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      Democrats’ US tour gathers support in fight against Trump: ‘Get angry, man’

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      A Minnesota veteran who found work at the Veterans Benefits Administration after suffering two traumatic brain injuries on overseas deployments stood in front of hundreds of people and five Democratic state attorneys general on Thursday night and recalled the moment she learned she lost her job.“All I was given was a Post-it note,” Joy Marver said, inspiring gasps and boos from a raucous crowd. “The Post-it note contained just the HR email address and my supervisor’s phone number. This came from an external source. Doge terminated me. No one in my chain of command knew I was being terminated. No one knew. It took two weeks to get my termination email sent to me.”The firing was so demoralizing she said she considered driving her truck off a bridge but instead went into the VA for crisis care.“Don’t fuck with a veteran,” she concluded.The story was one of many shared by former federal workers and others impacted by the Trump administration’s policies during a town hall in St Paul, Minnesota, on Thursday, part of a national tour that has offered an avenue for grievances against Donald Trump’s first two months, but also a way to gather evidence for ongoing lawsuits, totaling about 10 so far, that Democratic attorneys general have filed against the Trump administration.“Everybody’s putting in double duty. But the point is, we’re absolutely up to it. We got four and a half years of gas in our tanks, and we’re here to fight for the American people all the way through,” Ellison told reporters before the event began.The community impact hearings, as they’re calling them, kicked off in Arizona earlier this month and will continue in Oregon, Colorado, Vermont and New York, the attorneys general said. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, Kris Mayes of Arizona, Letitia James of New York, Matthew Platkin of New Jersey and Kwame Raoul of Illinois attended the event in Minnesota on Thursday, where the crowd filled a high school auditorium and spilled into an overflow room.Attendees were given the opportunity to take the mic and share their stories.Another veteran who worked at the Veterans Benefit Administration was fired via email by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, she said. She was part of the probationary employee purge, and her supervisors didn’t know she was let go. She recalled that her boss’ response to her firing was: “WTF”.A probationary employee at an unnamed federal agency said she was also let go. She interviewed and did background checks for 11 months to secure her federal role. “Now we are forced to put our plans of starting a family, of owning a home on hold indefinitely, and I feel that this disruption of this dream will be felt for the rest of our lives,” she said.A former employee of 18F, the federal government’s digital services agency, said they were laid off in the middle of the night on a weekend. “I’m grieving. We didn’t deserve this,” they said. A former USAID worker said she watched as Doge moved through the agency, accessing files and threatening employees if they spoke up, before she was fired.After several probationary employees shared their stories, Arizona’s Mayes cut in to ask whether the Trump administration or their agencies had reached out to rehire them. The Democratic attorneys general secured a win in a lawsuit over these firings, and a judge ruled they needed to be reinstated. If that wasn’t happening, Mayes said, they needed to know.“We can bring a motion to enforce,” Ellison explained. “We can bring, perhaps, a motion for contempt. There’s a lot of things. But if we don’t know that, we certainly can’t do anything.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBefore the town hall began, the attorneys general said that they had secured temporary restraining orders halting or reversing Trump administration directives in nearly all of their cases so far. In several instances, they have had to file additional actions to get the administration to comply with the orders. In a case that ended a “pause” on federal grants, for example, the pause was ended – but some programs still were not restarted. James said they had to file a motion to enforce to get those programs running again.Trans people shared how the Trump administration’s disdain for their community was affecting them. A young trans athlete was kicked off her softball team, her mom shared. A trans veteran was worried about her access to life-saving healthcare. Doctors who treat trans youth said their patients are on edge.Immigrants and people from mixed-status families talked about the specter of deportation and how the threat loomed over their day to day. One woman said her mother’s partner was deported, as was her husband’s uncle. She worries daily whether her mom is next. “The Trump administration has impacted me deeply during these past two months alone, but more than ever, we have to come together organized because I’ll be damned if they keep hurting my family,” she said.Suzanne Kelly, the CEO of the Minnesota Council of Churches, said her organization, which helps resettle refugees, is losing $4m in federal funds that would go directly to their clients, an amount that can’t be replaced with local dollars. She has had to lay off 26 employees, most of whom are refugees or asylees themselves. Refugees they were expecting to help are now stranded overseas in refugee camps, she said. People already here will lose rental aid and other assistance.“Whatever your faith tradition, please pray with us for those individuals, and pray with us for this country. We’re better than this,” Kelly said.After two hours of testimony a Minnesota activist stood up and shared their vision of the way forward: “The first step of that call to action is just to get fucking angry, man.” More

