On Tuesday morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned hundreds of American generals and admirals from across the world to a military base in Virginia for a blistering, mandatory briefing. He railed against poor physical fitness standards, he called for more lethality and aggression in the military, and he — of course — decried diversity, equity and inclusion.
“No more identity months,” he said, “D.E.I. offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction or gender delusions. No more debris.”
“As I’ve said before and will say again,” he continued, “we are done with that shit.”
But as he spoke, I kept thinking … isn’t this the same person who shared almost certainly classified information about an imminent American military strike on a group text in a civilian messaging app called Signal? And didn’t that group — incredibly enough — include Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic?
Didn’t that mean that, thanks in large part to Hegseth, the safety of the entire mission turned on the security of a civilian app and the integrity of a civilian journalist?
It’s difficult to put into words the sheer incompetence of that moment. If I’d done something that colossally stupid during my military career, it would have ended my career, instantly. It most likely would have led to prosecution. I should know: I’ve helped discipline soldiers for less egregious misconduct — far less.
A senior leader committed gross misconduct and put lives at risk. He was never formally held accountable. That is not what a meritocracy looks like.
One of the most important distinctions in politics is the difference between people who are mainly motivated to vote against their opponents rather than for their allies. Their hatred or fear of their opponents is far more important than their embrace of any particular policy or ideology.
This concept, called “negative partisanship,” is spreading like a virus across American politics, and it’s reaching its culmination in Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Ben Shapiro, one of the most popular right-wing podcasters in America, recently spoke with my colleague Ezra Klein and described the modern G.O.P. perfectly.
“I think that on the right there is such a rage that has arisen,” he said, “at least on part of the right, that the tendency is to just rip things out by their roots, rather than trying to correct or even determining whether the thing can be corrected.”
The Republican Party, Klein replied, “isn’t conservative anymore. It’s counterrevolutionary.”
“It’s anti-left,” Shapiro responded.
He is exactly right, and in few areas of American life is that distinction more obvious — and more consequential — than in MAGA’s war against diversity, equity and inclusion. It’s a war against the left far more than it’s a fight for American justice and equality, and it’s producing a new reality that’s worse than the system they’re MAGA faithful are ripping apart.
I write these words as someone who firmly believes that the pre-existing D.E.I. infrastructure suffered from profound problems. I was most familiar with its manifestations in higher education, where D.E.I.-motivated policies were often unfair and deeply illiberal.
Time and time again, even the most well-meaning administrators carried out policies that turned out to suppress free speech or threaten due process or created systemic hurdles and challenges for other students, especially (in some cases) Asian students who themselves come from historically marginalized communities.
My experience in the military, however, was substantially different. It was the most purely meritocratic institution I’ve ever belonged to — as well as the most diverse. If I was to list the military’s top problems, wokeness wouldn’t make the list.
But if you’re going to demolish D.E.I., what are you going to replace it with? Because if one thing is clear from the Trump administration so far, it’s that the cure can be clearly and unequivocally worse than the disease.
No one should think for a moment that the world before D.E.I. was fair and meritocratic. I remember growing up in a Southern hometown that was a functional nepotocracy — the most important question you could be asked was, “Who’s your dad?”
Explicit racism was absolutely frowned upon, but family history meant (almost) everything. And, of course, since many prominent families dated back to well before the Civil Rights Act, the answer to that question disproportionately benefited the white kids whose families had been powerful and prominent for a very long time.
In fact, life before affirmative action was often shot through with discrimination. Affirmative action (the move to take proactive steps to address the consequences of past racism) didn’t disrupt a pre-existing American meritocracy; it disrupted American bigotry.
But when affirmative action evolved toward explicitly race-based preferences, it operated as a blunt instrument — one that could create fresh injustices. The 14th Amendment, after all, mandates equal protection under the law.
The solution, however, wasn’t on display on Tuesday. When Americans watched a strutting, arrogant, underqualified Pete Hegseth lecture men and women with far more combat and leadership experience than he’ll ever possess about transforming the American military, they weren’t watching meritocracy at work. Instead, they were watching something much worse than D.E.I. — a political commissar who conceals his rank incompetence behind posturing and peacocking.
Writing at The Dispatch, Nick Catoggio had a pointed — and accurate — analogy. The gathering, he wrote, “had the feel of Pop Warner players scolding a group of N.F.L. linebackers about the importance of hustle.” It was so farcical that “if you weren’t paying close attention, you might even have missed the menacing parts.”
For example, Trump, the commander in chief, who also addressed the generals and admirals on Tuesday, actually suggested that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” He also absurdly suggested that Washington, D.C., was more dangerous than Afghanistan.
Would any military leader of any experience believe for even five seconds that one of the best ways to prepare troops to deter or (God forbid) fight our nuclear-armed foes is by walking through cities, picking up trash and occasionally confronting left-wing protesters?
Nothing about that exercise prepares troops to face deadly, drone-filled skies or the hypersonic missile barrages that characterize modern warfare.
D.E.I. has been on my mind not just because of the Trump administration’s excesses and incompetence, but also because I just finished reading a book that painfully reminded me of what conservatives have lost in the age of Trump.
The book is called “The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education,” by Justin Driver, a law professor at Yale. The book is a challenging read for a conservative like me. I always try to read the best arguments for the opposing point of view, and Driver’s arguments in favor of affirmative action are the best I’ve read.
But one part was particularly poignant, at least for those of us who believe that to be conservative means so much more than mindless opposition to a hated political enemy.
