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The firings of General Randy George, General David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr. have nothing to do with wartime performance. Hegseth fired George, the Army’s highest-ranking officer, while the Army’s 82nd Airborne was literally en route to the Middle East. One unnamed U.S. official put it plainly to Axios: “Here is a four-star general who is actively working to get equipment and people into theater, to protect U.S. forces, and you fire him? In the middle of a war?”¹
The documented reason for George’s firing is that he and Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll refused to pull four Black and female officers from a promotion list. Hegseth blocked or delayed promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four military branches. One U.S. official told reporters, “There is not a single service that has been immune to this level of involvement by Hegseth.”² The cover story is DEI. The actual project is something larger and more deliberate.
The chapter on the Department of Defense in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s governing blueprint, was written by Christopher Miller, the man who served as acting Defense Secretary in the final days of Trump’s first term. Miller calls the existing general officer corps “Barack Obama’s general officer corps” and calls for the next president to “limit the continued advancement of many of the existing cadre, many of whom have been advanced by prior Administrations for reasons other than their warfighting prowess.” Multiple analyses of the chapter describe it as a blueprint for purging and replacing military leadership unwilling to execute presidential orders.³ The Project 2025 document states the goal plainly: “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”³
Hegseth announced before he was even confirmed that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs needed to go. He said so plainly on a podcast: “Well, first of all, you got to fire, you got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”⁴ Since taking office, he has removed more than a dozen senior military leaders across multiple branches, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of Naval Operations. Five former defense secretaries, including Trump’s own first SecDef Jim Mattis, called the pattern of firings “reckless” in a joint letter to Congress demanding hearings on the national security implications; Republican leadership scheduled no such hearings.⁵ The officer replacing George is Gen. Christopher LaNeve, a former Hegseth aide who called into Trump’s inauguration ball from South Korea to congratulate the president.
Political scientists who study how democracies are killed have a name for this sequence. They call it executive aggrandizement: the use of legal mechanisms and institutional levers to concentrate power in the executive until the outward form of democratic governance remains but the substance is gone. Viktor Orbán did not eradicate democracy in Hungary overnight. He chipped away steadily, using legal systems to consolidate authority.⁶ He packed courts with loyalists. He redrew electoral districts. He captured public media. He appointed allies to every institution that might otherwise check him. The separation of powers was hollowed out, institutional neutrality disappeared, and the machinery of the state was deployed to partisan ends.⁷ By the time his advantages in elections became structurally insurmountable, it had all happened through technically lawful means. Orbán calls the result an “illiberal state.” His admirers at the Heritage Foundation call it the model to emulate and refine.
The historical record on military purges is consistent. Stalin removed three of five Soviet marshals and roughly 35,000 officers between 1937 and 1938; within two years the Red Army was so hollowed out it nearly collapsed against Finland. Erdoğan used the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey as cover to dismiss over 40% of his general officer corps and replace them with loyalists. In each case the stated reason was readiness or loyalty to the state. In each case the actual result was a military answerable to one man.
For years we have seen Trump, Bannon, and others in the GOP orbit express open admiration for Orbán. The people around Trump studied Orbán’s playbook carefully. And the playbook has a chapter on the military, because any attempt to permanently consolidate power runs into a specific problem: at some point, someone has to be willing to give an order, and someone else has to be willing to follow it. Project 2025 contributors Stephen Miller and Jeffrey Clark discussed invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement. Russell Vought, now the White House budget director, said the Heritage Foundation’s affiliated organization was working to keep legal and defense communities from preventing use of the Insurrection Act.⁸ A military commanded by generals who called into the inauguration ball is a military that will carry out whatever domestic deployment the administration decides to call necessary.
On the same day these firings were announced, the White House proposed $1.5 trillion for defense, a 44% increase over the current budget, while cutting nondefense spending by 10%, with those reductions falling primarily on deep cuts to housing, social services, and healthcare.⁹ Trump explained his thinking at a private White House event this week: “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”¹⁰
We now have a military that has been purged of independent officers and flush with the largest budget in American history, while the people who need doctors die. Ask yourself what that combination is actually for. Orbán figured it out fifteen years ago. The answer is not national security. The answer is permanence.
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Editor's note: Two direct quotes from the Project 2025 DOD chapter have been added for precision. The original text paraphrased the document accurately but the direct quotes provide greater specificity for readers who want to verify the sourcing themselves.
References
Al Jazeera. (2026, April 3). Trump seeks historic $1.5 trillion for military in Congress budget request. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/3/trump-seeks-historic-1-5-trillion-for-military-in-congress-budget-request
CNN Politics. (2026, April 3). White House seeks massive increase in defense spending and looks to slash housing, social services and health care. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/03/politics/white-house-budget-proposal-defense-spending-trump
The Daily Beast. (2026, April 3). Pentagon Pete Hegseth’s bigoted reason for firing top General Randy George leaks. The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-petes-bigoted-reason-for-firing-top-general-randy-george-leaks/
Democratic Erosion Consortium. (2025, April 18). How to erode a democracy: Hungary’s illiberal turn under Orbán. Democratic Erosion. https://democratic-erosion.org/2025/04/18/how-to-erode-a-democracy-hungarys-illiberal-turn-under-orban/
The Hill. (2024, November 14). Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth stoke fears of ‘woke’ general purge. The Hill. https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4989432-trump-defense-military-shakeup/
Lawler, D., & Demarest, C. (2026, April 2). Hegseth removes Army’s top general during Iran war. Axios. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/02/iran-war-hegseth-remove-gen-george-army-chief-staff
MS NOW. (2026, April 3). Pete Hegseth fires Army’s top general. MS NOW. https://www.ms.now/news/hegseth-fires-armys-top-general
Szelényi, Z. (2026, April 1). Win or lose, Orbán has broken Hungary’s democracy. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2026/04/win-or-lose-orban-has-broken-hungarys-democracy
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. (2024, October 20). Here’s what Project 2025 has planned for the military. Bucks County Beacon. https://buckscountybeacon.com/2024/10/heres-what-project-2025-has-planned-for-the-military/
A military loyal to anything other than the support and defense of the Constitution of the United States is a military that will increasingly commit atrocities in the name of the leader, party, religion or what ever other warped influence or idea this administration comes up with. This is beyond dangerous and highly destabilizing. Our military is led by a commander in chief that does not understand service before self, let alone military service nor the profession of arms; and is directed by the most unqualified civilian to ever have served as SECDEF. THE US CONGRESS IS TO BLAME. They have capitulated and abandoned principal - American and foreign blood is on their hands. Those that are up for re-election need to be voted out this cycle and the next.
Thank you for another informative article! It’s an excellent companion to your other article about why the military will never turn on Trump.