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Monday, June 29, 2026
Sunday, June 28, 2026
The Purging of General Donahue Is a Breaking Point
David French
The Purging of
General Donahue Is a Breaking Point
June 28, 2026
In this handout photo from the U.S.
Army, Gen. Christopher Donahue boards a cargo plane in Kabul, Afghanistan.Credit...Master Sgt.
Alexander Burnett/U.S. Army, via
By David French
Opinion
Columnist
It’s an iconic image of the war on terrorism.
A single grainy figure,
bathed in the green light of night-vision goggles, steps toward the back of an
Air Force transport — the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan, one
minute before President Joe Biden’s Aug. 31, 2021, deadline.
That soldier was Gen.
Christopher Donahue, then the commander of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
He and his men had been deployed to Kabul on an emergency basis to protect
Americans and their allies during the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
He is also the latest casualty of
Pete Hegseth’s purge of senior leaders.
Donahue arrived in
Afghanistan in the chaotic final days of the war,
after the Afghan government fell. Encountering nearly complete chaos, he
aggressively brought a degree of order.
He told military officials who
investigated the withdrawal that he was blunt with the Taliban.
“We told them that we would control the gates and they would push people out,”
Donahue said. “We expressed that they will comply, because if they fight us on
this, we would be able to kill more of them than they would ever hope to kill
of us. After that their tone changed.”
The evacuation from
Afghanistan was an immense tragedy. While Donahue was there, a suicide bomber
killed 13 service members and about 170 Afghan civilians at the Abbey Gate.
(Despite what you might hear, the gate was outside Donahue’s area of
responsibility at the time of the bombing.) Thousands of American allies,
including people who’d risked their lives serving alongside American troops,
were left behind, and the Afghan people were plunged back into the oppression
of Taliban rule.
That photograph, in
which the commander is the last person to leave, like a captain who is the last
to abandon a sinking ship, elevated Donahue’s profile, but it might have made
him a target for those who wanted someone held accountable for the defeat in
Afghanistan. As a senator in 2024, Markwayne Mullin, now the secretary of
homeland security, briefly held up Donahue’s nomination to lead Army forces in
Europe for this reason.
Donahue, however, was
the wrong person to scapegoat. He’d earned praise and respect from
Republicans and Democrats for his conduct during the retreat.
Beyond his service in
Kabul, Donahue had a sparkling résumé.
He’d commanded Delta Force, arguably the most elite branch of the Army’s
Special Forces, and was instrumental in the fight to destroy the ISIS caliphate
in Syria and Iraq. He also helped Ukraine plan its 2022 counteroffensive
against Russia. But almost every senior general has a glittering résumé. The
reactions to Donahue’s departure make clear that he wasn’t just accomplished;
he was deeply respected and admired.
Writing in The Atlantic,
Adm. William McRaven, the former commander of the Joint Special Operations
Command, who directed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, said that Donahue
is “one of the most brilliant officers I know” and that “he has the respect of
every man and woman who ever served with him.”
Gen. Mark Hertling, one
of my commanders in Iraq during the surge, wrote in The Bulwark that
Donahue “is not simply another general officer,” and he used the same word as
McRaven: “respect.” Donahue had “earned the trust and respect of soldiers.”
Rich McCormick, a
Republican member of the House, told The Washington Examiner that
Donahue’s departure was “unfortunate.”
“I have mad respect for
that guy,” McCormick said. “I don’t know the details, so I’m not going to
continue to talk about it, because I don’t know. I don’t know him personally,
but I have mad respect for the guy. He’s earned that. Great leader.”
But there was one other
part of Donahue’s résumé — something that would raise the hackles of an
administration that believes it’s purging the woke corruption of the Biden
military. In 2023 he contradicted Republican claims that wokeness had overtaken
the military. He told an interviewer, “We’re focused on people, war
fighting and making sure that we’re prepared for the next fight. There ain’t no
‘woke’ here.”
We don’t know precisely why Donahue is leaving. A technical
explanation is that his command in Europe was downsizing to a three-star
position and he, as a four-star general, had nowhere else to go. The problem,
as The Washington Post reported, was that Hegseth “stonewalled” efforts
to keep him. The message was clear: Hegseth wanted him gone.
