Last week, President Trump, through Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, fired the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse.
For good measure, two senior U.S. Navy leaders were also dismissed: Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, the chief of Navy Reserve, and Rear Adm. Milton Sands, commander of Naval Special Warfare Command.
No reason was given for Kruse’s removal from office, except that Hegseth had lost confidence in him. That’s the secretary’s catch-all mantra for getting rid of senior figures he dislikes. But a blind man on a galloping horse could see what had happened: Kruse allowed his organization to contradict the president.
In the wake of Operation Midnight Hammer, the strikes by Air Force stealth bombers on three Iranian nuclear facilities, Trump addressed the nation and boasted that “Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” There was now no prospect of Tehran achieving its nuclear ambitions “for years.” The successful surgical strike was heroic, decisive and used America’s outstanding technological capabilities to eliminate a significant threat.
But the Defense Intelligence Agency’s initial assessment, which was leaked to the media, was considerably more cautious. Iran’s network of centrifuges, the machines that extract weapons-grade fissile material from uranium, was still largely “intact.” There has been no evidence that existing stockpiles of enriched uranium were destroyed in the strikes either. One anonymous source familiar with the report said, “The assessment is that the U.S. set them back maybe a few months, tops.”
This presentation of intelligence that contradicted the president’s bravado was, of course, unacceptable to the White House and Trump’s brittle ego. Just as he had sacked the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the beginning of August because her agency’s recent report showed job creation at a lower level than the president wanted, so Kruse was sacrificed on the altar of “alternative facts.”
In the seven months of his second term, Trump has now removed 13 generals and admirals; the civilian deputy director of the National Security Agency; and the chair and deputy chair of the National Intelligence Council, who were fired because their intelligence assessment did not support the president’s claims that criminal gangs from Venezuela were a significant national security threat.
There are also questions over the future of Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, who has reportedly fallen out with the White House over the existence (or nonexistence) of a client list belonging to Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender and erstwhile Trump friend.
The president has always demanded unquestioning loyalty from his subordinates, not to the administration or the Constitution, but to himself and his own political fortunes. This extends to an insistence on accepting cherished MAGA fables. When he was choosing members of the current administration last year, Trump questioned several candidates on the 2020 presidential election, and those who would not assent to the fiction that he had won and the result had been “stolen” were not favored. Now it seems that remaining on the job requires not only obeisance to established lies but embracing new ones, too.
This trend is dangerous and corrosive. Ultra-loyalists like Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard, the conspiracy-obsessed, ideologically lightweight director of National Intelligence, may rail at the president’s “enemies” and emphasize the necessity of removing them from positions of influence, but this is something entirely different. Consider: When was the last time Trump heard a point of view that contradicted his own, thought it over and accepted that he had been mistaken?
Advisers, especially in the military and intelligence establishments, are now expected to tailor their counsel to fit what Trump already thinks. That is not advice but cheerleading.
Making effective decisions in the Oval Office is one of the most demanding tasks in the world, and it becomes infinitely more difficult if there is no critical, skeptical, fact-based challenge from professionals in their field. Already the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the president’s principal military adviser — and the National Security Advisor have been removed, as have the heads of the National Security Agency, the National Intelligence Council and now the Defense Intelligence Agency.
A president who was renowned for deep thought, experience, judgment and erudition would make his task unnecessarily hard by retreating to the comfort of an echo chamber. Trump is not that president. His grasp of world affairs is impressionistic and shallow, often simply wrong, and his sense of his own abilities and influence is vastly overinflated.
In rejecting President Richard Nixon’s argument of confidentiality over the Watergate tapes, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger conceded that “the president’s need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts.” This was a recognition that an ability to engage frankly with a wide range of opinion is a fundamental part of good governance.
It is ever clearer that Trump neither wants nor can endure such frankness. Bad decisions are an inevitable consequence.
Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.