Trump’s Cabinet:

“Angry vets,” social class, and contempt for the military

President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet choices have raised eyebrows left, right, and center. Three of those headed for important posts are veterans, and that’s a problem for some people.

Trump selected J. D. Vance, junior Senator from Ohio, as his vice-president. Vance (Yale law, age 40; Marine Corps) will be the third-youngest vice-president ever; at 78, Trump is the oldest president-elect in history.

Trump nominated Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense (Princeton, age 44; Army) and Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence (Hawaii Pacific University, age 43; Army). Vance was a journalist in Iraq. Hegseth served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo.

Gabbard was deployed in Iraq and Kuwait.

When these veterans were chosen, media promptly sounded the alarm. Trump’s choices have caused even thoughtful elites to fret. An article in the Wall Street Journal, for example, is headed “At the Top of Trump’s Team: Angry Iraq Vets Who Want to Upend U.S. Foreign Policy.” The subhead reads, “Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth came back from service in the Global War on Terrorism determined to change America’s role in the world” (Schectman et al.)

Angry upenders in top government offices? This cannot end well. Or so the WSJ wants us to think.

The headline promises more than the article delivers. The words “anger” and “upend” do not appear again in the text of some 2,500 words. Both were chosen by editors looking for eyes, as they say. Among the woke, both words are loaded. “Anger” is frequently linked to men and toxic masculinity. “Upend,” a verb found in a Journal headline nearly every day, implies an unexpected change, even a violent revolution.

According to the article’s authors, “Generation GWOT [Global War on Terror] is set for the first time to take over some of the most powerful positions in the U.S. government. President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to hand over major military and intelligence posts to people whose experience in that conflict has made them deeply skeptical of America’s security role abroad.”

But is that skepticism really remarkable? After the fog of Biden-Harris, it is difficult to say exactly what “America’s security role abroad is.” Biden hedged his bets on Ukraine, Israel, and elsewhere. He gave Bashar-al-Assad, killer of his own people, plenty of room to run.

Generational shifts happen. Given that both Trump and Biden are 79, significant changes in top government jobs are overdue. Full credit to Trump for understanding this. For alarmists, however, veterans with experience in combat zones don’t seem to have a place in government leadership. Some people think that those who are “deeply skeptical of America’s security role abroad” should not be in charge of military and intelligence agencies.

The writers seem nervous about closing the gap between those who command and those who wear the boots on the ground. Some of Trump’s other Cabinet choices also seem intended to cut through the massive stasis of government bureaucracies and the smug spinmasters who feed media stories about how well tax dollars are being spent.

In the United Kingdom the vast, immobile administrative state is known as “The Blob.” This term was current when Liz Truss briefly served as Prime Minister in Fall 2022. According to creators of a recent film about her tenure, “She was the first prominent European politician in years to attempt a fundamental break from the stale economic consensus entrenched across Europe. Her rise, brief reign and fall were dramatic because of the conflicts she provoked with a political and bureaucratic class hostile to her ideas, and her and her supporters’ mistakes and foibles along the way” (Sternberg). Let’s hope the American version of The Blob won’t smother Trump’s warriors.

Warriors are good agents of change. They know a lot about conflict, and not just from fights with the enemy. Warriors sometimes have to fight their bosses. Anybody with even a slight knowledge of military operations knows that the gap between command and commanded is vast and that it is lethal. Recall Biden’s politically-motivated exit from Afghanistan in August 2021, which sent thirteen soldiers home in wooden boxes, injured another 45, and killed over 170 Afghan civilians.

Trump had set up a conditional withdrawal before 2021. With Obama looking over his shoulder, Biden was determined to reverse anything having to do with Trump. Biden announced that all U.S. forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021. He removed conditions Trump had imposed to restrain the Taliban. His withdrawal would mark the 20^th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001 and show that he was protecting our country from dangerous foreign engagement. In the service of optics, Biden and his team put symbolism before safety.