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      Trump administration plans for militarized border in New Mexico – report

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      The Trump administration is working on a plan to create what conservatives have long demanded: a militarized buffer zone along the southern border in New Mexico that would be occupied by active-duty US troops, empowered to detain migrants who cross into the United States unlawfully, the Washington Post reports.According to the Post, recent internal discussions have centered on deploying troops to a section of the border in New Mexico that would be turned into a kind of military installation, which would give the soldiers a legal right to detain migrants who “trespass” on the elongated base. Unauthorized migrants would then be held until they can be turned over to immigration officers.The planning appears to focus on creating a vast military installation as a way around the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that bars soldiers from participating in most civilian law enforcement missions.Calls to militarize the southern border are not new, but so far they have existed more in the realm of political rhetoric than reality.In 2022, Blake Masters, an Arizona Senate candidate enthusiastically backed by Peter Thiel, the same tech billionaire who bankrolled JD Vance’s campaign that year, ran a campaign ad promising to do just that.In 2018, Trump abruptly announced during a White House meeting with then defense secretary Jim Mattis: “We are going to be guarding our border with our military. That’s a big step.”Although the US president’s announcement sparked a flurry of reports, in the Washington Post and elsewhere, that he was serious about the proposal, it was never enacted at scale.Seven months later, as Trump focused on the supposed threat of a migrant “caravan” on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections, Mattis defended the limited presence of troops at the southern border by saying: “We don’t do stunts in this department”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMattis’s successor, Mark Esper, revealed in his memoir that Trump had apparently asked him to violate the Posse Comitatus Act in 2020. According to Esper, Trump asked him, a week after the murder of George Floyd, to deploy 10,000 active-duty troops to the streets of the nation’s capital and have them open fire on protesters. “Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked, in an Oval Office meeting. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Esper declined to do so.One big difference between 2018, 2020 and 2025, however, is that Trump will not have to convince a sober, former general like Mattis or a West Point graduate like Esper to carry out his plan to divert military resources to domestic law enforcement, since his current defense secretary is a former weekend TV host who is far less likely to object. More

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      Article on Jackie Robinson’s military career restored to defense department website

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      An article detailing Jackie Robinson’s military career has been restored to the Department of Defense’s website amid a purge of material considered to be related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).Robinson, who Donald Trump last month described as helping “drive our country forward to greatness”, is widely considered a national hero in the US. He broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947 when he suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers; he went on to be elected to his sport’s Hall of Fame. Robinson also served in the US Army during the second world war. However, on Tuesday night ESPN’S Jeff Passan noted a page detailing Robinson’s army career had been taken down and “dei” added to the URL.On Wednesday, the page had been restored. Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot said that “everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson”. He added that the defense department regularly checks for material than may have been removed in error.The initial removal was in step with similar decisions in recent weeks as the Pentagon works on the removal of any webpage it considers to be representative of DEI programs. The Trump administration has made its distaste for DEI clear and has rolled back many DEI programs across the federal government. One Trump executive order sought to end all “mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the federal government” related to “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility’ (DEIA) programs”.Other pages to have been removed include one focusing on Ira Hayes, a Native American who was one of the marines pictured raising the American flag at Iwo Jima during the second world war. Articles about the Native American code talkers also appeared to have been removed from military websites.Defense department spokesperson Sean Parnell has defended the removals. “I think the president and the secretary have been very clear on this – that anybody that says in the Department of Defense that diversity is our strength is, is frankly, incorrect,” Parnell said.Robinson had a striking military career. After a successful battle to train as an officer, Robinson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1943 and assigned to a tank regiment. However, in 1944 the driver of an army bus ordered Robinson to sit at the back, a directive Robinson refused. Robinson was court martialed and acquitted, then served as an athletics coach before being honorably discharged in November 1944.The removal of Robinson’s page seems to be at odds with comments by Trump himself, who last month said Robinson’s statue would be added to a garden of national heroes. Trump said at the time that Robinson was one of a number of “Black legends, champions, warriors and patriots who helped drive our country forward to greatness.” More

