Closing summary
Joe Biden capitalized on his State of the Union performance by announcing campaign stops across the United States and cheering yet another month of positive employment growth. Donald Trump, meanwhile, launched a volley of attacks on the president’s annual address, which was the third of his presidency and potentially the last, if Biden does not win re-election. The former president was otherwise busy posting a bond in the massive defamation judgment author E Jean Carroll won against him, while pushing for a new trial.
Here’s what else happened today.
The Republican National Committee made Trump’s daughter-in-law Laura Trump its co-chair, as the former president moves to install loyalists atop the party.
The Senate is scrambling to pass a government fund package ahead of a midnight deadline to prevent a shutdown.
No Labels is moving forward with fielding a third-party presidential ticket – but does not have any candidates lined up yet.
Biden’s campaign responded to outcry over the president’s use of the word “illegal” to describe an undocumented murder suspect.
Ronny Jackson, a Republican congressman and Trump ally, advertises himself as a retired Navy rear admiral, but was in fact demoted following a scathing inspector general report into his work as White House physician.
On his website, Republican congressman and former White House physician Ronny Jackson describes himself as a retired Navy rear admiral.
The Washington Post reports that’s not the case. Jackson, a Texas lawmaker and Donald Trump ally, was demoted to captain by the Navy following an inspector general’s report that documented inappropriate behavior during his time as doctor to the president.
“The substantiated allegations in the DoDIG [Department of Defense inspector general] investigation of Rear Adm. (lower half) Ronny Jackson are not in keeping with the standards the Navy requires of its leaders and, as such, the secretary of the Navy took administrative action in July 2022,” Navy spokesman Joe Keiley told the Post.
Here’s more:
Jackson is now a retired Navy captain, those people said — a demotion that carries a significant financial burden in addition to the social stigma of stripped rank in military circles.
Despite the demotion, Jackson has continued to refer to himself as a retired rear admiral, including in statements released since the Navy reclassified him as a retired captain. Former president Donald Trump and other Republicans have also continued to publicly describe Jackson using his former rank; it’s unclear if they were aware of his demotion.
Jackson’s office did not respond to requests for comment about the Navy’s 2022 personnel action and his demotion. The former White House physician has become a prominent voice in the 2024 campaign, repeatedly affirming Trump’s fitness to serve while castigating President Biden’s.
After publication of this story, the Navy provided Jackson’s service record, which shows the rank of captain retroactively applied to the date of his retirement in December 2019.
For an officer who served 24 years like Jackson, there is a more than $15,000 difference in annual pension payouts between a retired one-star admiral, the rank that Jackson held when he retired from the Navy in December 2019, and a retired captain, according to an estimate by Katherine L. Kuzminski, a military policy expert at Center for a New American Security. That payout gap is likely to widen over time as the military periodically increases its pay rates for each position.
Kuzminski also said that it was inappropriate for Jackson to describe himself as a retired rear admiral. “While it is possible that others will mistakenly refer to him as ‘Admiral’ in perpetuity, he himself should not make that mistake,” she said.