Donahue is the latest in
a long line of generals and admirals the Trump administration has removed,
without explanation and without any evidence of misconduct. Some were obvious
political targets, and the list is heavily weighted toward women and minorities.
President Trump, for
example, fired Gen. Charles Brown Jr,
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and the second Black officer to hold
that post) after Hegseth accused Brown of — you guessed it — being too “woke.”
Donahue’s departure,
however, seems to have touched a particular nerve, and I think I know why. It’s
a matter of both timing and principle.
Donahue is leaving just
as the impact of Trump’s corruption and Hegseth’s partisanship and incompetence
is becoming obvious to the American people, in matters both large and small. In
scandal after scandal, incident after incident, the same message is sent: The
morale, effectiveness and integrity of the American military are under siege.
Trump launched a war without public
support, prosecuted it sporadically and incompetently and seems to be on the
verge of handing Iran a strategic victory.
Even worse, it seems
with every passing week we’re learning that the war was less one-sided than we
were told. Last Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that there was extensive damage to
an important American naval base in Bahrain, far more damage than the
administration had said.
According to the
Journal, the administration asked commercial satellite companies to limit
access to imagery of the damaged bases. And it still hasn’t disclosed to
Congress the total cost of the damage. In other words, while we inflicted
enormous damage on Iran, the public still doesn’t know how much damage Iran
inflicted on us.
A flu outbreak is less
consequential than a war, but it’s symbolic nonetheless. In April, Hegseth made
the vaccine optional for all units. The results were entirely predictable.
After 275 people at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas fell ill with the flu, the
Pentagon reinstated mandatory flu vaccines.
It’s hard to imagine any
Pentagon leader scorning vaccines after experiencing the incredibly close
quarters of military life. In the absence of robust public health measures, a
military base can be a breeding ground for infectious disease.
And we cannot forget the ongoing war,
also undeclared, against people suspected of trafficking drugs in the
Caribbean. Increasingly, the evidence seems to point to American strikes costing innocent lives.
The man tasked to lead
the American military — to advance its mission and its values — is putting
considerable moral pressure on the United States military.
And we can’t forget that
if there were any justice or real accountability, he wouldn’t be in the job.
When he shared sensitive information about upcoming American military strikes
against the Houthis in 2025, he not only risked the lives of American service
members; he committed an act that would have destroyed the career of virtually
any uniformed member of the military. Nevertheless, he survived.
It might seem basic to say this, but when Hegseth began his term as
secretary of defense, he inherited a military that had already been shaped and
formed by generations of training and moral formation. Even a person as
powerful as a secretary of defense can’t transform an institution’s DNA
overnight.
Think of the military as
a big ship controlled by a small rudder. The ship responds to the rudder, but
not immediately and not obviously. But given even a moderate amount of time,
the direction of the turn is clear.
And that brings us to the principle of
the matter. The administration’s treatment of Donahue removes any remaining
doubt that in Hegseth’s version of a meritocracy, there is no level of
excellence that can trump politics.
It is difficult to
overstate how much that principle will cripple a military in a democracy. If
the Trump administration is now punishing generals for following the orders of
his predecessor (by, for example, executing orders to withdraw from Afghanistan
or to place a greater emphasis on diversity in the ranks), regardless of the
quality of their performance, over time you’ll create an atmosphere of
institutional fear that can — and probably will — yield paralysis or serial
cronyism.
Worst of all,
politicizing the military will break its bond with the American people. The
military is one of the last remaining institutions in the United States still
holding on to the public’s respect, in part because of its commitment to
professional excellence but also because it is seen as apolitical and fair.
It’s arguably the most successful institution in American life that truly
models the immense diversity of American life.
It isn’t a Praetorian
Guard for the president and his party. It’s a citizen army that draws its
members from across the whole of society.
The Trump administration
owes the military and the public an
explanation for its treatment of Donahue — and an explanation for its treatment
of other senior officers it has fired or forced out. As commander in chief, the
president has the right to fire an officer, but as a servant of the people, the
president has a duty to tell us why.
In the meantime, Americans are right
to be alarmed. A failed war. A purge of officers. Potential war crimes. Each of these things should be a
stark warning that the Trump administration is in the process of breaking one
of America’s most vital institutions.