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      US judge blocks Trump’s ban on trans people serving in the military

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      A federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from military service on Tuesday.US district judge Ana Reyes in Washington DC ruled that the president’s order to exclude transgender troops from military service likely violates their constitutional rights.She delayed her order by three days to give the administration time to appeal.“The court knows that this opinion will lead to heated public debate and appeals. In a healthy democracy, both are positive outcomes,” Reyes wrote. “We should all agree, however, that every person who has answered the call to serve deserves our gratitude and respect.”The White House didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.Army reserves 2nd Lt Nicolas Talbott, one of 14 transgender active-duty service members named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said he was holding his breath as he waited to find out if he would be separated from the military next week.“This is such a sigh of relief,” he said. “This is all I’ve ever wanted to do. This is my dream job, and I finally have it. And I was so terrified that I was about to lose it.”The judge issued a preliminary injunction requested by attorneys for six transgender people who are active-duty service members and two others seeking to join the military.On 27 January, Trump signed an executive order that claims the sexual identity of transgender service members “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life” and is harmful to military readiness.In response to the order, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, issued a policy that presumptively disqualifies people with gender dysphoria from military service. Gender dysphoria is the distress that a person feels because their assigned gender and gender identity don’t match. The medical condition has been linked to depression and suicidal thoughts.Plaintiffs’ attorneys contend Trump’s order violates transgender people’s rights to equal protection under the fifth amendment.Government lawyers argue that military officials have broad discretion to decide how to assign and deploy service members without judicial interference.Reyes said she did not take lightly her decision to issue an injunction blocking Trump’s order, noting: “Judicial overreach is no less pernicious than executive overreach.” But, she said, it was also the responsibility of each branch of government to provide checks and balances for the others, and the court “therefore must act to uphold the equal protection rights that the military defends every day”.Thousands of transgender people serve in the military, but they represent less than 1% of the total number of active-duty service members.In 2016, a defense department policy permitted transgender people to serve openly in the military. During Trump’s first term in the White House, the Republican issued a directive to ban transgender service members. The supreme court allowed the ban to take effect. Former president Joe Biden, a Democrat, scrapped it when he took office.Hegseth’s 26 February policy says service members or applicants for military service who have “a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service”.The plaintiffs who sued to block Trump’s order include an army reserves platoon leader from Pennsylvania, an army major who was awarded a Bronze Star for service in Afghanistan, and a Sailor of the Year award winner serving in the navy.“The cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificed – some risking their lives – to ensure for others the very equal protection rights the military ban seeks to deny them,” Reyes wrote.Their attorneys, from the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLAD Law, said transgender troops “seek nothing more than the opportunity to continue dedicating their lives to defending the Nation”.“Yet these accomplished servicemembers are now subject to an order that says they must be separated from the military based on a characteristic that has no bearing on their proven ability to do the job,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote. “This is a stark and reckless reversal of policy that denigrates honorable transgender servicemembers, disrupts unit cohesion, and weakens our military.” More

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      Pentagon restores webpage for Black Medal of Honor winner but defends DEI purge

