the president is telling the truth about this exchange, Caine shouldn’t be in the job. Senior officers, by law and military regulations, must avoid shows of partisan fealty, and such displays should never be the basis for promotion. The story, if true, is a strong indication of Trump’s political motives; Caine’s behavior, in any case, disqualifies him from the job. He appears to have had a fine career, and while it is not typical to pull an officer out of retirement to take the chairman post, it is not unprecedented. But Trump, who has apparently been telling this story for years, is not choosing Caine because of his background; he’s elevating Caine in position and rank because he wants a chairman who is wholly devoted to him.

The message to the rest of the military could not be clearer. Trump loathed Brown’s predecessor, General Mark Milley, and has floated the idea that Milley should be executed for actions he took as chairman. (This idea came to him shortly after the publication of this magazine’s profile of Milley, by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, which detailed how Milley protected the Constitution from Trump.)

Trump and Hegseth have announced their intentions to fire several other senior officers—and perhaps even most ominously, including the head lawyers of each of the services. 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 U.S. government. None of this has anything to do with effectiveness, or “lethality,” or promoting “warfighters,” or any other buzzwords. It is praetorianism, plain and simple.

The sacking of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, and the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, as well as the judge advocate generals of the Army, Navy and Air Force on Friday night was completely legal—and appalling.

The consequences of this Friday-night massacre will be long-lasting and damaging. The JAGs embody the deep respect that the United States military has had for the rule of law. Although they merely advise and do not command, their role is a crucial one. The decapitation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Navy, and the firing of the second-most-senior Air Force officer was bad enough.

The replacement of General C. Q. Brown, a highly decorated and cerebral officer, as chairman by a retired lieutenant general was bizarre and unprecedented. By law the role of chair should be filled, unless the president deems an extraordinary exception necessary, by a four star who has led a service or a combatant command. Lieutenant General Dan Caine was relatively junior, and he spent 2009 to 2016 as a reservist. The skills he acquired as a special operator, moreover, are the antithesis of what the most senior military officer in the country needs. The United States armed forces, composed of millions of men and women on active and reserve duty, operates fleets and divisions and air wings. Its leaders need the ability to handle military movements and the political skills to deal with coalition partners in large-scale operations, skills that are acquired on the conventional side of the house, not in shadow warfare.

Caine, in other words, is not qualified for the job. If he indeed told President Donald Trump that ISIS could be wiped out in a week or four if only the military were unleashed—as Trump has claimed—he has, moreover, exceptionally poor military judgment. If the Israel Defense Forces, deploying substantial air power and five divisions of mechanized infantry, could not wipe out Hamas in a year-long campaign in the tiny area the group controlled, the United States Air Force could not, and cannot, do the same thing to a wily jihadist military organization spread over several large Middle Eastern countries in less than a month.

When confronted with civilian superiors behaving outrageously, the response of the American soldier, sailor, air fighter, or Marine is to stiffen, look rigidly ahead, and follow lawful orders. But they reflect. And what they are assuredly thinking today is that the Trump administration is determined to purge the military’s leadership; that it has no respect for the rule of law, including the law of armed conflict; and that it is willing to put them under the command of political generals of doubtful caliber. To say that they will find this demoralizing is an understatement.

Worse yet, a minority will applaud this. I have spent my entire career in the company of soldiers, including senior officers, and I have never encountered a group of more honorable men and women. There are, however, in all ranks, as in the rest of humanity, a certain proportion of toadies, opportunists, zealots, and fools. These will now be encouraged to curry favor with political authority, and if there is one thing that the Trump administration has shown itself desirous of, it is brownnosing. That will, in turn, undermine military performance. Promote the bootlickers, sow distrust among the decent ones, and military disaster awaits.

This episode tells us a great deal, none of it too surprising, about the secretary of defense, beginning with the firing itself, conducted on a Friday night and without the courtesy of personal meetings. Pete Hegseth may think of himself as a warrior type, but that was the corporate behavior of a coward. He did not publish his reasons for the firings other than mouthing a platitude or two about the public service of his victims. It was the behavior of a leader who is desperately weak.

He may not yet understand the damage that he has done to himself. It will escape no one’s notice that his two most prominent victims were a Black man and a woman, and that he has raged against women in the military. His unwillingness to explain himself means that the worst construction will be put on his actions. Whereas in a normal administration one should give some benefit of the doubt to leaders making hard calls, he deserves, and will receive, none.

That goes for his tattoos too. On one bicep is Deus Vult, “God wills it,” a motto embraced by some white-nationalist groups (which is why he was removed from duty after January 6). His defense is that it is merely a celebration of the Christian-warrior ethic, a slogan attributed to the Crusaders by contemporary chroniclers.

When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they spent two days killing the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Thomas Asbridge writes in his history of the Crusades that the city was “awash with blood and littered with corpses. In the midsummer heat the stench soon became intolerable, and the dead were dragged out beyond the walls, ‘piled up in mounds as big as houses’ and burned.” Six months later, Jerusalem still stank of death.

If celebration of that kind of thing is not what he means, he should make that clear, but of course he will not. A man as petty, thoughtless, and cruel as his boss, he will both feel aggrieved by reactions to his cruelties and ignorant of their likely consequences.

The firings coincided with other assaults both on the American government—the announced firing of more than 50,000 probationary workers in the Pentagon—and on Ukraine, where the United States leaned on Kyiv to withdraw a motion in the UN that would denounce Russia in favor of one, introduced by the United States, that would make no mention of invasion, atrocities, or aggression. In both cases, there was tremendous self-harm, to the civil service on the one hand and to American foreign policy on the other, as Russia gets consequential gifts without paying for them.

What is to be done? To some extent, the administration is setting up the conditions for its own failures as it causes chaos, alienates constituencies, and cripples essential governmental functions. Some of these actions will be illegal and must be confronted in the courts and beyond; others, like Hegseth’s, will be lawful but still enormously destructive, to which other responses are warranted.

At the very least, the public deserves to know the names of the members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, whose staffers have cut a swath through governmental departments but hide their identities from view. A sense of accountability in courts of opinion as well as law—and if not now, then in the future, when, inevitably, the wheel turns and they are no longer in positions of power—may help temper some of their worst excesses.

Unlike Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or J. D. Vance, I have had children serve in uniform in wartime. The parent of a service member looks with a particularly keen eye at who is in command. C. Q. Brown is the kind of general I would have been proud to have leading them, confident in his professional abilities and his moral compass. To understand the fury that many of us who know him feel at this moment, look at the video of his message following George Floyd’s murder. At a time of racial tension unlike anything since the civil-rights movement, he spoke with dignity, restraint, and the deepest kind of patriotism—the patriotism of a Martin Luther King Jr. or, more to the point, a General Dan “Chappie” James Jr., the first Black four-star general, one of the World War II Tuskegee Airmen.

The worst of the MAGA movement are the neo-Confederates, ignoramuses (to be charitable) about this country’s history—hence their outrage at the renaming of forts called after traitor generals from the Civil War—and in many cases, tapping into deep veins of bigotry. With this move, Pete Hegseth will henceforth labor under the presumption that he is among their number, a man unfit to lead anybody, much less the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, it is a consolation to know that this country produced C. Q. Brown—and that there are many more like him out there.