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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18095 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.

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.

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.

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