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      The US defense department webpage celebrating a Black Medal of Honor recipient that was removed and had the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address has been restored – and the letters scrubbed – after an outcry. But defense department officials have continued to argue publicly that it is wrong to say that diversity is a strength, and that it’s essential to dismantle all “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts.On Saturday, the Guardian reported that US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message – and that the URL had been changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.Rogers, who died in 1990, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base. Then president Richard Nixon awarded him the Medal of Honor, the country’s highest military honor, in 1970, making him the highest-ranking African American to receive it, according to the West Virginia military hall of fame.On Saturday the web page honoring him was no longer functional, with a “404 – Page Not Found” message appearing along with the note: “The page you are looking for might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.”A screenshot posted on Bluesky by the writer Brandon Friedman noted that a Google preview continued to show the defense department’s profile page – noting of Rogers that, “as a Black man, he worked for gender and race equality while in the service”. Friedman added that the page no longer worked and the URL had been “changed to include ‘DEI medal’”.By Monday, however, the site was operational once more – and the URL had returned to its original formulation, with the letters DEI no longer present.In a statement Monday that did not elaborate, a defense department spokesperson told the Guardian: “The department has restored the Medal of Honor story about army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers … The story was removed during auto removal process.”While the defense department also claimed publicly on Monday that internet pages honoring Rogers, as well as Japanese American service members, had been taken down mistakenly, spokesperson Sean Parnell also staunchly defended its overall campaign to strip out content singling out the contributions by women and minority groups, which the Trump administration considers “DEI”.“I think the president and the secretary have been very clear on this – that anybody that says in the Department of Defense that diversity is our strength is, is frankly, incorrect,” Parnell said.In all, thousands of pages honoring contributions by women and minority groups have been taken down in efforts to delete material promoting diversity, equity and inclusion – an action that Parnell defended at a briefing.Defense secretary Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump have already removed the only female four-star officer on the joint chiefs of staff, Navy Adm Lisa Franchetti, and removed its Black chairperson, Gen CQ Brown Jr.Brown, a history-making Black fighter pilot, had spoken out during the 2020 George Floyd protests about his own experiences with racial discrimination. Before he became Trump’s secretary of defense, Hegseth had publicly questioned whether Brown had become the chair of the joint chiefs of staff because of his race.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt – which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter,” Hegseth wrote in a book.“The full throttled attack on Black leadership, dismantling of civil rights protections, imposition of unjust anti-DEI regulations, and unprecedented historical erasure across the Department of Defense is a clear sign of a new Jim Crow being propagated by our Commander in Chief,” said Richard Brookshire, co-CEO of the Black Veterans Project, a non-profit advocating for the elimination of racial inequities among uniformed service members.Since retaking the Oval Office in January, Trump has moved his administration to roll back DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – efforts across the federal government.One executive order sought to terminate all “mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the federal government”, which the Trump administration deems “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility’ (DEIA) programs”.In a win for the Trump administration, an appeals court on Friday lifted a block on executive orders that seek to end the federal government’s support for DEI programs.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Black Medal of Honor recipient removed from US Department of Defense website

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      The US defense department webpage celebrating an army general who served in the Vietnam war and was awarded the country’s highest military decoration has been removed and the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address.On Saturday, US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message. The URL was also changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.Rogers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by then president Richard Nixon in 1970, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base.According to the West Virginia military hall of fame, Rogers was the highest-ranking African American to receive the medal. After his death in 1990, Rogers’s remains were buried at the Arlington national cemetery in Washington DC, and in 1999 a bridge in Fayette county, where Rogers was born, was renamed the Charles C Rogers Bridge.As of Sunday afternoon, a “404 – Page Not Found” message appeared on the defense department’s webpage for Rogers, along with the message: “The page you are looking for might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.”A screenshot posted by the writer Brandon Friedman on Bluesky on Saturday evening showed the Google preview of an entry of Rogers’s profile on the defense department’s website.Dated 1 November 2021, the entry’s Google preview reads: “Medal of Honor Monday: Army Maj Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers.” Below it are the words: “Army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers served through all of it. As a Black man, he worked for gender and race equality while in the service.”“Google his name and the entry below comes up. When you click, you’ll see the page has been deleted and the URL changed to include ‘DEI medal,’” Friedman wrote.The Guardian has asked the defense department for comment.Since taking office in January, Donald Trump has moved his administration to roll back DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – efforts across the federal government.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne executive order sought to terminate all “mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the federal government”, which the Trump administration deems “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility’ (DEIA) programs”.In a win for the Trump administration on Friday, an appeals court lifted a block on executive orders that seek to end the federal government’s support for DEI programs. More

