This week, the Senate held its confirmation hearing for Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, President Trump’s relatively obscure nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Caine’s nomination comes amidst questions of his perceived loyalty to Trump and the blowback of last week’s Signal leak involving several high-level Trump administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Not to mention, the administration’s continued attack on DEI and so-called “wokeness” in the military. On this episode of Trumpland with Alex Wagner, a look at how Trump is trying to remake the American military, and the potential threat it may have to readiness, morale, and recruitment in the armed forces. We hear from the some of the people who’ve put their lives on the line for their country about their concerns for the future of America’s fighting forces.
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Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
(Begin Audio Clip)
Roger Wicker: The Committee will come to order. Our eager members of the Fourth Estate are welcome to clear away, thanking them for their presence.
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Alex Wagner: On Tuesday morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a confirmation hearing for President Trump’s nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the principal military advisor to the president.
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Roger Wicker: This morning, the Committee needs to consider the nomination of retired Lieutenant General Dan Caine.
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Alex Wagner: Trump’s peg is Lieutenant General Dan Caine, known casually as Razin Caine.
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Jack Reed: I’m going to start by acknowledging the unusual conditions around your nomination. Six weeks ago, President Trump abruptly dismissed General CQ Brown, who was not even halfway into his tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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Alex Wagner: Back in February, President Trump fired the man who had held the position, General Charles Q. Brown Jr., a respected career official who Trump himself had nominated in 2020 to lead the Air Force. Brown was the first African American to ever lead a branch of the Armed Forces. That dismissal caused a stir on its own. But the announcement of Brown’s replacement, Dan Caine was also met with surprise and confusion.
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Dan Caine: I realized for many Americans I’m an unknown leader.
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Alex Wagner: Caine was relatively unknown and has never overseen a branch of the military, nor has he managed a large-scale division of combat troops. Usually, those are prerequisites for the job. Caine is also retired, a break from the tradition of having active personnel in the role.
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Dan Caine: I’ve served in the interagency at the end, at the White House, and I’ve deployed in combat as a fire pilot, a special operations officer and a CIA officer. I’ve also had the privilege of serving alongside incredible business leaders, starting at scaling companies as an entrepreneur, and along the way I learned what a different kind of grit looks like.
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Alex Wagner: Democrats in the hearing were concerned that Caine was picked because of his alleged loyalty to President Trump. That worry stemmed from a video that resurfaced of Trump speaking at CPAC last year, where he talked about meeting Caine.
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Donald Trump: This is where I met General Razin Caine. And what’s your name? General, what’s your name? And he gave me his name. What’s your name, sir? “Yes, sir. And I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.” And he puts you on a Make America Great Again hat.
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Alex Wagner: The video and the claims made in it were alarming enough, that it became a significant portion of Lieutenant General Caine’s confirmation hearing.
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Jack Reed: And according to the reports, the president tells a story where he spoke to you while you were serving in Iraq on active duty, and you said that you loved him and “I’ll kill for you, sir.” General Caine, is any of this story true?
Dan Caine: Senator, for 34 years, I’ve upheld my oath of office and the responsibilities of my commission. I think I went back and listened to those tapes, and I think the president was actually talking about somebody else and I’ve never worn any political merchandise or said anything to that effect.
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Alex Wagner: It’s easy to understand why a nomination like this might come under heavy scrutiny, given what has already transpired under the Trump administration, namely the attempted MAGAfication of the American military. It began with Trump’s nomination of Pete Hegseth, a veteran and Fox News host who faced significant allegations about both his character and his work.
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Mika Brzezinski: Pete Hegseth Pete’s attorney confirmed to NBC News that Hegseth paid a woman an undisclosed amount after she accused him of sexual assault. The lawyer also denied the encounter between Hegseth and an unnamed woman was sexual assault.
Reporter: Ten current and former Fox News employees who worked Hegseth telling NBC News that he drank in ways that concerned them, two saying that on more than a dozen occasions, they smelled alcohol on him before he went on air. A Trump transition spokesperson called the allegations disgusting, completely unfounded and false.