That institution can
hold. As I’ve seen firsthand, it’s not perfect, but its commitment to integrity
runs deep. It cannot hold forever, however. In a previous column, I referred to an old remark about
the allied armies in World War I. They were “lions led by donkeys.” The
ordinary soldier’s extraordinary courage was squandered through futile tactics
and foolish strategies.
Place the donkeys in
charge long enough, and you start to change the character of the military
itself. The donkey in chief is placing the effectiveness, morale and integrity
of the American military under siege, and we’re watching exactly what happens
when the lions are forced to leave.
It’s not an image I want
to see.
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Saturday, June 27, 2026
President Narcissus and the Fetid Reflecting Pool
President Narcissus and the Fetid Reflecting Pool
Public service announcement for anyone planning to visit Washington in the immediate term: Steer clear of President Trump’s hot mess of a reflecting pool. Don’t dip a digit in its emerald water. Don’t play with its “American flag blue” strips of peeling paint. Don’t get too close to the federal workers struggling to repair this refurbishment from hell. In fact, maybe skip the landmark altogether, lest you, too, get cuffed and hauled off by the park police for allegedly desecrating the president’s most half-baked vanity project to date.
Bungling the $14 million-plus redo of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, concocting batty stories about what really happened — Knife-wielding vandals? Corrosive chemicals “illegally” dumped in the water? — and harassing innocent bystanders to distract from his own incompetence: These are not the most outrageous things the president has done since his return to office. But that is part of what makes this saga so irresistible and resonant. It is Trumpism made laughable — farce rather than horror or tragedy.
As with the White House ballroom brouhaha, we see the power of vivid images and simple metaphors. Workers vacuuming algae out of the pool, oily green slime, a dead duckling floating in the muck — these visuals can capture the public imagination, even among Americans largely fed up with and tuned out of politics.
Trumpian moves such as going to war with Iran and slashing Medicaid upend more lives, but those policy failures take a lot of intellectual and emotional bandwidth to process. And learning about the American military accidentally bombing an elementary school in southern Iran will make plenty of people want to turn away.
Some guy wasting a pile of money on a shoddy remodel? Everyone gets how pathetic and hilarious that is. The memes practically generate themselves. My personal favorite is the image of Cousin Eddie from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” standing in his shorty bathrobe, draining a chemical toilet into the reflecting pool.
With any screw-up, Mr. Trump ducks accountability by blaming nefarious enemies plotting against him. Only people mainlining the MAGA Kool-Aid will buy the idea that terrorist-vandals wielding magic blades (because please recall that Mr. Trump assured us last month that the pool’s fancy new coating was impervious to knives) sneaked past the surveillance cameras and security patrols around the National Mall to carve a 250-foot — Oops, make that 300-foot! No, better still, 350-foot! — gash in said coating. “WOW, who would do such a thing?” he raved in a Sunday social media post. “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE.”
To review: First, the president made up stuff about his new pool being indestructible. Now he’s making up more stuff about the villains who supposedly destroyed it.
If the president had even a smidgen of evidence for his claims that the pool had been “seriously vandalized,” his people would be hawking it all over creation. Instead, we’re left with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, blathering on Fox News about her commitment to prosecute anyone “in a position of vandalizing or attempting to vandalize” the pool.
For those in search of genuinely sketchy behavior, note how the administration awarded a piece of the reflecting pool job, specifically its water-purification system, through a no-bid contract to a company tied to John J. Cafaro, a Trump-supporting Mar-a-Lago neighbor. Everyone is claiming ignorance, of course. No matter, the results are what we’ve come to expect: The president’s allies get rich while the public gets shafted.
Clever Democrats will not waste this opening. This election cycle, the blue team’s candidates have tried to weave examples of government waste, dysfunction and economic failure into a larger Trump-era corruption story. The president overseeing the creation of a costly, green, swampy mess in the middle of the National Mall is … mwah! … chef’s kiss.
Finally — and I cannot stress this element enough — this whole sorry episode is blessedly clownish. I don’t mean clownish like that bloody spectacle of a cage match birthday party Mr. Trump threw himself on the White House lawn this month. I count that among the legion of things this president celebrates that appall his critics but appeal to key chunks of his base.
