The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s Chief of Staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green, Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the Secretary of Army, Dan Driscoll.

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.

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.

Throughout his first term, Donald Trump serially fired and replaced members of his Cabinet as they displeased him. In his second, he seemed to be trying to break this pattern—keeping top aides even after their missteps and humiliations that would have sunk careers in any other administration. But now the president is back to his old ways. Last month, he fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Today, he announced the departure of Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Go for trivia launch. T-minus five, four, three—trivia ignition. Players, we have liftoff.
And by the way, did you know that so-called astronaut ice cream—that duplicitous treat!—was sent to space only once?
It is true that freeze-dried ice cream was developed under contract for NASA during the 1960s, but the only record of its presence on a mission is a menu from a single 1968 voyage.

Americans have been waiting for their president and commander in chief to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. For weeks, Donald Trump has offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his primetime address this evening was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.
Maybe he’d have been better off not trying.

The most momentous launch since the Apollo era was about to begin, and along Florida’s space coast, a secondhand exhilaration was working its way through the assembled crowd, as though all of us, and not just the astronauts, would soon ride out of Earth’s gravity well on a pillar of fire. The space faithful had started arriving at the A. Max Brewer Bridge in Titusville before dawn, under the light of a full, yellow moon.

As the Supreme Court heard oral arguments today about birthright citizenship, Donald Trump was watching from the courtroom—an apparent first for a sitting president. He listened silently as the justices pelted skeptical questions at Solicitor General John Sauer, who tried to defend a Trump executive order purporting to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of certain immigrants.

For a brief moment last week, Congress started to do something productive. The Senate, after weeks of bickering and fruitless negotiations, unanimously approved legislation to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, taking a small but meaningful step toward resolving one of the many crises that have sprung up like targets in a game of whack-a-mole during President Trump’s second term.