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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   22177 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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The Trump cabinet shakeup continues

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 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 was uncertain and that President Trump had 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 oust Noem, and that made him more likely to move ahead with Bondi. (Still, an administration official cautioned that after pushing out Noem, 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).

Some Trump allies (and many of his critics) believe that he had asked Bondi for the nearly impossible—to win convictions for seemingly unwinnable cases. But other members of the Cabinet and administration have expressed frustration that Bondi’s apparent lack of involvement in the details of managing the Justice Department resulted in basic mistakes. “They are sending in idiots” to defend the Trump administration in court without sufficient experience, one official from another agency told us. The president’s demand for absolute loyalty among the department’s rank and file resulted in a profound loss of institutional expertise and a sharply reduced talent pool. Multiple prominent Republican attorneys told us that they considered joining the second Trump DOJ. But the requirement to take what they viewed as an oath of loyalty to the president—not the Constitution—was a step too far.

Officials in other departments said they regarded the Justice Department’s errors as harmful to the administration’s credibility with judges, blowing up what should have been easy wins for the president. “This has been festering across the administration for a while,” said a second person close to the administration. “It’s the Epstein stuff, partly. It’s also the critiques of the indictments, like Comey. It’s a general sense of WTF—she’s not logging a lot of wins, not clocking a lot of good media.”

In Trump I, many of the early firings were because of insufficient loyalty. Trump adapted and overcame by ensuring personal loyalty at the apparent cost of competence. A junior law student could have told you his vengeance lawsuits would be laughed out of court. And it seems like the Iran SMO will snatch a few more scalps that would have delayed until after the midterms - poor Kash, he just wanted to party with the hockey chads. It's already claimed the Army Chief of Staff's, although it's not clear what exactly was wrong with Randy George's performance (the Army isn't even particularly involved in this op), or that of the Transformation and Training Command leader and the head of the Chaplain Corps.

There is obviously a trade-off between competence and loyalty. But where exactly the Pareto frontier runs is dependent on the specifics, like the field you want people to be competent in and the cause or person to which you want them to be loyal.

Finding a die-hard MAGA car mechanic or a die-hard SJ kindergarten teacher is easier than the opposite, for example.

Trump now is selecting for personal loyalty, like some generalissimo. However, what he can offer his vassals in exchange for their fealty is much less than what your average dictator can offer. He has about one year with majorities in Congress left, and then two years more as a lame duck president without majorities (unless he dies first). Most of the prospective candidates have longer time horizons than that. Unlike the Ayatollah, it seems unlikely that he will be succeeded by one of his sons; instead there will likely be some renewal of the Republican party after his death, and having been part of his cabinet might not enhance your career. On top of that, he is likely to push you under the bus whenever it is convenient for him. Noem and Bondi were loyal, whatever unpopular decisions they made certainly did have Trump's backing when they made them. I mean, being the fall guy/gal for the president is part of being part of an administration, but it certainly feels like Trump has more need of them than other presidents did.

Contrast this with SCOTUS appointments. If Trump had to nominate a new Justice tomorrow, I am sure there would be no shortage of accomplished conservative candidates (unless he foolishly insisted that they are loyal to him above the constitution).

But other members of the Cabinet and administration have expressed frustration that Bondi’s apparent lack of involvement in the details of managing the Justice Department resulted in basic mistakes. “They are sending in idiots” to defend the Trump administration in court without sufficient experience, one official from another agency told us.

It hardly seems fair of them to blame her for the fact that the Trump administration repels competence.

The problem with making a personal loyalty pledge the sole qualification is you inevitably end up with a staff dominated by bootlickers and conmen. Competent people generally expect to be treated with a measure of dignity and even the ones with a weak sense of ethics have some regard for their professional reputation.

Habbenings intensify.

F-15 confirmed shot down, large rescue op underway, according to latest news one of pilots found.

For comparison, here is full list of lost US aircraft during Desert Storm in 1991.

Not looking good for Iran. Chinese patriots are trying to brainstorm some ways of shooting American top tier wonder weapons. We will see if Iran will listen.

The list of American aircraft damaged or destroyed in the past 24 hours is now up to 5, with:

  • F-15
  • F-16
  • A-10 (possibly 2)
  • 1 or 2 Blackhawks damaged during rescue efforts.

Then you have the Ghost of Kuwait who shot down 3 F-15s, and the stratotanker shot down over Iraq.

Then you have the aerial assets damaged or destroyed on the ground by Iranian bombardment. Add to that the USS Gerald Ford supercarrier out of commission for 2 years due to a "laundry fire."

