Victor Davis Hanson
Firing Generals and Defense Board Members
The media went crazy when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., and now has fired members of the Defense Policy Board. I have no idea whether these removals were entirely justified, arbitrary, controversial, unnecessary, or long overdue.
But I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden fired hundreds of generals and defense-related board members mostly to media and political silence.
I know that because shortly after Obama took office in 2009, he fired the entire board of the American Battle Monuments Commission—as disinterested and apolitical a group as one could imagine, charged with overseeing the numerous cemeteries of U.S. servicemen killed in action in World War I and II and other conflicts.
I know that because I was fired without explanation and ordered to send back my commission passport immediately. And I did so that day.
Such is a president’s prerogative. One of the first things upon assuming office that Biden-appointed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin did was to scan all 42 defense-related policy panels and boards, and then summarily fire every single Trump appointee, regardless of past performance.
Trump may have relieved of command a few officers, but he will never match the record of Barack Obama. Within a single five-year period, Obama relieved of command 197 officers, often without cause, but usually in a predictable pattern of focusing on any officers deemed conservative and thus not on the same page as the radical Obama reset in foreign policy.
(Remember the Obama reboot: tilt toward Iran, champion the downtrodden Shia/Persian underdog, and its Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian, and Houthi subordinates. Then play them off against Israel and the Sunni sheikdoms and moderates, in order to have a Churchillian Obama intervene now and then to referee the anticipated “creative tension.” And as far as Ukraine: suspend offensive weapons shipments to Kyiv, see the Obama Russian “reset” implode with Putin’s 2014 invasion and annexation of the Donbas and Crimea, and then simply snooze and let the Russians do as they pleased—only to reappear to impeach Trump for temporarily suspending the arms Obama had cancelled entirely.)
From Fit as a Fiddle to I Had No Idea?
Remember, until 2025 the media and Left did not say Biden suffered occasional memory lapses. Instead, they demonized and castigated (“cheap fakes”) anyone who suggested he was so cognitively challenged that he could not perform fully his task as president, and that fact was well known to his own administration.
As soon as Biden was coup d’état-ed in June 2024, the media began leaking carefully and slowly (after all, he was still to be president for another seven months) that “rumors” circulated Biden was not well.
Then after the Harris defeat and the Democratic recriminations began, we suddenly saw a “race for the truth” in musical-chairs style, as if a Biden insider did not wish to be the last sycophant without a seat once the Biden cover-up music had stopped. So, we read in book after book, in interview after interview, that Biden was lost, asleep, bewildered, scary, etc.—all this from a media that just seven months earlier had damned any who wrote just that.
We forget that Biden was installed by a coup of sorts in March 2020. He had not yet won a single caucus or primary. Hard-leftist Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg were scaring the Democratic donor class as extremists who would ensure a McGovern or Mondale landslide loss in the 2020 elections.
So, they more or less forced everyone out, and paved the way for Biden to win the remaining primaries: he got the glory of appearing as a waxen-effigy president—the Obamas, the donor class, and the hard left of the party got to run the presidency.
But what are we not hearing about these recent confessionals of Joe Biden’s non compos mentis status?
There is no mea culpa, “I’m sorry for lying.” There is not even a lame excuse of the Elizabeth Warren sort, as in Biden was fit because “he was standing.”
Instead, there was nothing other than: Narrative A (2020–25)—Biden as Socrates; Narrative B (June 2024–January 2025)—he may be too tired to remain on the ticket; Narrative C (now)—he is near vegetative.
And, of course, lost in all these narratives was the fact that the Left deliberately nominated a candidate they knew was mentally unfit for the presidency and then hid that fact as best they could until he stepped down—in one of the greatest conspiracies in the history of the American presidency. And now to reclaim their shattered reputations, reporters have begun claiming that he was always demented but they were unable at the time to make the diagnosis to warn the rudderless country that they now so magically disseminate for book advances.
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