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Alex Wagner: But Hegseth shared Trump’s vision about how to remake the military and remove what both men understood to be unnecessary distractions.
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Pete Hegseth: I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is “Our diversity is our strength.”
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Alex Wagner: Sweeping executive actions, banning so-called DEI programs were among the first orders Trump signed as president, and then he singled out specific groups.
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Reporter: Today, President Donald Trump’s controversial executive order banning transgender Americans from serving in the military.
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Alex Wagner: Making these changes in Trump’s eyes would strengthen the country’s fighting forces.
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Donald Trump: Our Armed Forces will be freed to focus on their sole mission, defeating America’s enemies. Like in 2017, we will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen.
Pete Hegseth: Your job is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality, everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening.
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Alex Wagner: But Trump’s rhetoric and now his policies are full of contradictions. Those sweeping DEI cuts have ended programs that the people in them insist make them better, which is to say more lethal fighters. Military history is being rewritten, in many cases, erasing the contributions of people of color and women, all in the name of Trump’s diversity purge.
His attack on the federal workforce has included thousands in the military and particularly veterans. His cuts to the VA itself have been dramatic and swift, something veterans have noticed.
A few weeks ago, I was at a town hall in Arizona and veterans were well represented.
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Tim Cox: This administration has proved itself to be the most anti-veteran administration ever.
(Crowd Cheering)
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Alex Wagner: And then of course there is the issue of whether national security information is being properly protected and the risks to those serving, if it’s not.
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Reporter: But apparent national security breach that included group text exchanges among top Trump administration officials about U.S. war plans in the Middle East.
Reporter: Details of the U.S. war plans shared in real time with The Atlantics editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Reporter: The news angered and bewildered men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States. Going forward, they can no longer be certain that the Pentagon is focused on their safety when they’re strap into their cockpits.
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Alex Wagner: To put this all in military parlance, the American Armed Forces, under Donald Trump, have taken a remarkable amount of incoming. Trump’s agenda has raised serious questions about the readiness of the country’s fighting forces, who is actually leading them, and whether they are doing all, they can to keep those who serve out of harm’s way.
(Music Playing)
Alex Wagner: On this episode of “Trumpland with Alex Wagner,” the people who risk their lives in service to this country and what all this change has meant for them.
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Lieutenant Colonel Alea Nadeem: We’ve been talking to a lot of different women and they don’t really know what to do. Is there a voice for them? Is there a place for them?
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Alex Wagner: And what these new policies might mean for the future of the American military.
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Commander Bobby Jones: I have long advocated for military service, and for the first time in my entire life, I’m telling kids to pause.
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Alex Wagner: Part of President Trump’s attempt to drastically reshape the military has been his purge of anything even vaguely associated with diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI. Military officials, in an attempt to quickly comply with the law, went full DOGE.
Articles about the Holocaust sexual assault and suicide prevention are among those that had been purged from the Pentagon’s website. The purge is a result of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to scrub articles promoting diversity, equity and inclusion content from its platform. However, dozens reviewed by CNN have no apparent connection to DEI programs that includes the military story of Jackie Robinson. That information no longer exists on the Department of Defense website.
The DOD did repost the story about Jackie Robinson’s military service just in time for baseball’s opening day. But the DEI purge didn’t just affect websites, entire programs have been eliminated, among them the Air Force Women’s Initiative. The volunteer program, whose leaders claim is not a DEI program, was established in 2008. It has studied, recommended and implemented solutions for female service members who had been adhering to male standards in the military. Those standards were often outdated and arbitrary, and in many cases just nonsensical.
The Women’s Initiative fought these old standards and promoted new ones. It developed two-piece flight suits for female pilots. It secured permission for more pilots and crews to perform duties while pregnant. It expanded the range of hairstyles women were allowed to have to better fit with the equipment they were using, including helmets. And it increased VA healthcare access to former service members.
At its core, the work of the Air Force Women’s Initiative Team was focused on how to make women better soldiers. You might even say to make them more lethal, the term that Secretary Hegseth and the Trump administration have been so focused on.
