The last time President Donald Trump addressed Army cadets at West Point, he was locked in a dramatic conflict with America’s military establishment.
Two days before Trump spoke to the academy’s graduates in June 2020, Army General Mark Milley, the nation’s top military officer, had made an extraordinary televised apology for having appeared in uniform with the president outside the White House, after security personnel used force to clear peaceful protesters from the scene.
Two weeks before Trump’s commencement address, Defense Secretary Mark Esper had made what turned out to be an irreparable break with the president when he pushed back on Trump’s desire to use active-duty troops to put down unrest triggered by the killing of George Floyd. Trump had mused about shooting protesters in the legs, according to Esper, who later wrote, “What transpired that day would leave me deeply troubled about the leader of our country and the decisions he was making.” Trump, who denied suggesting that protesters be shot, fired Esper five months later.
Trump’s impulse to enlist the military to respond to nationwide protests generated an outcry from some retired officers, who denounced what they saw as presidential overreach. Most notably, James Mattis, who as Trump’s first defense secretary had tried to steer the president away from decisions he feared would endanger allies or undermine U.S. security, decried Trump’s effort to politicize the military and divide Americans.
That now feels like a different era.
As he returns to West Point to speak at the academy’s commencement today, Trump faces little resistance from the Defense Department. Instead, in selecting civilian leaders at the Pentagon, the president has prioritized perceived loyalty rather than experience. In doing so, he has brought the Defense Department much closer in line with his MAGA political agenda than it was in his first term, and raised questions about who, if anyone, will attempt to stop him if he tries to use the military in unconstitutional ways.
Unlike Mattis, Milley, and Esper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—a former Fox News host and National Guard soldier with little management background—has acted as an accelerant for Trump’s political priorities. He has moved swiftly to root out military diversity programs, overturned Joe Biden–era decisions on transgender troops and the COVID-19 vaccine, and altered combat standards in ways that might push women out of certain jobs.
Hegseth has also expanded U.S. forces’ involvement in repelling illegal migration, augmenting troops’ power to detain migrants at the southern border, ordering military deportation flights, and expanding camps to house migrants at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay. Although the military has long been one of the country’s most respected institutions, its standing has fallen dramatically in recent years, and pulling U.S. troops more deeply into polarizing activities such as policing the border could further erode Americans’ trust in the armed forces.
Like Trump himself, Hegseth has brought a combative, norm-busting approach to his leadership of the Pentagon, attacking enemies online, deriding the “fake news” media, and flouting government security rules. On Wednesday, he led a Christian prayer service in the Pentagon auditorium, a highly unusual move for the leader of a workforce comprising more than 3 million people who come from a wide range of backgrounds and faiths.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Dan Caine, was nominated by Trump after the president abruptly fired General Charles Q. Brown, the second Black officer to serve in that role, and other top officers in February. A respected former National Guard officer with less command experience than most previous JCS chairmen, Caine has maintained a low profile so far and has said little about his views. In his confirmation hearing, Caine—who denied a story Trump has told about him wearing a MAGA hat when they met on a military base in Iraq—said he would be willing to be fired for following the Constitution. (Other top brass, anticipating moves by Hegseth to slim down the military’s uppermost ranks, have sought to keep their head down and avoid contentious issues.)
The service academies, including West Point and the Naval Academy, are now at the center of the administration’s push to remake military culture. In response to a White House order that bans the teaching of “divisive concepts” and references to racism in American history at the academies, leaders at the schools have removed books from library shelves and are altering curricula. Sometimes acting in anticipation of the administration’s preferences, they have also shut down student groups related to race, gender, and ethnicity, and canceled speakers and events they feared could violate the new rules.
It’s difficult to know how West Point cadets feel about all this. The academy has no independent student newspaper and few venues for students to voice their views on such issues. Cadets, like most service members, usually keep their political beliefs to themselves.
Kori Schake, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me that Trump is undermining core tenets of U.S. military culture, including the institution’s apolitical nature and service members’ sworn allegiance to the Constitution rather than to any one person. While the checks from Trump’s first term are long gone, Schake said, “what I see as continuity from 2020 is President Trump trying to corrode the good order and discipline of the American military to establish a much more personalistic kind of loyalty.”
In his 2020 remarks at West Point, Trump largely stuck to a typical presidential script, congratulating troops on making it through the rigors of academy life and eulogizing Army leaders including Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. Perhaps his speech today will take a similar tone. If it does, it will mark a departure from his more recent appearances at troop events. When he addressed service members at Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar, this month, Trump sounded like no other president has in a military setting. He criticized “fake generals” who fail to adhere to his worldview, belittled the role of allies such as France in winning World War II, and suggested that he might run for a third term.
Trump praised the service members assembled around him for “defending our interests, supporting our allies, securing our homeland.”
“And you know what? Making America great again,” he continued. “That’s what’s happened. It’s happened very fast.”
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