Mr. Trump’s reflecting pool face plant, by contrast, is more Three-Stooges-meet-Bozo-the-Clown-ish. Getting bested by an algae bloom then throwing a finger-pointing tantrum about it doesn’t make Mr. Trump seem scary or threatening so much as petulant and inept. People are laughing at him, and that laughter undermines his image as a take-charge master of the universe.
This is the true gift of the reflecting pool meltdown. Mr. Trump looks foolish, with relatively minimal damage done to the nation. The economy will not crater. The global order will not be upended. No one will be deported to a foreign gulag. No one is likely to die. Aside from, perhaps, some poor little ducklings.
That said, I still recommend that summer tourists forgo pool gawking for the duration. Maybe check out the National Zoo instead. The pandas will be more welcoming.
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Tuesday, June 23, 2026
A Malicious Chapter in the History of American Justice
A Malicious Chapter
in the History of American Justice
June 21, 2026
By David French
Opinion
Columnist
An unusual tweet caught
my eye last week.
It was from Josh
Gerstein, Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter, and it said this: “NEW:
Trump admin takes rare step to quell controversy over prosecutorial misconduct
in dropped criminal case against Chicago-area anti-ICE protesters. Feds won’t
fight defense demand to pay bill for activists’ legal fees.”
Here’s why it’s so
notable. In our legal system, prosecutors rarely pay a criminal defendant’s
legal fees, even when the government loses its case. Defendants tend to be
reimbursed only when they can prove serious prosecutorial
misconduct. It’s even rarer for prosecutors to agree to pay those fees. Experienced
lawyers will read that tweet and know a single, simple truth.
Something very bad went
down in Illinois.
Why, you might wonder,
would I write about a criminal case in Chicagoland when the world is convulsed
by so many seismic events? Last week alone, Trump capitulated to Iran, the
United States cut some of its defense commitments to Europe, and Ukraine hit Moscow
with what appears to be its largest drone attack of the war.
We’re living in a moment
when every week seems to bring a new development of global importance.
But the Chicago case is indicative of
the fight for justice in the Trump administration. For every high-profile case
that goes to the Supreme Court, there are dozens of other, smaller cases in
federal courts across the country in which the Trump administration lies, bends
the rules, slanders innocent citizens and otherwise abuses the legal system to
persecute its political opponents.
And that brings us to
the story of the Broadview Six.
On Oct. 23, 2025, a
federal grand jury indicted a group of six protesters, including
current and former Democratic public officials, charging them with conspiring
to “injure” a federal officer “in his person or property.” The indictment
claimed that they, among other things, “banged aggressively on the government
vehicle’s side and back windows, hood and other vehicle body parts; crowded
together in the front and side of the government vehicle and pushed against the
vehicle to hinder and impede its movement.”
The indictment also
claims the defendants scratched the word “PIG” on the government vehicle.
The indictment was
important enough that Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, announced the charges,
and they fit perfectly with a MAGA narrative that the real problem on the
streets wasn’t with rogue federal officers but with out-of-control leftist
activists — the all-powerful antifa of right-wing fever dreams.
To put this indictment
in context, it was announced around the same time that the administration
was debating whether to invoke the Insurrection Act to
use the military to crush anti-immigration protests.
In fact, the same day
that Blanche announced the charges, Will Scharf, the White House staff
secretary, wrote his boss, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of
staff, warning against using the Insurrection Act. And it was just a few months
later, in January, that the vice president, JD Vance, urged invoking the
Insurrection Act after federal agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex
Pretti in Minnesota.
But then, in March, the strangest
thing happened in Illinois. The government dismissed its own case.
The government dropped
charges against two of the defendants, and the Broadview Six became the
Broadview Four. The government also dropped the felony charges against the
remaining defendants.
Here’s where things get
really interesting (and a little complicated). As Eric Columbus explained in
an excellent rundown of the case
in Lawfare, the defense attorneys filed a motion asking the court
for permission to see the grand jury transcripts in the case, to make sure that
the grand jury had been properly instructed about the law before it issued its
indictment.