It's looking bad for the US military, which is probably why multiple generals have been fired in the past 48 hours...

Add to that the USS Gerald Ford supercarrier out of commission for 2 years due to a "laundry fire."

Ignoring that fires do, in fact, "just happen" sometimes on aircraft carriers, where the hell are you getting "2 years" from?

Ignoring that fires do, in fact, "just happen" sometimes on aircraft carriers

Indeed. I realize that technically it was an "amphibious assault ship" but the fire that wrecked the Bonhomme Richard was only a few years ago! According to the wiki, pretty much all of the usual suspects were to blame for the fire. New and improved Naval safety protocols weren't being followed, "leadership failures" in the chain of command, poor communication between sailors and officers, the various firefighters and civilians, etc. etc. etc.

I am not a military bird, and I know this is my own nature and bias speaking, but whenever I see those sorts of "after action" reports I can't help but read between the lines and suspect that over-emphasis on $LATEST_SHINY_THINGS as the underlying culprit to these sorts of things, which is to say that when there are too many priorities, then nothing is a priority. The Dilbert Principle is universal.

whenever I see those sorts of "after action" reports I can't help but read between the lines and suspect that over-emphasis on $LATEST_SHINY_THINGS as the underlying culprit to these sorts of things, which is to say that when there are too many priorities, then nothing is a priority.

Too many Shiny Things, and too much "distributed responsibility". After all, "safety is everyone's responsibility", right? But to paraphrase Incredibles, when everyone is responsible for something, nobody is. And to return to a different subsection of the Navy...

"Responsibility is a unique concept; it may only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it. Even if you do not recognize it or admit its presence, you cannot escape it. If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, ignorance, or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."

Strongly agree. Sure, there's too much external pressure that creates and distorts the excessive and conflicting priorities and too little time to actually attend to all of them, but it's still always a "leadership failure" when the inevitable Bad Things happen. The solution to the problem of too much bureaucracy is, of course, more bureaucracy.

There was another great quote about "When something happens, and a leader tells you they are 'not responsible', believe them. That is to say, they are correctly claiming to be irresponsible".

The question is whether this makes a withdrawal more or less likely. Under most presidents, I’d say less, but under Trump, I think perhaps more.

My read on the strikes over the last two days is they’ve been purely aimed at destroying expensive infrastructure to cause economic chaos after a withdrawal that might, hopefully presumably, create space for some kind of popular uprising. Destroying it to make rebuilding armories more expensive doesn’t make sense, since the IRGC will always prioritize that over civilian infrastructure.

One plausible outcome is TACO, leaves the SoH under effective Iranian control, and loudly proclaims victory because he blew up a bunch of shit.

And sadly that is one of the better ways the current situation might develop.

Yes, that has always been the most likely outcome.

Chinese patriots are trying to brainstorm some ways of shooting American top tier wonder weapons.

First of all the dude only has 100k followers which is nothing in China. Secondly he made that video because “shooting a plane” is a pun for fapping in Chinese. I’m picturing him transferring our precious masturbating techniques to Iranians. On onlyfans maybe?

Incidentally the PLA published a “how to shoot a plane” booklet during the Korean War. But I thought we had a population boom back when? Not when you waste your precious seeds right?

It's already claimed the Army Chief of Staff's, although it's not clear what exactly was wrong with Randy George's performance (the Army isn't even particularly involved in this op), or that of the Transformation and Training Command leader and the head of the Chaplain Corps.

Either US army has a Russian disease - a system in which every report moving upward was rose tinted into oblivion, and when they started planing properly for ground invasion - suddenly the real readiness was not what was expected. Or Trump was asking for something insane and they said no.

Anyway - I am worried about those shakeups - people rarely shake up military command when things are going well.

I suspect they weren't prepared for the most obvious of Iranian responses - blocking the Strait. If it were easy to rectify the block, the US would have just done it weeks ago. They don't have enough troops or hardware in the area; an aircraft carrier was put out of commission ((Russian intel-aided) missiles/drones) and had to leave the theater; the replacement aircraft carrier left Norfolk three days ago and will take another 10+ days to arrive near Iran. The US is lacking popular support at home for the deployments that would be big enough to break Iran militarily, Trump's only diplomatic gift is to offend allies, and at the same time they can't just leave either, because leaving right now is tantamount to surrendering the petrodollar without a real fight and losing hegemonic credibility.