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      ‘Maga since forever’: mercenary mogul Erik Prince pushes to privatize Trump deportation plans

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      Silicon Valley has played a sizable part in the early days of Donald Trump’s new administration, but another familiar face in the Maga-verse is beginning to emerge: businessman Erik Prince, often described by his critics as a living “Bond villain”.Prince is the most famous mercenary of the contemporary era and the founder of the now defunct private military company Blackwater. For a time, it was a prolific privateer in the “war on terror”, racking up millions in US government contracts by providing soldiers of fortune to the CIA, Pentagon and beyond.Now he is a central figure among a web of other contractors trying to sell Trump advisers on a $25bn deal to privatize the mass deportations of 12 million migrants.In an appearance on NewsNation, he immediately tried to temper that his plan had any traction.“No indications, so far,” said Prince about a federal contract materializing. “Eventually if they’re going to hit those kinds of numbers and scale, they’re going to need additional private sector.”But the news had people wondering, how is Prince going to factor into the second Trump presidency?Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who has advised the Pentagon and the CIA, said: “Erik Prince has always been politically connected to Maga, the Maga movement, and that’s going back to 2015.”Prince, himself a special forces veteran and ex-Navy Seal, is a known business associate of Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first electoral win. Prince even appeared with him last July at a press conference before Bannon surrendered to authorities and began a short prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena.“He comes from a wealthy Republican family,” said McFate, who has authored books on the global mercenary industry and is familiar with Prince’s history. “His sister, Betsy DeVos, is the former education secretary, and he’s been a Maga, not just a Maga, he’s been a Steve Bannon, Maga Breitbart Republican, since forever.”Beginning during the two Bush administrations, Blackwater was a major recipient of Pentagon money flowing into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a massacre in Baghdad at the hands of some of his contractors led to prison sentences, congressional inquiries and blacklistings of the firm.Years later, Trump would come to the rescue: pardoning all of the Blackwater mercenaries involved in the massacre.Now, with the current administration, which is doling out free advertising to Elon Musk and other Maga loyalists, Prince has a new and familiar ally in Washington.“This is a big market time for him,” said McFate. “He’s very quiet when there’s a Democrat in the White House and gets very noisy when a Republican, especially Trump, is in the White House; I expect this to be one of many things he will try to pitch.”Do you have tips about private military contractors or the world of Erik Prince? Tip us securely here or text Ben Makuch at BenMakuch.90 on Signal.McFate said Prince is nothing if not an “opportunist” and an “egotist” with a penchant for getting into media cycles.“If Trump or somebody says ‘That’s an interesting idea,’ he will pump out a PowerPoint slideshow proposing an idea, whether or not he can do it,” he said. Prince also has the ear of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and was a character witness for her Senate confirmation.There’s no denying Prince is a relentless pitchman, offering world governments billion-dollar plans to privatize wars or other less expensive espionage activities. For example, he was recently named to the advisory board of the London-based private intelligence firm Vantage Intelligence, which advises “sovereign wealth funds” and other “high-net-worth individuals”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPost-Blackwater and under new companies, he has proposed missions in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Congo, Libya and, purportedly, Venezuela – a country he often mentions as ripe for overthrow on his podcast, Off Leash.A senior commander in an alliance of former Venezuelan soldiers who defected from the Chavista regime told the Guardian his organization has been asking Prince for help against the country’s current president, Nicolás Maduro.“We have sent messages to Mr Erik Prince to try to see if we can meet,” said Javier Nieto Quintero, a Florida-based former captain in the Venezuelan military and leader of the Venezuelan dissident organization Carive. “If he wants, we can provide help, support in terms of information, intelligence, or any other area based on the freedom of our country.”Nieto Quintero, who said Prince has yet to respond, and Carive was used in a failed operation against Maduro in 2020 led by a former Green Beret. In what is notoriously known as the “Bay of Piglets”, six of Nieto Quintero’s men were killed and close to 100 captured, including two former US servicemen recruited for the job who were freed two years ago from a Caracas prison.Prince’s eye has undoubtedly been focused on Venezuela, a country with vast oil reserves that has long been in the crosshairs of Trump’s retinue. In recent months, Prince has supported a Venezuelan opposition movement called Ya Casi Venezuela, claiming to have raised more than $1m for it over the summer. The Maduro regime is now investigating Prince’s links to the campaign, which it paints as a sort of front for western governments fostering its downfall.Venezuela has reason to fear Prince and his connections to American spies: the CIA, with a rich history of covert actions in Latin America, was at least aware of a plot to overthrow Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez in 2002.“We were in contact with Ya Casi Venezuela, but a meeting never took place,” said Nieto Quintero. “We have continued to grow and strengthen our ranks and our doctrine, our plans, our institutional, military, security and defense proposals.”Prince is officially active in the region. Last week, Ecuador announced it would be partnering with Prince in a “strategic alliance” to reinforce the country’s controversial “war on crime” with his expertise.Prince did not respond to a request for comment sent through his encrypted cellphone company, Unplugged. Ya Casi Venezuela did not answer numerous emails about its relationship with Prince. As of now, no business deal between the Trump administration and Prince has been signed or publicly disclosed.But across his career as both a shadowy contractor and a political figure, who just graced the stages of the latest Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to applause and then spoke to Harvard Republicans, the public and private sides of Prince remain somewhat antithetical.“He likes to be in the news, which makes him a very bad mercenary,” said McFate. “Frankly, most mercenaries I talk to in Africa, the big ones, despise him.” More

