The MAGA military purge
Trump and Hegseth are set to radically transform the US military which defends Europe. Will Europeans trust a MAGA army to protect them?
They warned us that Trump's second term would be a whole different ballgame, with the increasingly erratic president unleashed from the guardrails that hindered him in his first term. Within two weeks of winning, Trump has shown those predictions to be true with his wild and astonishing cabinet picks. You've probably heard about the most outrageous ones, such as a conspiracy theorist anti-vaccine warrior to head the health department, an alleged statutory rapist as attorney general and a Russian asset as director of national intelligence. But the scariest pick for Europeans may be one you haven't heard about yet: Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense.
“What is Hegseth there for? They want to turn the US military into an extension of MAGA,” national security expert Ben Rhodes noted on Pod Save America this week. “That’s something that Trump has always wanted, he’s wanted a military that would follow his orders - no matter how extreme those orders are. He wants a military that culturally reflects the people at his rallies.”
Hegseth is a Fox News host and former infantry officer in the Minnesota state military (the National Guard) who has for the past ten years called for a purge of the US military. He is part of the MAGA movement and is associated with white nationalism, with a white nationalist tattoo on his arm that once saw him flagged as a potential “insider threat” by the military. He has for years laid out a plan for a “frontal assault” to reform the military from the top down, including by purging "woke" generals, forbidding women from serving in combat, eliminating diversity goals and utilizing the "real threat of violence" on global friends and foes alike. He has suggested that the US military should go back to its “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, which could mean a purge of openly gay people. Like several of Trump’s cabinet appointees, Hegseth has also been dogged by rape allegations (his lawyer has acknowledged that Hegseth paid off an accuser after being investigated for sexual assault in 2017). However this part of his biography is so common among Trump’s cabinet nominees it can hardly be said to rise to the level of a scandal.
The most alarming thing, particularly for US allies, should be what Hegseth has said about using the US military against Americans domestically. In one of his five published books he wrote that the US military would have to be used against Americans in “some form of civil war” if Democrats were to win the 2024 election.
Hegseth has laid out his intentions to purge the military of anyone not sufficiently loyal to Trump (ahead of loyalty to the country) in detail. "First of all, you’ve got to fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs…any general that was involved -- general, admiral, whatever -- that was involved in, any of the DEI woke shit, has got to go," Hegseth recently said in an interview on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast. He and Trump have also suggested that generals involved in the US pullout from Afghanistan, and potentially in the arming of Ukraine during Biden’s term, should be put on trial for treason. While he has said Russia and China are threats, he’s said the biggest threat to America is the enemy within. "I think our biggest threat is internal. I think we're committing cultural suicide, and we've lost complete focus on the basics and building blocks of what made Western civilization in America exceptional, fruitful, prosperous, strong, free," he told the podcast. In his book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, he wrote that diversity programs are making the military less white, and that’s a bad thing. “America’s white sons and daughters are walking away, and who can blame them,” he wrote.
In short, he has been far more concerned about America’s internal enemies than its external ones, and has had little to say about actual foreign policy. This is why the transatlantic defence community reacted with a collective “who the fuck is this guy?” when the announcement was made.
It has been well-known that since 2020 Trump has been eager to make the military more loyal to him. After the January 6th investigation in the US Congress revealed that Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, was essentially planning a military counter-coup if Trump’s coup attempt was successful. Trump has said that Milley should be executed for treason for this and for his bilateral contact with the Chinese in January 2021 suggesting he would not carry out erratic orders from the president. It’s clear that the military was the one thing standing between democracy and a Trump dictatorship in January 2021 had the coup been successful. Trump doesn’t want to encounter that obstacle again.
A MAGA military firmly in Trump’s control will be a completely different situation than during Trump’s first term, which saw an uncomfortable relationship between the president and his generals (who have since called him a fascist). There will no longer be principled generals to talk Trump out of his alliances with Russia or his abandonment of NATO. The men that will be installed will be ready to use the military domestically against US citizens to put down dissent, something Milley resisted during Trump’s first term.
If Europeans think this all has nothing to do with them, they are not living in the real world. There are 100,000 US soldiers in Europe, spread out across hundreds of locations on this continent the full extent of which isn’t even known. Militarily, it could be said that Donald Trump is now the president of Europe. During his first term, his control over the military was tenuous. Going forward, we’re going to be in a very different situation.
What Hegseth is able to do to the US military will impact every European, whether they like it or not. If Europeans are uncomfortable with Donald Trump being in charge of their defence, there is only one alternative: European defence. But national leaders on this continent, particularly in the East and Britain, are still fiercely resisting this idea. The Atlanticist establishment on this continent gambled that entrusting Europeans’ security to the American military was a safe bet. But that military may be about to transform in previously unthinkable ways, with terrifying implications. By the time Europeans wake up to this reality, it will probably be too late.