Shortly after the group ended, we spoke with two women who had devoted years to this program, Retired Lieutenant Colonel and Air Force pilot, Jessica Ruttenber and Lieutenant Colonel Alea Nadeem Dean, who had led the Women’s Initiative Team since 2015. They are also good friends, something you will probably pick up on immediately.
(Begin Audio Clip)
Alea Nadeem: We’ll behave.
Alex Wagner: Don’t actually.
Alea Nadeem: We never have.
Alex Wagner: Yeah. Good.
Jessica Ruttenber: Well-behaved women seldom make history.
Alex Wagner: Yeah. Exactly.
Alea Nadeem: That’s unfortunately why we’re here or fortunately, how you look at it.
Alex Wagner: Right. I mean —
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Alex Wagner: Ruttenber grew up in D.C. and she now lives in Alabama. Nadeem was born in Ohio, but grew up in Iraq, an experience that shaped her military story.
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Alex Wagner: Let’s start at the beginning, why did you guys join the Air Force? Why’d you join the military?
Alea Nadeem: 9/11.
Alex Wagner: 9/11.
Alea Nadeem: I grew up actually in Iraq, lived under Saddam Hussein.
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Alea Nadeem: And somebody, one day, called me a terrorist. And to be fair though, I think most Americans at that time, you know, didn’t know the difference between a terrorist and Arab and a Muslim, right? So, I think there was a shock.
Alex Wagner: I would argue they probably still don’t on some level, but we’ll not digress.
Alea Nadeem: Oh, that’s a whole other topic we could dive into. And I remember going home that night and asking my mom, you know, like, am I a terrorist? And she’s like, who said that? In what context? And you know, I’m Alea Nadeem. I look like the way I do, and it really changed my perspective. And I was like, no, of course, I’m not a terrorist. I love my family back there.
And I’d heard comments in the news like we should make Iraq a parking lot. And I remember as a junior in high school thinking, what? Is this for real? Are we really going to do this? And so, it just inspired me to join. And I went into a recruiter’s office and, thank God, it was a woman. And I thought, here she is, maybe I could really do this. And I told her, I want to sign up for something that deploys the most. And you should have saw her face. She was like, are you sure? Like there’s some other jobs we can look at. And I was like, no, what deploys the most? And she was like, well, security forces —
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Alea Nadeem: — deploys the most. And I was like, that’s what I want to do.
Alex Wagner: What about you?
Jessica Ruttenber: Well, I was born in D.C., but my dad took a job at the commissary on the Naval Air Station. And we saw the Blue Angels fly all the time because they practiced there. They had their homecoming show. But it was the 1980s and women didn’t fly fighter aircraft at that time. So, it didn’t occur to me that I could do something like that until years later, they had a school day for girls, where they brought in different types of careers, and that’s when I saw my first female pilot ever. And I saw a woman standing in a flight suit that looked like me. And all of a sudden, I was like, that’s an option.
Alex Wagner: Right.
Jessica Ruttenber: I didn’t realize that and I was like, sorry, Navy, I’m going to join the Air Force and fly something cool like in A-10.
Alex Wagner: Wow. That’s awesome. What’s interesting to me is that both of you guys have these moments where seeing other women, whether it’s the recruiter or whether it’s the woman in the flight suit, like that’s eureka moment, like seeing yourself in those women.
Jessica Ruttenber: Yeah, representation.
Alex Wagner: Representation matters, right?
(End Audio Clip)
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Alex Wagner: Ruttenber served 21 years in the Air Force and performed seven tours in Afghanistan and Iraq as a pilot. She’s now the director of Level Up Aviation, a nonprofit dedicating to help youth and young adults find equity in aviation.
Nadeem has served for 22 years and is currently the commander of the 150th Security Forces Squadron at the 150th Special Operations Wing. And we should note her comments do not reflect those of the Department of Defense or the Air Force. They are her own.
(Begin Audio Clip)
Alex Wagner: I wonder if you can just talk to me about the Women’s Initiative Team and the work of that team.
