Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has enjoyed President Trump’s full support for any number of Trumpian initiatives: staging macho, campy shows of military bravado; trashing political opponents and the press, often by name; dissing European allies; posting videos of air strikes on suspected drug boats off the coast of Latin America.
What is the role of a general in a democracy? Many of today’s military leaders have a very particular answer: Focus on tactics, carry out orders, and otherwise shut up.
This is not what America’s top officers have always done. The country’s most senior generals and admirals are expected to provide unvarnished military counsel to the president and swear an oath to defend the Constitution.
Updated at 1:29 a.m. ET on Sunday, April 26, 2026
We were under the table before we knew what was happening. One moment, a military band was parading out of the Washington Hilton’s cavernous ballroom; hundreds of government officials, diplomats, and journalists, including more than a dozen of us from The Atlantic, dressed in our best or borrowed black tie, had turned to our spring-pea and burrata salads.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Army’s top officer, and the White House is discussing the potential departure of the Army secretary in what together would be the biggest wartime military shake-up in decades.
Hegseth asked General Randy George, who was just over halfway through his slated tenure as Army chief of staff, to step down and retire immediately, a Pentagon official told us.
When General Mark Milley outlined the U.S. Army’s future priorities in 2017, he said that new long-range missiles, improved tanks, and better-armed, better-trained infantrymen were vital to America’s domination of the next major conflict. But those plans, the then–Army chief and soon-to-be chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, came with an important caveat: The upgrades would be useless unless the military came up with a more effective air defense.
The suspected drug traffickers, the lone survivors of a U.S. airstrike, were sprawled on a table-size piece of floating wreckage in the Caribbean for more than 40 minutes. They were unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift as they repeatedly attempted to right what remained of their boat. At one point, the men raised their arms and seemed to signal to the U.S. aircraft above, a gesture some who watched a video of the incident interpreted as a sign of surrender.
Mark Kelly thought he was merely stating the obvious. Earlier this month, the Arizona senator joined five other congressional Democrats to film a message addressed to members of the military. “You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders,” they said.
An ordinary president, Kelly told us on Tuesday afternoon, would have responded to the video by affirming that troops should of course follow lawful orders. “But not this guy,” he added. “We basically said, ‘Follow the law.
During Donald Trump’s first term, his top advisers attempted to run a traditional process for shaping foreign policy, tapping experts from the White House’s National Security Council, debating recommendations from across the government, and steering the president away from decisions that they feared would damage America’s interests. But Trump was deeply mistrustful of the NSC, which he saw as too big, too cumbersome, and too attached to Republican orthodoxy.
Updated at 4:05 p.m. ET on June 24, 2025
At 1:08 a.m. eastern daylight time, President Donald Trump proclaimed on social media that a cease-fire between Iran and Israel was “NOW IN EFFECT,” potentially ending an intense 12 days of violence and allowing all sides to step back from a wider, more destructive regional war. “PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!” Trump wrote.
By 6:50 a.m.
By his own account, the military operation that Donald Trump mounted against Iran over the weekend was an unqualified success. Saturday’s covert raid, in which U.S. bombers dropped a series of massive, tailor-made bombs onto fortified Iranian sites, left Tehran’s nuclear capability “completely and totally obliterated,” the president proclaimed in a triumphant White House address late that night.
The reality is more complex.
The last time President Donald Trump tried to send military forces into American streets to put down civil unrest, in June 2020, Pete Hegseth was positioned outside the White House with a Kevlar helmet and riot shield.
This story was updated at 4 p.m. ET on June 5, 2025.
Things were going fine for Pete Hegseth, right up until a chance encounter with the world’s richest man. His pursuit of Donald Trump’s agenda at the Pentagon had made him a star among the president’s advisers. The former Fox News host had moved swiftly to roll back diversity initiatives in the military and to expand U.S. troops’ role in halting immigration at the southern border.