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Prepping a Coup?: The Trump Administration’s Military Purge [1]

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Date: 2025-03-04

Coups are usually associated with brazen assaults by military leaders, leading to a dictatorship. What might a coup in the United States look like? Pretty much what we are seeing from trump 2.0: the rapid fire dismantling of democratic institutions via a host of questionable legal maneuvers, the branding of the opposition as enemies of the people, the installation of kowtowing officials, a cowed Congress, a Supreme Court that turns a blind eye to unconstitutional actions, and the stacking of the military with sycophantic leaders.

On Feb. 21, President Trump’s new Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, carried out a purge of top military officials, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Chief of Naval Operations, and Vice Chief of the Air Force, General James Slife, as well as the judge advocates general (JAGS) of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, who oversee the military code of justice.

Why did the Trump administration go balls to the wall in purging these distinguished military officials?

“Hegseth and Trump have made no secret about focusing on pushing aside military officers who have supported diversity, equity, and inclusion in the ranks,” AP reported. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth maintained that the firings were part of Trump’s right to form his own national security team. “Nothing about this is unprecedented,” Hegseth told “Fox News Sunday” (https://apnews.com/article/trump-hegseth-brown-joint-chiefs-firing-25668b583b8fb2262c7890a44164e287).

While DEI-cleansing may be the rationale being offered up by Hegseth and Trump, it also signals something much more sinister: the consolidation of power, the insuring of ideological loyalty and/or removing of perceived threats for the preparation of a naked power grab.

At the Lucid Substack, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, pointed out that “Purges are a feature rather than a bug of the authoritarian style of governance. Trump’s early actions against the military are a sign of how extreme his administration is going to be. It will be increasingly difficult to call this extremism out,” (https://lucid.substack.com/subscribe).

Ben-Ghiat is a historian specializing in authoritarianism, propaganda, and political strongmen. Her 2020 book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present examines how authoritarian leaders fro Mussolini to Trump rise to power, maintain control, and ultimately fail. On her Substack, Ben-Ghiat put Trump’s recent moves on the military in context:

Some purges of the military take place within a more general crackdown against political and other elites, as in Stalinist Russia during the Great Terror, or Xi Jinping’s current shakeups of the PLA under the guise of anti-corruption campaigns. Others prepare large-scale mobilizations, as when Adolf Hitler purged the German armed forces a year before the invasion of Poland, or they come before an escalation of an ongoing conflict, as in Stalin’s 1941 purges.

When an established leader feels vulnerable, he might purge the military as part of “coup-proofing.” Officials can become scapegoats for a war going badly, as with Vladimir Putin’s 2024 purges of senior defense officials. Sometimes leaders can micro-manage military policy (as Putin has done intermittently since the start of the war), and this is a sign of weakness and insecurity.

If the authoritarian comes to power via a coup, the purges are immediate and part of the wrenching changes to establish new rules of engagement and codes of behavior appropriate for the use of lethality against a domestic population. That happened in Chile after the U.S.-backed 1973 coup, when the junta’s purges put non-compliant officials in prison, required officers and soldiers to torture thousands, and used military tribunals to deliver “justice” to civilian political opponents.

In general, politicizing a military and rewarding loyalty and ideological fanaticism over competence and professionalism enhances the possibility of negative outcomes. The United States will be no different.

In a Lucid commentary, Ruth Ben-Ghiat called the current maneuverings by Trump and Elon Musk “a new kind of coup.” In 2017, Ben-Ghiat wrote in a CNN essay of Trump giving power to “a small group of loyal insiders, who take orders directly from the leader’s inner circle … and bypass those of existing federal government and party bureaucracies.” At that of time Steve Bannon was the Trump whisperer. These days it’s Musk (https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/opinions/bannon-trump-coup-opinion-ben-ghiat/index.html).

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