Alea Nadeem: So, the Women’s Initiative Team started out of actually Office of Personal Management, so under, you know, equal opportunity. And one of the things that OPM essentially was designated to do is how do you remove barriers from the federal force? And so, it first sort of started as we kind of all got around the table and talked about all our issues.
Jessica Ruttenber: Right.
Alea Nadeem: Right. And I got really tired of coming year after year and hearing the same issues, and there were no tangible changes. And so, I came in guns blazing, and I was like, if you want to go talk about this, you want to go cry about it, this is not the group for you. And so, we sort of flipped it and we started to look at how can we make women more lethal, more ready. As of right now, today, some women cannot relieve themselves in the jet.
Alex Wagner: Right. Because of the flight suits?
Alea Nadeem: There’s equipment that you need to do that. And if you don’t have that equipment readily available —
Alex Wagner: Then you can’t do it.
Alea Nadeem: Yeah.
Jessica Ruttenber: Bladder relief is an issue for some female fighter pilots. It fits down there, but it might not get the proper seal. You might get rashes. They tactically dehydrate themselves, or they even get urinary tract infections because of this. So, it’s great that they have it. It’s a good start, but one size doesn’t fit all.
Alex Wagner: Right. Of course.
Jessica Ruttenber: And we need to constantly improve that and think about that.
Alex Wagner: Yeah. So, one of the things you’re hearing is women don’t have literally the tools —
Alea Nadeem: To relieve themselves.
Alex Wagner: — the tech to relieve themselves when they’re fighting in combat.
Alea Nadeem: Yeah. And those are the things we were working on, because now you’re going to have a pilot who’s not combat-effective.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Alea Nadeem: Right? So, all this leads to readiness and operations, and so that’s what we focused on. We just didn’t sometimes always have the equipment. We didn’t have the right policies in place to make us more lethal.
For example, one of the reasons that we worked on hair policy is, you know, I was enlisted security forces, shooting my weapon, have this huge cavalier helmet on.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Alea Nadeem: As you’re shooting, you’re like shooting like this and your helmet is coming up.
Alex Wagner: Because of your hair?
Alea Nadeem: Yeah, because you have a bun on.
Alex Wagner: You have to have your hair in a bun per the rules. Is that right?
Alea Nadeem: It was.
Jessica Ruttenber: Right. Or very short like a bob.
Alex Wagner: Okay.
Alea Nadeem: Like, your hair would’ve been perfect.
Alex Wagner: Okay.
Jessica Ruttenber: Yeah. Well, you’re fabulous.
Alex Wagner: That’s good to know.
Alea Nadeem: So, I remember we used to go to our combat arms instructor and say, you know, sir, and in my case, it was usually a man, sir, may I please take my hair down to shoot my weapon? So, he would, you know, usually be like, yes, but make sure you put it right back up. So, we would go ask if we could do a braid and then tuck it, you know, underneath, and they’d give us permission to do that.
Alex Wagner: You needed special permission to get a braid?
Alea Nadeem: Yeah, just to shoot my weapon.
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Alea Nadeem: But what if I’m in a real-world situation, I don’t have time to take my bun. Like a female fighter pilot —
Jessica Ruttenber: Right.
Alea Nadeem: — she needs to put her helmet on.
Jessica Ruttenber: Right. Anyone who has to wear a helmet when they fly, you have to put your hair down so you get the proper fit. And so, you’re flying in Afghanistan and you come back and you land, but they’re saying it looks unprofessional. So, I can kill somebody with my hair down. But as soon as I land, I need to put my hair back up.
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Alea Nadeem: So, when we talk about lethal, we work that not to look cute, because trust me, I’ve heard that. Someone once said, you guys just want your hair in ponytails and braids because you want to look cute. And I said, there’s nothing in uniform going to make me look cute. That’s number one. Right?
Number two is, you know, I’m sad that you really think that we’re trying to look cute. We’re trying to do our jobs.