He reminded me of a quote from Justice Antonin Scalia that I’d long forgotten. In 1979, even as he disagreed with race-based affirmative action, Scalia wrote, “I strongly favor — what might be called (but for the coloration that the term has acquired in the context of its past use) ‘affirmative action programs’ of many types of help for the poor and disadvantaged.”
He continued, “It may well be that many, or even most, of those benefited by such programs would be members of minority races that the existing programs exclusively favor. I would not care if all of them were. The unacceptable vice is simply selecting or rejecting them on the basis of their race.”
The italics, as Driver notes, are Scalia’s. Driver writes that Scalia’s statement “makes clear that Justice Scalia believed universities could accord admission preferences on the basis of nonracial criteria even if they disproportionately — indeed, even if those preferences exclusively — redounded to the benefit of Black applicants.”
That’s what genuine conservatism looks like. It recognizes an urgent social problem — including the systemic disadvantages suffered by Black citizens as a result of centuries of legalized bigotry advanced through both state and vigilante violence — and attempts to address those disadvantages through means that also respect foundational constitutional values, including freedom of speech and equal protection under the law.
Applied to the military, this means understanding that the American military should draw from every American community, and every American community should feel directly invested in America’s defense.
Trumpism, by contrast, all too often denies the existence of systemic disadvantage (even the very argument is deemed woke), demolishes D.E.I. and replaces it with a degree of authoritarianism and incompetence that makes a mockery of the very idea of meritocracy.
Did a meritocracy give us Trump’s cabinet? Does a meritocracy give us Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, in which sound medicine is replaced by conspiratorial quackery?
Does a meritocracy yield so-called Liberation Day tariffs that were based on nonsense economics that almost crashed the stock market before Trump backed down?
And that’s but a fraction of the incompetence that has plagued Trump’s second term.
Given a sufficient time horizon, the American story is a good story indeed. We are unquestionably a better and more just country than we used to be. No single contemporary American injustice comes close, for example, to the horror of chattel slavery or Jim Crow. The arc of the American moral universe has bent toward justice.
But the American story also contains years — sometimes even generations — of backsliding before we correct ourselves. The most salient example is the descent into segregation after the early promise of Reconstruction. In some places in the South, it took Black Americans a century to recover the political power they had in the years immediately after the Civil War.
Trump has initiated another era of American regression. He isn’t replacing D.E.I. with merit. He’s replacing it with sycophancy and malice.
And if you doubt that truth, look to that military base in Virginia, where an underqualified secretary of defense snarled and strutted before an audience of leaders who knew that he’d already betrayed their trust.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about the James Comey indictment, and its theme fits perfectly with this newsletter. Trump’s attack on the former director of the F.B.I. is not only a deeply corrupt attack on a political enemy; it’s also deeply damaging to the Department of Justice:
Trump’s retribution isn’t just inflicting grave injustice on its innocent victims; it’s hollowing the Justice Department. As decent people resign, they’re replaced with people eager or at least willing to participate in Trump’s partisan inquisition.
When you put it all together, there can be no doubt: Trump’s attack on American justice has taken its next, and most ominous, turn.
“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Those infamous words are the hallmarks of a corrupt state. Trump is now openly mimicking the dictators he admires so much. He has shown Pam Bondi the man, and Bondi’s Department of Justice has manufactured the crime.
On Sept. 23, I published a column that attempted to explain how Christians at Charlie Kirk’s memorial could cheer both Erika Kirk’s decision to forgive her husband’s killer and Trump’s declaration that he hates his enemies. MAGA Christians perceived no contradiction between those sentiments at all:
To explain, let’s discuss two of the most famous passages in the Bible — Matthew 5 and Romans 13. Matthew 5 contains the beating heart of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. This is where you find the Beatitudes, such as “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” and “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
The Sermon on the Mount contains the command that Erika Kirk repeated on Sunday, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven.”
Romans 13 is quite different. In that passage, Paul describes the role of the ruling authorities, and his language is vivid. A ruler, Paul says, “is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”
As a result, when you watch MAGA Christians cheering Kirk and Trump, they’ll argue that there’s no contradiction at all. Kirk and Trump occupy different roles, and they’re each fulfilling the roles that God intends. Kirk — as an individual — is loving her enemies. Trump and Miller — as the president and one of his chief advisers — are playing their divinely appointed roles as avengers.
Read the whole thing to see why the conclusion of these MAGA Christians is deeply wrong.
Finally, on Sept. 21, I wrote about Trump’s reported deal to help engineer a sale of TikTok to his friends and allies. Crony capitalism has reached new lows:
It’s impossible to separate Trump’s actions regarding TikTok from his administration’s threats against broadcast networks (including the threats that preceded Kimmel’s ouster) and his grotesque bullying of journalists. On Friday, for example, he said, “When 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech” — a blatantly erroneous statement about constitutional law.
Trump’s quest for media control is bad enough, but it’s incalculably worse when he compounds lawlessness with a reckless disregard for America’s vital national security interests. Checking Chinese influence appears to be less important to Trump than controlling American discourse and expanding his own media reach.
If our laws depend on Trump’s voluntary compliance — and Congress won’t lift a finger to defend the laws it has passed — then the president is unleashed. There is no law holding him back. Instead, we are left to the whims and desires of a man who cares about only himself, a man who is willing to discard any law or standard to satisfy his insatiable lust for power.
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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