Donald Trump's administration is barely bothering to pretend that the firings at the Department of Defense are about anything but bigotry. On Friday, Trump fired Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., only the second Black person to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To add insult to injury, the highly qualified Brown was replaced by Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, a white man who, according to the Associated Press, "has not had key assignments identified in law as prerequisites for the job." Promoting unqualified white men over qualified women and minorities isn't just the modus operandi of the Trump administration. There's a long paper trail pointing to race as the reason they painted a target on Brown's back.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is the shining example of Trump's love of giving plum jobs to wholly unqualified white men, has long held a racialized resentment of Brown. By his own admission, Hegseth's military career was a failure. He complained the Army "spit me out," though he tries to save face by claiming "the feeling was mutual." General Brown had a dramatically more successful career than Major Hegseth, with four stars and a storied journey from fighter pilot to commanding the Pacific Air Forces. Yet Hegseth sneeringly suggested in his 2024 book that Brown only got his promotion because of "his skin color." Hegseth claims this insult is justified because Brown "made the race card one of his biggest calling cards." This appears to be a reference to Brown's willingness to publicly state both that racism exists and that racism is bad, sentiments that should be unobjectionable to anyone who is not a racist.