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      How Pete Hegseth is pushing his beliefs on US agency: ‘nothing to prepare forces’

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      More than 50 days into Donald Trump’s second administration and his Department of Defense is already rapidly transforming into the image of its secretary, Pete Hegseth.Now, many of the rants and opinions common during Hegseth’s Fox News career are coming to policy fruition in his new Pentagon.Hegseth inaugurated himself by scolding his Nato allies and confirming the US would never accept Ukraine into the alliance. Then his Pentagon immediately made leadership changes targeting women and people of color. He oversaw total deletions of all diversity, equity and inclusion programs, all the while slashing whole sections of the military overseeing civilian harm reduction in theatres of combat.Combining all of that with his connections to Christian nationalism and a pastor who said slavery brought “affection between the races” has led to calls from former defense department officials that the new secretary is actively damaging his own agency.“What are we seeing in the Pentagon right now? What are we hearing about the future of warfare? What are we hearing about the transformation that is necessary, right now, as we come out of the last two decades of warfighting?” said the retired brigadier general Paul Eaton, a veteran of the Iraq war. “We’re hearing of DEI purging.”Eaton continued: “We’re hearing about taking a Black four-star out of the seniormost position in the armed forces of the United States; a female four-star removed, who was the first chief of naval operations; a four-star female taken out of the coast guard.”In any national military, fighting cohesion and faith in the chain of command is paramount. But Eaton says Hegseth is a “Saturday showman on Fox News” unfit for the office he occupies and has undermined his troops at every turn.Eaton explained that mass firings and transgender bans have distracted from learning lessons from the war in Ukraine and the coming global conflict many inside the Pentagon have been predicting for years. Most of all, Hegseth’s focus on culture war is actively neglecting the “warfighters” he constantly invokes.“What we’re seeing is nibbling around the edges of a culture with a dominant theme that does nothing to prepare the armed forces of the United States to meet its next peer or near peer opponent,” said Eaton.In a period where the Pentagon has struggled to meet recruitment numbers, Hegseth’s dismissal of top female officers and his historical attitude towards gender is not making enlistment a top attraction among women.“Comments that question the qualifications and accomplishments of women in uniform are deeply disrespectful of the sacrifices these service members and their families have made for our country,” said Caroline Zier, the former deputy chief of staff to the last secretary of defense, Lloyd J Austin III, and a VoteVets senior policy adviser. “Secretary Hegseth risks alienating and undermining the women who currently serve, while decreasing the likelihood that other women look to join the military at exactly the moment when we need all qualified recruits.”Hegseth’s office also had social sciences and DEI research axed in a memo announced in early March. The cost cutting measure will save $30m a year in Pentagon funding of internal studies, “on global migration patterns, climate change impacts, and social trends”.In a post on X, Hegseth said: “[DoD] does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” Those comments match up with his complaint that under the Biden administration the military somehow weakened soldier standards and focused its efforts away from fighting wars in favor of adopting liberal subcultures.