Many predicted what would happen. The retreating soldiers were attacked by the Taliban. Thirteen died. Biden went on to display brazen indifference to the deaths he had caused. At Andrews Air Force Base, he looked at his watch three times while the coffins were being unloaded from a military aircraft. He did not, as his White House spokeswoman insisted, and as his media protectors also claimed, check his watch just once. An experienced politician, he was a heartless Commander-in-Chief, indifferent to military death as well as to military life. But then his son was not among the victims.

Trump has promised to investigate the generals who endorsed the Afghanistan withdrawal, an inquiry of interest to every taxpayer, not least because Biden’s withdrawal left billions of dollars of equipment, including 12,000 military vehicles and 73 aircraft, in the hands of our enemies. Biden and his generals rewarded those who killed our soldiers and abandoned the friendly forces that had supported us. For optics. As Hegseth points out in The War on Warriors, no general was fired for this deadly debacle (p. 178). After all, they were only following Biden’s orders.

Generals get a free pass. Ordinary soldiers do not. Hegseth notes that disdain for the troops is among social elites, including newspaper editors and writers. Soldiers, he says, are seen as “thoughtless, order-following grunts” who work with their hands (p. 32). That is all right “for the lower classes” but not for the middle and upper classes who work from home, drive EVs, and shop at Whole Foods.

Working-class grunts can defend the country. But elites do not want them running it. The WSJ writers wonder if “a team with such deep distrust of America’s national security institutions and little management experience” could “effectively run” these organizations (Schectman et al., p. C2). There are three misguided assumptions about military experience here.

The first regards the supposed link between “deep distrust” and “anger.”

The second pertains to the significance of experience in government and the supposed insignificance of combat experience.

The third assumption is that those who are now running these same organizations trust the institutions and know what they are doing.

I’ll take these assumptions in order.

First, the WSJ authors pair the vets’ “deep distrust” with “anger.” This attempt to portray veterans as dangerous and potentially violent is misleading and slanderous. Veterans may well be angry, but the three chosen by Trump obviously trust American institutions such as the military, as well federal and state elections and governments. They have served in them. They are angry about incompetence. With good cause, they distrust the people in charge of those institutions, not the institutions themselves.

Second, the vets came back ready to create change because they had learned from their military experience. They know that the military is not well run. That is not the fault of troops or NCOs. It’s the fault of the top brass at the Pentagon, whose focus since Obama, as Hegseth demonstrates, is on DEI and woke politics, not on defense and offensive readiness.

Like many of the GWOT generation, the veterans discussed in the WSJ article saw a gap between theory and practice in many of their leaders. They were dismayed at the waste, indecision, and the careerism of generals who either did not know how to fight or were afraid to fight, and who shaped their decisions in accord with woke directives flowing from Obama and Biden.

The WSJ authors exaggerate the importance of administrative experience, which they silently privilege over the experience available to those who work with their hands. Without debating the merits of the nominees, I find it is curious that anybody would, any longer, regard political and government experience as a measure of competence.

One thing Joe Biden had in spades was experience in government. How did that work out for him, or for us? How well did experience manifest itself in his handpicked replacement? As a presidential candidate, Harris had been vice-president for nearly four years. No one, including Harris herself, could point to anything she had done, apart from declaring that the Texas border was “under control.” She didn’t say under whose control. She had to read off a teleprompter; she ducked interviews. She did not know what would come out of her mouth. Neither did anybody else. She was an experienced politician, but the value of experience depends on intelligence.

The generals in Iraq and Afghanistan had extensive military experience but, once in positions of power, they set it aside. They were disappointing and ineffective, even disastrous, because they were looking out for themselves and their promotions and forgetting their troops. Generals now subordinate war-readiness to the diversity, equity, and inclusiveness of combat units, orders handed to them by Obama and Biden. That’s why NCOs in training have to wear “empathy bellies” to know how pregnant women feel (Hegseth, p. 38). That’s the kind of experience that matters to generals today. Empathy first, then weapons training. For Biden’s generals, woke politics first, combat-readiness and troop safety second.

