"King Donald I" Accelerates White Nationalist Purge of Military Leaders

The highest ranking woman in the US military - ever - is fired. So is the second.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (who "just happens to be Black") is fired.

Hey! I don't give a fuck. I'm a straight male WASP, so I have nothing to fear. Right?

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

White House photo

"King Donald I" Accelerates White Nationalist Purge of Military Leaders
By William Boot

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In a late Friday night purge, Donald Trump — America's often ramblingly incoherent ceremonial commander-in-chief — fired three of this country's top generals and admirals, the latest assault in weeks of efforts to install loyalists at top military and security posts and restore the primacy of the white male ruling class that has traditionally held power here since the country's founding two centuries ago.

The purge included the nation's groundbreaking and widely respected top four-star general, C.Q. Brown, who was the first of the country's oppressed racial minority Black community to rise to head a branch of the military, and also removed the military's top lawyers as well as the air force chief and the one female currently leading a military branch. The purge completes Trump's removal of the both the first-ever and second-ever women to rise to the highest ranks of the military.

Traditionally, incoming US presidents remove precisely zero military leaders and the collective firings stand as all-but unprecedented in the 80-year history of the modern military, which prides itself on itself on studious political independence, but had looked increasingly inevitable since Trump installed a white Christian nationalist as defense minister who has been openly hostile to women serving in the military and who has cut back on recruiting Blacks to join.

Trump in his previous presidency had actually selected Brown to head the nation's air force, until turning on him more recently as insufficiently supportive of the country's ongoing political and corporate domination by a caste of mediocre white men — people historically unable to succeed on their own merits or competency — that includes Trump himself as well as the newly installed defense minister. (Unsurprisingly, Trump announced Friday his intention to replace Brown with a less qualified white male general, who had — unlike Brown — never attained the military's top rank.)

With the ouster of Brown and the naval commander, Admiral Linda Franchetti, the remaining top military leaders—known as the Joint Chiefs of Staff—are once again all white and male, a particularly pointed power imbalance given the fact that the country's racial and ethnic minorities make up nearly 40 percent of national forces and women constitute fully a fifth of the ranks.

A month after returning to the presidency after evading criminal charges for his attempted insurrection in 2021, and three weeks after a fast-moving coup by junta forces loyal to South African oligarch Elon Musk reduced him to a mere figurehead, Trump has seemingly embraced his new limited role as head of state. He has increasingly taken to styling himself as a "king" in recent official communications and begun talking openly that he will forgo constitutional limits on his tenure to serve as long as he wishes—although most capital observers wonder more how long the power-sharing agreement between Musk, the world's wealthiest man who is operating as the head of government, and Trump, an increasingly senile mid-level oligarch who made his fortune in reality TV and real estate, will continue.
Another recent post by the self-aggrandizing regent to Trump's own social media company brazenly suggested the a historical and factually incorrect premise that breaking in the law in service of the country was acceptable — a post many took to invite future violence by the paramilitary militias that backed his 2021 coup attempt who he pardoned as soon as he returned to office on January 20th. Notably, one of those militia leaders — who was convicted of seditious conspiracy for participating in Trump's coup and had been serving a 22-year prison sentence until Trump ordered him released — was re-arrested Friday afternoon by independent police forces loyal to parliament after he returned to the grounds of the national assembly known as the US Capitol, which he had helped storm in 2021.

While Musk's mercenary forces, known as DOGE, continue to ransack and loot sensitive data from key agencies and tussle with civil servants as they attempt to force their way into ministries — including in recent days the nation's internal revenue service — Trump has been largely absent; he's spent fully half of his month-long presidency at his own resort properties and played golf on a third of the days he's been in office so far.

Tensions this week seemed at times to rise between the two camps, though, including after Musk's son appeared to wipe a booger on the presidential desk. (Trump, a notorious germophobe, insisted the near-immediate removal of the historic desk for "refinishing" was a mere coincidence.) Trump officials, who had initially appeared quiescent following the seizure of the national treasury last month by Musk's junta, have increasingly started to whisper about their unhappiness with his growing power, although their actual ability to resist Musk's whirlwind appeared limited.

Across the capital, the new regime accelerated its sweeping removals of government workers, evoking comparisons to the disastrous "De-Ba'athification" movement that the United States instituted in Iraq in 2003 that removed huge swaths of civil servants after the country's invasion. That move is now widely considered one of the greatest mistakes of the occupation, though it now appears that Musk and Trump are seeking equally disastrous results in the capital at home.

While traditionally a small number of political appointees turn over in a new presidential administration, Musk's coup has been followed by massive, disorganized, and chaotic firings at many government agencies and ministries. Last weekend, DOGE mercenaries actually blindly fired a large chunk of the agency that secures the country's vast nuclear weapon stockpiles before attempting to reverse their mistake.