“The truth is the United States military is the most lethal fighting force in the history of the world, and the Department of Defense never took its eye off warfighting and meritocracy,” said Zier. “I saw that up close over the course of 15 years working at the Department of Defense, across administrations.”Tough talk about “warfighting” and “lethality” has also followed an obsession within the Trump administration with special forces units – the types that carry out drone strikes or a mission such as the one that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Hegseth and Trump, for example, were dogged defenders of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy Seal pardoned by Trump for war crimes in Iraq.But special operations missions, especially when they have led to civilian carnage, have the propensity to create enemies across the globe if unneeded collateral damage occurs. Which is why new and evolving watchdog policies governing how covert actions are carried out were adopted across the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations of the past. By 2023, Austin instituted new orders surrounding civilian harm mitigation.But Hegseth has closed the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which both handled training and procedures critical in limiting civilian harm in theatres of war. Coupled with plans to overhaul the judge advocate general’s corps to remake the rules of war governing the US military, all signs point to a Pentagon more prone to tragic mistakes.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEaton thinks that is shortsighted and ignores lessons learned.“When I was in Iraq in 2004 developing the Iraqi armed forces,” said Eaton. “I would stand up in front of my Iraqi soldiers and I would make a case for the most important component of the US military: our judicial system and the good order and discipline of the armed forces.”But then, Eaton added, something happened that undermined those words: “Abu Ghraib”.Not only was Hegseth a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was also a major veteran voice that railed against the Biden administration’s handling of withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Part of that included criticisms of abandoning allies, and yet Hegseth’s time at the top of the Pentagon has coincided with the unprecedented undermining of global alliances – suspending things such as offensive cyber missions countering Russia – which has blemished confidence in military interoperability and intelligence sharing.Ukraine, at risk of becoming the new Afghan government cutoff from American military support, is fighting for its national survival against a superior Russian force.In early March, the Pentagon froze critical intelligence and weapons packages as Trump repostured the US position on the conflict. That kind of uncertainty has borne real fears on the ground of the most deadly war in Europe since the second world war.“I think the Ukrainians and all of us working here regardless of nationality, are anxious about what the future of US support looks like,” said a former US marine currently living in Ukraine and working on defense technologies near the frontlines. “We’re all hoping that the US will do the right thing and provide the Ukrainians the tools they need to end this war and secure their future.”But so far, Hegseth has instead shown he’s turning the Pentagon’s gaze toward the border in Mexico, another obsession during his time on air, for the first time in over a century and to the containment of China. Ukraine, Nato and the many Pentagon cuts are in the backseat.The Pentagon did not respond to several emails with a detailed list of questions about Hegseth’s personal impact on policy making on the department he leads. More