(End Audio Clip)
Alex Wagner: This is something they told me repeatedly, “We’re just trying to do our jobs.” But that work has now been labeled DEI, somehow part of a woke agenda.
(Begin Audio Clip)
Jessica Ruttenber: I think there’s a fear at the top level, that we’re lowering standards to let women in, and the fear woke is synonymous with lowering standards. The truth is we have data the Women’s Initiative Team has shown that we’ve lowered academic standards in career fields when we didn’t have enough people to get in there. And guess what, a lot of those career fields were career fields that women should be, just not tall enough. It had nothing to do with their academic ability.
So, like the DLAB for the linguist, why does a linguist have to be 5’5” to sit in the back of the plane? Well, this is a really high aptitude test for language, and they had a lower the score because they didn’t have enough people that were academically qualified. But there was an amazing amount of women that could do it but just weren’t tall enough. And it was like, why don’t we just lower it two inches or three inches and get the population in? And they went out there and measured, and checked for safety, and they’re like, boom, instantaneous. And they were able to get their recruiting up.
Alex Wagner: So just to be clear, you’re saying that having a more inclusive agenda actually raises the bar.
Jessica Ruttenber: It did.
Alex Wagner: So, when you cast a wider net in terms of recruits, you get better people.
Jessica Ruttenber: You get more talent to choose from. And if it happens to be a woman, fantastic.
Alex Wagner: I guess I wonder, though, and I say this just because this is all happening under the auspices of, you know, ending wokeness in the military. What if actually turning back the clock is kind of the point here? I don’t mean to be alarmist, but do you ever consider that maybe it’s not a priority to have women functioning well in the military, and that fewer women in the military, if that happens, is like fine with them.
Jessica Ruttenber: I don’t think we’ll meet our recruiting goals without women. The Army met their first recruited goals in 2024 and they couldn’t do it without women. Women were more qualified when it came to academics. They had more college degrees than men, and they were less likely to be disqualified for things such as criminal records.
So, we simply cannot do it. It is a competitive advantage for America to recruit from the entire population. So, I wasn’t surprised when it came out, the Women’s Initiative Team. I did have an emotional reaction.
Alex Wagner: Yeah. What is the mood inside the ranks for women who are serving, and how are they thinking about all this?
Alea Nadeem: Well, I never want to speak for all women.
Alex Wagner: Of course.
Alea Nadeem: But I think there’s a mood of concern. I think everyone will salute smartly. Right? We take an oath to the Constitution. So, I think everyone will do that. But I think coupled with some of the comments about women, seeing the Women’s Initiative Team go away, the mood is a little dim. And so, I think between both of us, we’ve been talking to a lot of different women and they don’t really know what to do.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Alea Nadeem: Is there a voice for them? Is there a place for them? You know, some of these other career fields is like, well, am I allowed to stay in my career field? You know, there’s so much unknown right now that I think it’s giving them trepidation possibly about service and their future. And so, I think, listen, we’ve persevered through a lot harder things. We’ve made it through war.
Jessica Ruttenber: Right.
Alea Nadeem: We are battle-tested. We’ve made it through war. We’ve done the work. No one is dying. We got this. Like we’re going to make this work.
(End Audio Clip)
(Music Playing)
Alex Wagner: We reached out to see if Nadeem or Ruttenber had heard anything more about the Women’s Initiative since we spoke to them. They told us the group and its work had ended, and that most Defense Department websites mentioning women or their services have been removed. Nadeem also told us she’s considering running for Congress in Ohio as a Republican. We’ll be right back.
(Announcements)
(Begin Audio Clip)
Pete Hegseth: Hey, everybody, Pete Hegseth here. We’re about to land in Washington, D.C.
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Alex Wagner: On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a sweeping review of military standards for combat roles.
(Begin Audio Clip)
Pete Hegseth: For far too long, we allowed standards to slip, and different standards for men and women in combat arms, MOSs and jobs. That’s not acceptable. We need to have the same standard, male or female, in our combat roles to ensure our men and women who are under our leaders or in those formations had the best possible leaders and the highest possible standards that are not based at all on your sex.