The administration was getting a bunch of bad HUMINT from the Tehran university bubble about how the regime was on the brink of collapse. It was assumed that the whole thing would come down like a house of cards the second the Ayatollah died.

The old 'decapitation' gambit. Air/bombing wars rarely result in the whole rotten house collapsing IRL.

an aircraft carrier was put out of commission ((Russian intel-aided) missiles/drones) and had to leave the theater

... you're saying a drone hit the laundry room? Or that it was a cover-up and the fire was from a drone hit elsewhere, and the US Navy suddenly has astounding Opsec and message discipline? Or is there another carrier that left for repairs recently?

Trump seemed to ramble something about the Ford getting hit by missiles and drones from 17 different directions during a speech recently, but the whole thing didn't make much sense.

Not getting hit, specifically, he was bragging about the effectiveness of our missile intercept.

I don't necessarily trust that story, no.

FWIW I am a navy carrier vet, and I think it's extremely plausible that it was a laundry fire.

I also think that it never would have spread so much without significant failure by the crew to contain, and that's indicative of the general level of readiness in the Navy, but that's a whole 'nother bag of worms.

Hmm okay.

There was all sorts of stories/FUD coming out. Credible reports of Russians sharing intel with Iranians. A story of a US carrier getting targeted by missiles and drones. Then the supposed fire, at the same time, and also reports from libs about the fire being a sabotage from within, due to low morale.

You have to consider a) how many times Iran & the Houthis claimed (or social media claimed) to have hit/sunk aircraft carriers, and b) a lot of sailors are dumbass young men and flushing mop heads and mousetraps down the toilet is incompetence rather than sabotage (another claim I've seen bouncing around). Hell, the laboratory I work at had trouble convincing grown engineers and scientists to "please only flush toilet paper, don't put anything else in the toilet, you guys wonder why it clogs so often?"

Okay. To answer your previous q: What would make me fully believe a story? A verified report from a reliable first person witness who did not have to fear repercussions from revealing truths. The issue here is that we never really know whether a fire is just a fire or a result of enemy action, because militaries regularly lie about or cover up the latter.

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To calibrate, what would you require to believe that story?

I'm agnostic on what happened, but knowing the base rate of laundry fires taking out carriers in the US military would be useful information.

It's not specifically laundry, but Fire at Sea: A 70-year Review of Fire-Related Mass Casualty Events on U.S. Aircraft Carriers may be of interest in this regard!

Since World War II, no attack on a large U.S. Navy capital ship has occurred during combat operations

we reviewed mass casualty events from major fires aboard large U.S. Navy aircraft carriers[1] from 1950 through 2020

Of 246 fires identified, 27 met inclusion criteria resulting in 1,634 casualties with a combined crew mortality of 23% of those injured.

The majority of major fire mishaps involved aircraft carriers[1], and none were the result of an enemy attack

[1] the reason behind this potential contradiction is inconsistent usage/definition of large-hull amphibious assault ships as "aircraft carriers" or not in the abstract vs text.

That is extremely compelling, if not what I would call reassuring. Thanks.

If I recall correctly, carriers typically dock for maintenance every six months, this one's been adventuring for a year now.

That does shift my opinion toward the laundry explanation, thanks. That's a lot of lint.

The reported reason is culture stuff, George wasn't implementing anti-DEI measures as aggressively as Hegseth wanted.

But that feels like something you do in the off-season, not right before a playoff game.

I'm really blackpilling here.

But that feels like something you do in the off-season, not right before a playoff game.

More charitably, it's a pretty common trend through history that generals from peacetime and colonial/peacekeeping periods tend to fall on their face when conditions change. To make things worse, you can't tell ahead of time how or why they will fail. This isn't unique to the US either. Russia and Ukraine have seen the same thing. It seems like the only way to mitigate the risk is to have a deep bench of officers and a willingness to shitcan anyone who isn't getting the job done.

I don't know whether or not this is why Hegseth is doing what he is doing, but it's a possibility. People in general want to make this conflict a referendum on Trump so badly that it's difficult to find objective information.

We're in agreement that firing officers when things are going badly can be the right thing to do.

What's blackpilling to me is that this is a strong bayesian update that things are going badly.

I don't entirely buy the DEI explanation, I don't think the friction of changing horses mid stream would be worth it to do right now. Even replacing a mediocre or bad general incurs costs in chaos and readjustment, the "where's the bathroom" problems, which I don't think we'd do in wartime.

We did it to both General Patton and Admiral Halsey during WW2, though in their cases it was more of a sidelining (to avoid a public scandal/embarrassment) as opposed to outright firing them.