Third, the WSJ authors assume that those now in charge of important institutions know what they are doing. Many people disagree, and not just veterans. The public’s disapproval rating of Congress is 80%. Two-thirds of the public rates the Secret Service as poor or fair. Only 40% of the American public approves of the FBI; the approval rate is much lower among Republicans. Only 37% approve of the current President. Pew Research reports that over 40% of the public in the nominated veterans’ age group has a negative view of the military. For younger Americans (i.e., 18-29) the negative rating for the military is 53%.

Who thinks that the FBI is guided by people who know what they are doing? The FBI’s political interference was recently surveyed by Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray (Dec. 18, 2024). Grassley noted FBI’s enthusiasm for aggression. Wray ordered 30 armed agents who were authorized to use “lethal force” to storm Trump’s house in August 2022. Did they expect Melania to shoot back? The FBI discriminates. It did not raid then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s home when it became known that she had handled highly classified information on an unsecured server.

The FBI keeping, Trump’s house safe for democracy

The FBI’s political interference is legendary. James Comey was a consummate power player whom Trump fired in 2017. Comey dismissed charges against Clinton’s use of a personal server for top-secret government communications. Then, less than two weeks before the 2016 election, he re-opened the investigation, dismissing a subordinate’s concern that by doing so he would be increasing Trump’s chances of becoming president. Comey made his announcement. Trump won.

A few years later, another FBI activist, Jack Smith, launched an investigation into Trump’s handing of classified documents, continuing the FBI’s spell of TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. In June 2023, Trump was indicted in Miami, the first time a former U.S. president had faced federal charges—37 of them. Trump pleaded not guilty. The media was awash with predictions about the devastating effect that Smith’s move would have for Trump’s candidacy.

The mainstream media were delighted. Eager to support the FBI’s political interference with the election, CNN applauded Smith’s attempt to “bring Trump to Justice.” But others realized that this unprecedented assault could help Trump. A man familiar with lawfare, Trump successfully portrayed himself as a victim of Smith’s scheming, not to mention the scheming of obscure New York and Georgia prosecutors eager to get onto the national stage. In November 2024, when Trump was re-elected, Smith was forced to drop all charges. Once again, the FBI’s attempt to interfere in an election had backfired.

Administrative or management experience doesn’t necessarily produce wisdom and good judgment, and combat experience doesn’t necessarily produce the kind of anger and distrust that the Journal writers envision.

Hegseth has been criticized for never running a corporation. Barack Obama had never run anything. He wasn’t even a working part of anything until he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. His work there was to run for president. He served as Senator from January 2005 to his election in November 2008. In January 2009 he became the most powerful man in the world. We can thank his race and privileged education for his success, not his experience.

The vets chosen by Trump do not have experience pushing paper, the specialty of Obama, the one-man band who boasted that he needed only a pen and a phone to govern. Unlike Obama, Trump is democratic. His cabinet choices have had experience outside the office, i.e., experience in war zones. They volunteered for duty, Hegseth more than once and in war zones at home as well as abroad. He was a National Guard officer standing against the Black Lives Matter riots in Washington, D.C. in 2020 (pp. 111-23). What is the benefit of the veterans’ experience? Chief among them is accountability, which is to say accountability that has been reinforced by rigorous training, exposure to danger, and responsibility for the lives of others. Paper-pushers like Obama and Biden know nothing about that except what others tell them.

Let’s see how well the Journal’s profile of the “angry Iraq vets” who are supposedly determined “to upend” foreign policy suits each one’s experience.

Vance is the most thoughtful and established of the three. He himself has been upended plenty. He had had three different surnames by the time he was 30. By the time he was 17, Vance had been known as J. D. Bowman and as James David Hamel. He served in the Marines as Hamel (2003-2007), then went to Ohio State, where he earned his B.A., with double majors, in two years. Yale law school was next. When he was about to graduate Yale in 2013, he changed his name to Vance, his mother’s maiden name.

He introduces his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, a book that was a best-seller in 2016, by saying that he was 31 years old and “not a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary.” His achievement was to grow up poor and make something of himself. Come January 2025 he will be the Vice-President of the United States, first in line to succeed the President. He will have a window of four years to create a persuasive profile as a presidential candidate. “Anger” and “upending” hardly apply to him.