(End Audio Clip)
(Music Playing)
Alex Wagner: Well beyond Hegseth’s announcement this week, veterans’ advocates say all of these changes threaten to make potential recruits, including people of color and women feel unwelcome. And that could be a real problem for a military that has already been struggling with recruitment in recent years.
Before he left the service in 2023, Bobby Jones led a distinguished Naval career spanning over two decades, serving as commanding officer of Maritime Expeditionary Security Squadron Four. Jones worked as a recruiter for the Naval Academy and is also the president of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, a nonpartisan group of veterans advocating for the integrity of American democracy.
Commander Jones joined me to talk about the effect of all of this chaos and controversy on America’s ability to actually get people to enlist in the U.S. military.
(Begin Audio Clip)
Alex Wagner: Trump has moved very swiftly to overhaul, if you will, the military and specifically target what he calls DEI programs, and to purge the military of both people and programs and initiatives that fall under that very broad banner. I know you’ve raised alarm bells about some of that, and I wonder if you could elaborate on what your assessment is of all these actions.
Bobby Jones: The United States military, specifically our military, has been DEI almost from day one. Now, I would love to sit there and say it was because of the enlightened ideas the founders wrote about, but, no, it was out of necessity.
So, when you see the things that he’s trying to do, number one, America has gone through this before and found that it doesn’t work, because in times of crisis, it’s amazing how meritocracy actually becomes a thing —
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Bobby Jones: — and you have to find the willing and the able to serve. And what he’s trying to do is he’s betting that people who he thinks will be willing will also be just as able to do that, and American history shows us that’s not the case.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Bobby Jones: And the irony of it is those who are most able to serve have often been denied the ability to serve at various points, and we’re going backwards because of that.
Alex Wagner: What does this all do for recruitment?
Bobby Jones: Right now, if you are a young person, and particularly a young person of color and I’ll talk about why that’s important in a second, I have long advocated for military service, and for the first time in my entire life, I’m telling kids to pause.
Alex Wagner: Wow. Really?
Bobby Jones: And I’m saying that, you know, as someone who has two daughters, one that’s in, you know, 20 going to be 21, and another that’s 16, about to be 17, who both parents served in the United States military. Their great grandfather was a Tuskegee airman, and then the other one was a Korean War vet. So —
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Bobby Jones: — I don’t say this lightly. I say this because bottom line, what Trump has done, the administration has done in less than 80 days, they have destroyed the history of the American military. They have heavily influenced the future of the American military, and the direct results will be those who are currently in uniform, who have to suffer through that.
You erase the history like the Tuskegee airmen, the WASP, Women Airforce Service Pilots, all these different groups, Navajo Code Talkers. You erase them. It removes role models and it gives a sanitized version of American history. So now, if you do serve, you’re wondering, will my contribution be remembered and will it matter?
Alex Wagner: And I would assume just in terms of getting people excited —
Bobby Jones: Yes.
Alex Wagner: — and willing to sacrifice their lives —
Bobby Jones: Yes.
Alex Wagner: — it has to feel meaningful, that that’s a meaningful thing. It’s not just, oh, we should be accurate about history.
Bobby Jones: Right.
Alex Wagner: But we should actually give people a reason to believe that their efforts are worth it and will be remembered.
Bobby Jones: Yes, ma’am. You’re asking 17 and 18-year-old people to raise their right hand and say, I’m willing to die for this country. The least you can do is remember them, right? And so, when you see that, that’s one big red flag.
Then within one week of you coming on board, one month, the first person you fire is the commandant of the Coast Guard, who was the first member of that rank openly to be LGBTQ. You then fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was only the second Black man to have that position.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Bobby Jones: And then you fire the only woman to ever sit as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of Naval Operations. You do this all back to back to back, eliminating any diversity amongst the Joint Chiefs of Staff, meaning you now only have older white men in charge.
So, let’s think about this. If I’m a Black kid or if I’m a woman that is thinking about service, just like my daughter is both. My oldest is Black and female, you know, with two veteran parents. Why would I want to go into an environment where my competency will not matter as much as my appearance? And that’s the fundamental question.