The prosecutors, it
turns out, had already handed the judge a redacted copy of the transcripts. In
other words, they had blacked out key portions of the proceedings. This
prompted the federal judge in the case, April Perry, to require the government
to produce unredacted copies and to require any prosecutor “who participated in
the decision to redact portions of the grand jury transcripts” to appear before
her in person.
The unredacted
transcripts were damning. The judge found that federal prosecutors had behaved
improperly in at least three ways. They’d engaged in the forbidden practice of
“vouching,” in which prosecutors essentially tell grand jurors to trust them,
that the case is stronger than it seems. Vouching implies the existence of
secret proof. But grand juries are supposed to make decisions based on the
evidence put before them, not their personal trust in prosecutors.
Prosecutors had also impermissibly
spoken to grand jurors outside the jury room, an act that could place
additional pressure on grand jurors to yield to the prosecution’s version of
events.
And finally, prosecutors
had dismissed from deliberations those grand jurors who had disagreed with the
government’s case. Once again, the prosecution was improperly placing its thumb
on the scales of justice.
To make matters worse,
prosecutors had redacted all this evidence. There was an obvious cover-up. The
judge declared herself “incredibly shocked” and said that she had “never seen
the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those
transcripts.”
She then said words no
lawyer wants to hear. She raised the possibility of “sanctions for
prosecutorial misconduct and for potential ethical violations, including lack
of candor to the court.”
Moments later, after a
brief recess, the government moved to dismiss the case against the remaining
defendants, with prejudice (meaning that the government can’t charge them again
for the same offense). The court immediately granted the motion — and a malicious
chapter in the history of American justice came to a righteous end.
Don’t think for a moment that the Trump administration’s
corruption and incompetence were confined to that case alone.
The Chicago
Sun-Times maintains a database of
criminal charges related to Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s
immigration crackdown in Chicago, and it’s astounding. Out of more than 30
cases filed so far, two resulted in guilty pleas, five resulted in deferred
prosecution agreements (slaps on the wrist), and two are still pending.
Twenty-four other cases have failed. Twenty were dismissed. Grand juries
refused to indict in at least three, and one resulted in acquittal.
This is a terrible
record in court, and the facts of the cases are sometimes egregious. In the
most notorious case, a federal agent shot a woman five times, and the
administration publicly accused her of being a domestic terrorist,
then charged her with assault —
only to dismiss the case after
an overwhelming amount of evidence (including body camera footage) contradicted
the government’s account.
The Chicago cases are collapsing just as the federal government is
announcing a new round of
criminal indictments, this time against protesters in Minnesota. Last Tuesday,
for example, the Department of Justice announced that it had charged 15 members
of a group called Direct Action Minnesota with, among other things, assaulting
federal officers, interstate stalking and interstate threats.
We don’t yet know enough
to evaluate those cases, but one thing is clear: The federal government has
lost the benefit of the doubt. Or, as Judge Perry said in Chicago, “I do
believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government
attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing. That trust has
been broken.”
But there is a silver lining in the
dark cloud. In Chicago, the Trump administration has blinked. It’s not just
refusing to contest the payment of attorneys’ fees; U.S. Attorney Andrew
Boutros — the same person who presided over these corrupt prosecutions — has
changed his tune.
In May, he announced a
series of “sweeping reforms” to
his office’s grand jury procedures as part of a “remediation plan” to prevent
future misconduct.
When I’m in my more
optimistic moments, I think we’ll look back at last year as the high-water mark
of Trumpism, when the combination of arrogance after Trump’s victory and the
inherent authoritarianism of the Trumpist project led to a unique period of state
violence and legal corruption.
And now, my optimistic
self says, the justice system is reasserting itself. The combination of
personal courage, legal persistence and judicial independence is preserving due
process and the American system of justice.
But optimism is no cause
for complacency. Federal prosecutors in Illinois may be chastened, but Todd
Blanche, the man who announced the bogus prosecution of the Broadview Six in
the first place, is Trump’s nominee to replace Pam Bondi as the attorney general
of the United States.
If he is confirmed,
expect more vindictive prosecutions. Expect more prosecutorial misconduct. And
expect more federal judges (and more American citizens) to say, along with
Judge Perry in Illinois, that their trust is broken.
Why? Because the Trump administration
is the nation’s chief threat to the rule of law.
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