Gabbard is at the opposite end, at least when it comes to “upending.” She is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. As a Democrat, she represented Hawaii in the U.S. House from 2013-2021. She left the Democratic Party in 2024 and supported Trump. Her service notwithstanding, Gabbard is a mysterious pick for Trump, since she is nothing if not a woke Democrat right out of central casting. She has a history of siding with America’s deadly enemies. In 2017 she met with the now-exiled Assad, then the president of Syria. That fact alone ought to have excluded her from serious consideration from Trump’s cabinet.

Gabbard blames U.S. support for Ukraine for the Russian invasion. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, she proposed that the two nations embrace “the spirit of aloha.” Wiki says that “aloha” is a word “for love, affection, peace, compassion and mercy.” In other words, her recommendation is that Ukraine bend over for the Russians, who do not seem to show peace, affection, and compassion to those they have invaded.

In For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind (Regnery, 2024), Gabbard calls the governing establishment “permanent Washington.” It is the U.S. version of the U.K.’s “blob.” She nails radicals who wanted to take Trump of the 2024 ballot, reminding them that had their changes been put into effect, in other years Republicans might us the same device against Democratic nominees. She also details the lawfare against Trump, which grew to a total of 91 federal and state charges, all felonies. This was a coordinated strategy of unelected “entities,” as she calls them, to undermine democratic institutions and to make it impossible for Trump to run for office.

Should Gabbard becomes the spokeswoman for national intelligence, there will be some merit to “permanent Washington,” I suspect. Some seasoned, real-world agents and diplomats will be able to modify some of her ideas about what is good for the United States and its allies. Her Senate hearing ought to be revealing. She has her defenders (see De Luce).

In the middle is Hegseth. He is also controversial pick chiefly because he is a warior, body and soul. His book, The War on Warriors, is a stinging indictment of smug military bureaucracy, its love affair with DEI directives, and its hallowed, old-fashioned incompetence. The left—especially the military left—has been busy trying to damage Hegseth. He claimed that he had been accepted at West Point—something that is not easy to do—but that he did not attend. The U. S. Military Academy quickly denied that he had been admitted. This attempt to discredit Hegseth was thoroughly covered by the media.

But then West Point had to issue an apology. “A review of our records indicates Peter Hegseth was offered admission to West Point in 1999 but did not attend. An incorrect statement involving Hegseth’s admission to the U.S. Military Academy was released by an employee on Dec. 10, 2024,” a spokesperson for West Point told news outlets. Nice use of the passive voice, sir. Can just any employee release confidential information to the public? The statement was a typical military attempt to duck accountability. CYA was and is the generals’ first concern.

We see that the politicians of West Point shoot first and look at the records later. From the inability to run a war to the inability to check facts, today’s Army leadership has earned Hegseth’s criticism—his distrust. It is easy to see why the powers at West Point and at other service academies devoted to DEI fear what Hegseth’s tenure as head of the Department of Defense would mean for them and their careers.

One of Hegseth’s most important observations connects disdain for the military to hatred of police on the battlefront at home. We all saw it during and after the orchestrated George Floyd riots of 2020 (pp. 112-27). At the time Hegseth was in the National Guard and on duty in Washington, D.C.

Everybody knows what happened in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, because it was a disgrace for Trump. But who remembers that on May 29, 2020, Black Lives Matter and Antifa attacked the White House? Sixty Secret Service employees were wounded; the White House was locked down and the President moved to a secret, secure location.

B H A Z = Black House Autonomous Zone

Supported by Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bower, rioters defaced the church where Lincoln once prayed. The church’s rector, in line with Bower, supported the graffiti as “memorials” and as signs of a needed change (Hegseth, p. 118). As an officer in the D.C. National Guard, Hegseth had a first-hand view of the rioters’ anti-white racism and sexism. They abused as traitors those in uniform who were Black, Hispanic, or female. Hegseth watched as the targets of Antifa’s and BLM’s deadly violence shook with fear.

