Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s firing yesterday of Navy Secretary John Phelan would normally be bound for the “world will little note nor long remember” file, but for its ironies and its context. As for ironies, Phelan was a perfectly typical Trump appointee: a Florida-based investor whom President Trump had hailed as “one of the most successful businessmen in the country.” Phelan even was aligned with Trump’s nostalgic desire to have the Navy build more battleships—power symbols of Trump’s youth—even though naval officials and scholars universally believe that they’ve been obsolete since 1942. But even all this was not enough to make Phelan the kind of Hegseth acolyte who can enjoy job security (at least until the criteria for Hegseth acolyte change, as they do every few weeks).
But it’s the context in which the firing occurred that makes it part of a broader and more important story. That context is the purge of top commanders that we’ve seen under Trump and Hegseth: the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Navy’s chief of staff, and the commandant of the Coast Guard, who violated Trump and Hegseth’s norms of propriety by being, respectively, Black, female, and female. Those discharges preceded the firing of the Air Force chief of staff and, earlier this month, Army Chief of Staff Randy George, even as our war on Iran was raging. According to a Wall Street Journal report, George was upset that Hegseth had struck Black and female colonels from the Army’s list of candidates about to be promoted to generals, and George was also close to Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, whom Hegseth views as a rival.