Other firings appeared equally ill-conceived and executed—including the removal of veterans working on suicide crisis lines, public health staff combating bird flu, and medical workers supporting the country's indigenous populations. Inexplicably, the mass removals also included more than 400 engineers, technicians, and personnel who help keep safe the nation's airspace, which has long been the envy of the world but under the Trump regime has already suffered a series of troubling incidents.

It's increasingly clear that the mass firings and reprisals are less a thoughtful exercise in management or efficiency gains and instead a wholesale effort to dismantle the long-respected administrative state's capability and regulatory structures have might hem in the ambitions and profits of the nation's oligarchy, which has been emboldened since November by Trump's surprise electoral victory. The country's banking regulators, now firmly in the regime's control, made clear in a series of actions this week that they would look the other way amid egregious abuses by the cryptocurrency industry, an electronic financial system favored by Musk and criminal groups.

Over the course of the week, Trump and Musk, who seem keen to reduce the world's leading $27-trillion-a-year economy to banana republic status, tightened their grip on the country's key institutions of power, most notably assaulting traditionally apolitical security services and targeting independent media outlets, following a classic would-be authoritarian playbook deployed in many a third-world country in recent decades.

Trump's loyalist factions, known as MAGA, have used increasingly bold threats of violence to cow parliament into subservience—it has rubber-stamped the most craven of his appointees, no matter how unqualified they are, to the point that one imagines, in the tradition of Caligula, an ambassadorial nomination for Trump's favorite horse can't be far away in the future.

Despite the fact that under the nation's constitution the congress actually controls the power of the purse, supplicant loyalist members of the House and Senate have taken to begging Trump to intervene with Musk, who is canceling legally mandated payments, grants, and government expenditures by personal fiat. In comments to reporters, Senator Tommy Tuberville, who is regularly cited as the dumbest member of the national senate, said he was fine with the new dynamic of personally appealing to the unelected oligarch to support his state back home: "If we have to lobby for, 'Hey wait a minute, what about the bridge in Birmingham?' or, 'There's a bridge in Mobile' or whatever, I think that could be very possible."

At the top of this week's rubber-stamps was Trump's appointment of a far-right extremist, loyalist, and conspiracist to head the country's premier national law enforcement agency. While all previous directors of the agency — known as the FBI — have been either nonpartisan federal judges or esteemed law enforcement leaders, the new director is best known for his aggressive hawking of Trump branded merchandise, authoring children's' books that venerate Trump as a "king," and, recently, his controversial and extensive Chinese financial holdings. The new director — who even standard Trump loyalists balked at as stunningly unqualified and who opposition leaders believe lied about how he helped orchestrate a purge of the FBI's top ranks even before taking office — has promised to hunt down "Deep State" resistors and weaponize the traditionally independent agency against political enemies and media in the capital.

Musk appeared in public this week at a loyalist political rally wearing sunglasses and wielding a chainsaw on stage and moved to formalize his own loyal paramilitary units, having his private personal security force officially deputized as federal marshals, a move one law enforcement archly described simply as "rare." On stage at the far-right rally, Musk declared, "I am become meme" and marveled at the ease of his government takeover: "There's living the dream, and there's living the meme. And it's pretty much what's happening, ya know?"

As they settle into power, both men appear to be merging their official roles and private feuds and business challenges.

This week, Trump — who ranks near of the bottom of the nation's wealthiest, has failed at nearly every business line he's entered across his career, is a convicted felon surrounded by fraud allegations, and faced an outright ban from leading organizations in the province of New York — has long harbored resentment towards the nation's powerful moneyed elite who live in the vast nation's coastal urban centers. Now finally in a position to deliver retribution for a lifetime of slights, he is moving to flex the official powers in long-simmering fights among the country's oligarchy.

News report indicated this week that he hopes to assume control of the country's independent postal authority, an illegal move but one he has long coveted. In the past, he has frequently criticized how the postal service's main customer is increasingly the online shopping portal known as Amazon — a site akin to the Chinese powerhouse site Alibaba — that's run by oligarch Jeff Bezos, who is the nation's second-wealthiest man after Musk. (Recognizing that he would be Trump's cross-hairs, Bezos has spent recent months cozying up to Trump, including funneling a $40 million payment to Trump's wife.)

For his part, Musk also apparently is attempting to leverage his new official powers for business purposes, as reports alleged that his social media company — a less successful version of the Chinese microblogging site Weibo that's known as "X" and now largely populated by Nazis and the many mothers of Musk's 13 children— attempted to blackmail advertisers with adverse government action unless their raised their spending with his company.

In newly released custody filings, the mother of Musk's most recent child — who was announced on "X" last Friday — provided some notable insight into Musk's current mindset, saying Musk texted her, "I'm #2 after Trump for assassination," and then added, "Only the paranoid survive."