For a full-blown example, MacArthur was fired by Truman in Korea.

It's been a while since I took a history class, but didn't Macarthur get benched because he wanted to nuke the whole peninsula?

Regardless of how accurate the why is, I've always loved Truman's (much later) quote about it:

I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

That's the "just-so" story that's often cited as the reason, but in reality, MacArthur was fired because he expressed to various parties that he fully intended to bring the war to communist China and win it, something that would have been in direct opposition to Truman's own public policy.

who isn't getting the job done.

What job though? like @FiveHourMarathon says, is implementing anti-DEI measure the off-season job or playoff game job? There are many things to consider here.

  1. is implementing anti-DEI a good and strong signal of how competent someone is at waging a war in the Middle East? (how much does the off season stuff matters for the playoffs?)
  2. does waging a war in the Middle East depends on the completion of implementing anti-DEI measures? (are we able to separate the things in the off season that does or does not matter in the playoffs?)
  3. on the axes of "urgency" and "important", how does the two land? (must the changes for the off season be done now before the playoffs?)
  4. Is Hegseth competent at managing and assessing these questions? (is the general manager good at assessing the quality of the coach? quality of the offseason management? quality of the playoffs management?)
  5. Is Hegseth setting manageable expectations? (is the GM asking the coach for the impossible?)

and so on, and so on.

I suppose the conclusion of this war (which hopefully will be soon or within Trump 2.0 term) will setup my biases on these questions for the rest of my life.

Edit 1: this is of course dependent on that the general was let go because of not good at implementing anti-DEI measures. I'm sure it's actually a host of reasons.

This isn't something I've specifically studied, but I have a meme in my head that "chew through leadership until you hit the secret sauce right man for the job" is a fairly common pattern in winning modern wars. That the guys in the history books were often talented second or third rank officers who got promoted after fuckups from the peacetime generals.

"chew through leadership until you hit the secret sauce right man for the job" is a fairly common pattern in winning modern wars. That the guys in the history books were often talented second or third rank officers who got promoted after fuckups from the peacetime generals.

well it's war right? isn't that just "survival of the fittest"? That's all wars, all processes, evolution, etc. throughout history.

How far back are you considering "modern"? Lincoln "churned through generals" until he found Grant, for example.

That's an interesting thesis, but a key theme in it is that there has been a fuckup. My general view is that the Lindy effect rules in leadership: changes beget changes and indicate failure. When you change leadership there is instant friction.

Complicated by CoS being more administrator than commander, so it's more just increased friction on the back-end than replacing McClellan with Grant on the front line.

Not a big Trump fan, although you have to respect his phenomenal instincts. I think his brain is kind of stupid, but my god his gut is smart.

Something that's been amusing, and impressive, is the speed at which Trump2 has operated at. They've really struggled to turn that speed into long term wins, but that's besides the point here.

Separately, I've noticed that the longer politicians are in power, the worse and worse their cabinet/advisors get. It's kind of an evaporative cooling effect where only sycophants remain.

A great example of this is Justin Trudeau. From what I could tell, that man was profoundly out of touch by the end. I think he thought he was doing the "right" thing, and he was clearly concerned with public image, so I assume he also did not think his dumbass ideas were as unpopular as they were. But given he was in power for quite some time, by the end I assume he was surrounded by people who just agreed with all his ideas and didn't go "Justin, they'll fucking hate that, no one wants more peasants imported"

It seems from this though, Trump2 has sped run that step too.

The president’s demand for absolute loyalty among the department’s rank and file resulted in a profound loss of institutional expertise and a sharply reduced talent pool

lol

Multiple prominent Republican attorneys told us that they considered joining the second Trump DOJ. But the requirement to take what they viewed as an oath of loyalty to the president—not the Constitution—was a step too far.

lmao even

Not a big Trump fan, although you have to respect his phenomenal instincts. I think his brain is kind of stupid, but my god his gut is smart.

Donald Trump is the caveman in the bell curve meme.

Trump I don’t think agrees on anything based on any comment or analysis greater than his own intuition, so he either gambles on outcomes or outsources the process to his cabinet who makes choices it for him. “Gut” can get you lucky and sometimes that luck can get you far, but eventually it runs out and comes crashing back down.

The chief ‘accomplishment’ people are going to remember him for in 20 years is the Iran war. There will be other points to speak of, but his presidency will eventually get colored into a specific issue the same way a lot of people only remember Obama for the Affordable Care Act and his rhetorical talents.

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