As Hegseth notes, the violent militants have been at work for decades and have had much success, thanks to the eager support of the media, educators eager to buy into woke progressivism, and an indifferent public. They have eroded the military so that it can barely meet its offensive and defensive obligations. They have kidnapped education at all levels, turning it into a swamp of feminism and Marxism that teaches students to hate their country and to laugh at their fathers (most of their teachers are women). The educated elite looks down on those whose work is defending the nation. The world of boots, uniforms, and regulations is as remote to these people as the surface of the moon.

Post-election, with Trump’s cabinet taking shape, Jason L. Riley sees the Times and other leading media as “stuck in resistance mode.” This pertains not only to party politics, which is Riley’s focus, but also to ways in which the media regard the military. The media are interested in the military only when there is an opportunity to emphasize ground gained by women or, as in the case of the WSJ article mentioned above, to cast doubt on the worthiness of veterans to participate in government.

What is at stake is not only the fate of three veterans or their performance as public officials. Also at stake is unwillingness in both the media and large parts of the public to show the military the respect its women and men have earned. When boots and uniforms are in the news, we usually see men and a few women in business attire, photographed against the background of uniformed troops and vehicles such as tanks or ships.

The message is that the people in charge are the professional politicians, who are lay people, the green-energy rich, the expert—experienced—elite. Hegseth calls them the “enlightened” class who believe, as did John Kerry, “that only suckers get drafted and go to war” (p. 34). Those doing the work, in the background of news reports, are Hegseth’s “order-following grunts.” They don’t need to think because they work with their hands. They are laborers from “the lower classes” who perhaps hope that military service will give them a social and economic leg up.

Unsettling that smug assumption is something Trump has been working on. Perhaps the most significant thing Trump has accomplished in his political career is to reverse the alignment of political parties with white-collar elites (once Republican) and “the lower classes” (once Democrat). This is nowhere more apparent than in his plans to elevate veterans to leadership positions in his cabinet.

Trump’s followers were routinely dismissed as white trash, uneducated yokels. But he won a second, non-consecutive term because significant numbers of Blacks and Hispanics (and not only men) knew they had been better off under him than under Biden. They know which party speaks for them; it is not Biden-Harris-Obama’s party.

Post-COVID, Biden poured three billion dollars of taxpayer money into the economy when it was not needed. He bought votes with this record-breaking waste, but not enough votes. He cost us a lot of money. But, in a way, he did us a big favor. He set off a devastating inflation cycle that in November 2024 defeated the princess for whom he had paved the way. The man taking her place in 2025, and other veterans who are in line for Cabinet positions, can speak from head and heart in a way that neither Biden nor Harris could ever do. Not only that, but, as former boots on the ground, the veterans know more about—and are better at—fighting and surviving than paper pushers are. Let’s wish the troops well. The paper pushers we will always have with us.

December 2024

Sources

Ball, Molly. “Unconventional Cabinet Picks Offer Clues of [sic] Trump’s Agenda.” The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2024, p. A6.

De Luce, Dan. “Democrats and Republicans in Congress worried that Gabbard might leak to Assad regime.” NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/democrats-republicans-congress-worried-gabbard-might-leak-information-rcna181316. Seen 12/23/24.

Gabbard, Tulsi. For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind. New York: Regnery, 2024.

Hegseth, Pete. The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. New York: Fox News Books, 2024.

——. “I’ve Faced Fire Before. I Won’t Back Down.” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 2, 2024, A17.

Riley, Jason L. “All the News That’s Suddenly Fit to Print After the Election.” The Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2024, p. A17.

Schectman, Joel, Nancy A. Youssef, and Vera Bergengruen. “At the Top of Trump’s Team: Angry Iraq Vets Who Want to Upend U. S. Foreign Policy.” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 7-8, 2024. C2-3.

Sternberg, Joseph C. “Why We Still Need to Talk About Liz Truss.” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 26, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-we-still-need-to-talk-about-liz-truss-bureaucrats-bank-of-england-570f999e

Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: HarperCollins, 2016.