Preparing Trump’s Military Purge: What MAGA Did Not Want the U.S. Naval Academy to Hear

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Check off another box of the authoritarian playbook now being implemented in America. 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.

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. The efforts of MAGA ideologues and politicians to get me banned from delivering the Bancroft Lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy before the election were a preview of that.

When and Why Do Autocrats Purge Militaries?

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.

What MAGA Did Not Want the U.S. Naval Academy to Hear

There is no doubt that Trump intends to politicize the military and make loyalty to his person the overriding ideal. He has spoken about possibly using the military against civilians, has amplified social media posts suggesting a civilian be subjected to a military tribunal (former Republican politician Liz Cheney, to punish her for her leadership of the House Jan. 6 committee), and has suggested that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley deserved to be executed.

This where the dismissals of the JAGs come in. Interviewed on Fox News, Hegseth justified the firings as a necessary removal of those who could potentially act as “roadblocks to anything that happens.” Bookmark that phrase, “anything that happens.”

Such shifts in military culture when authoritarians take over were the topic of my Bancroft Lecture. I announced the honor of having been selected to deliver it in this Sept. 2024 Lucid essay, which contrasts Trump’s authoritarian will to insult and humiliate the U. S. military with his “attachment to America's enemies, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping chief among them.”

While I made it clear in the Lucid essay that I would be speaking about Augusto Pinochet and Putin and not Trump (the flyer the Academy produced bears this out) a lecture on “Coups, Corruption, and the Costs of Losing Democracy,” was apparently undesirable to MAGA.

A coordinated campaign was cooked up that involved the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, media outlets such as the Washington Times, the Daily Signal, and at least eighteen Republican members of Congress.

These political operatives depicted me as a “partisan historian” whose physical presence at the Academy would “politicize” the Bancroft Lecture and constitute a violation of the Hatch Act, even if I did not mention Trump or U.S. politics during my talk. I was unacceptable as a person regardless of what I might say. I found this interesting as someone who studies how authoritarians target people and institutions.

Although one would think they had better things to do so close to a fateful election, seventeen GOP politicians signed a letter on Congressional stationary: they included Rep. Michael Waltz, now the head of the National Security Agency. Rep. Jen Kiggins (R-VA), who identifies herself on her website as a “former Navy helicopter pilot, Navy spouse, and now Navy Mom,” spearheaded the initiative. Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) wrote his own letter and had a separate campaign going, perhaps to get extra MAGA loyalty points.

The joint letter takes issue with me calling Trump an authoritarian in my Lucid essay. “In one such example, Ben-Ghiat falsely claimed that what motivates the former President is his ‘authoritarian character, desire to destroy democratic values and ideals, and loyalty to autocrats’ such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.”

Now, with the “negotiations” on Ukraine, Trump’s adoption of Kremlin talking points is out in the open. Before the election, saying that was apparently unacceptable, and the whole topic of authoritarianism and the military became toxic.

And so, a small purge was orchestrated, to make sure the Naval Academy fell into line when Trump got back into office and the real purges could take place. It was a loyalty test for the Naval Academy, and they passed it, but Trump and Hegseth will surely be back for more.