Alex Wagner: There’s the open question about whether the people Trump is appointing here are actually qualified in the way that they should be or better qualified in the people who formally occupied those positions.
Today actually is the Senate confirmation hearing for Trump’s choice of a replacement for CQ Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his replacement, Lieutenant General Dan Caine. The fact of the matter is Trump clearly seems to believe that Caine will be loyal to him. And I sort of wonder, how do you look at that situation?
Bobby Jones: I don’t know if most people know this. You take two different oaths. The officers take one oath that is different than the enlisted, and I stress this because the enlisted oath says you will obey the orders of the president and the officers appointed above you. The officers do not have that clause. They do not have obey the president, blah, blah, blah. You know why? Because we are supposed to be the last sanity and fail-safe check to a tyrannical commander in chief.
So, when I hear a story that allegedly happened with General Caine, where he’s literally pledging loyalty to an individual, putting on the hat, doing all this, saying he’ll kill for him, et cetera, et cetera, it gives you pause.
And then if you go back to Trump’s first administration, he referred to the generals and admirals as his generals and admirals. Again, I have dealt with dictators in my career. I’ve traveled this planet and I’m telling you that is the exact same language that dictators use. They do not see the military, specifically the military leadership as those belonging to the people. They see it as those belonging to them. And that is a dangerous president.
Alex Wagner: I get why you’re advising young recruits to maybe just take a pause and to just —
Bobby Jones: Yes.
Alex Wagner: I mean, I would also assume, you know, in addition to the leadership question, the qualifications question, there’s the safety question, right? I mean, obviously, war is dangerous. But I can’t get over this Signal chat. What does it mean for the people who are at sea, waiting to take off on an aircraft carrier?
Bobby Jones: We’re talking about serious strategic and tactical strike implications. That’s a problem. That’s a fundamental problem. And it shows me a callousness, right? Because each one of the individuals in that group chat has access to secure communications, every last one of them. Right? They did this out of convenience and they did this out of ego.
You’re seeing the gutting of the military’s true subject matter experts being replaced by ideologues. And why that’s dangerous is not just our people in uniform that your sons and daughters may be, but also our allies. There will be no trust. I mean, the, the damage that was done just from that chat being leaked internationally and domestically, I think we are going to be reeling for that for years.
And I can’t tell a kid at 18, hey, I trust the stewardship of the people in charge right now because of the lack of experience, and now the lack of seriousness to which they take their jobs. I think a year from now, we will be in a very big recruiting crisis because you have multiple things that are coming to the forefront at the same time, which Trump has helped either accelerate or has ignored.
So culturally, you are saying to specific groups of people, you need not apply. Your history and contributions don’t matter. Right? I’m saying in a year, because you got to give all these policies time to kick in and tick people off. In a year, you’re going to see them lower what they believe are the actual recruiting requirements and the recruiting goal numbers. They’ll do it quietly because they don’t want people to say, hey, you’re bringing in less people because less people want to do this. But that’s what they’re going to do.
Alex Wagner: Wow. Building the most lethal army by lowering the standards of who can be in it.
Bobby Jones: Well, limiting who you want in it because you believe the poster will win the war.
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Alex Wagner: We’ll be back next Thursday with a new episode of “Trumpland with Alex Wagner.” To get this show and other MSNBC podcasts ad-free, be sure to subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. As a subscriber, you’ll also get exclusive bonus content. And if you like what you’ve been listening to so far on “Trumpland,” please don’t forget to rate and review the show.
“Trumpland with Alex Wagner” is produced by Max Jacobs, along with Julia D’Angelo and Kay Guerrero. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez. Our crew included Enrique Larreal on audio, and Liam Lee and Katherine McNamara on camera. Our audio engineers are Bob Mallory and Katie Lau. Bryson Barnes is head of audio production. Matthew Alexander is our executive producer, and Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. And I’m your host, Alex Wagner. We’ll see you next week.
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