A Crisis of Exploitable and Profitable Ignorance. The For-Profit Disinformation Machine and What You State Can Do About It Christopher Armitage Jun 30 Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Michael M. Santiago / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty; Jeff Spicer / Getty. Call it the for-profit disinformation industry. You could view it as a social phenomenon or a crisis of exploitable ignorance, and plenty of smart people have spent the last decade doing exactly that. You can also realize what we are looking at is a supply chain, with producers, buyers, distributors, and customers, organized the way any other industry is organized, and once you see it that way it is the single most effective political weapon deployed against the American public in our lifetimes. The producers come first, because everything downstream depends on who makes the product and what it costs to make. A working newsroom is expensive. Reporters and editors and fact-checkers draw salaries, lawyers review stories before they run, sources take years to develop, and institutional memory, the kind that lets a city-hall reporter recognize the new zoning proposal as the same scam the last mayor ran in 2007, takes decades to build. A person willing to invent a story needs a laptop and a few hours. When those two products compete for the same audience attention, one costs thousands of dollars per story and the other costs nothing, and the market sorts itself accordingly. It sorted itself fast. American newspapers employed about 71,000 newsroom workers in 2008, and by 2020 that number had fallen to 31,000. Forty thousand reporters, editors, and photographers are no longer at their desks, the buildings where they worked have been sold, and the beats they covered, school boards and county commissions and state agencies and zoning authorities, are now uncovered across most of the country. What filled the space behind them was not silence. It was cheaper content, produced faster, verified less, and engineered for emotional reaction, because emotion moves faster through a feed than verification does and always has. Downstream from the producers are the buyers, and they are not usually the people who appear on camera. They are fossil fuel companies protecting oil reserves worth hundreds of billions of dollars, tobacco executives who spent decades paying scientists to question their own research, pharmaceutical companies burying trial data, cryptocurrency operators running pump-and-dump schemes, hostile foreign governments, oligarchs, and political donors who would rather pay ten million dollars to confuse the public than face a regulation that would cost them a hundred million. From their spreadsheet, disinformation is the single most efficient investment available. Ten million in, a hundred million saved. No other asset class offers that return, which is why the money keeps flowing. Between the buyers and the audience sit the distributors. A digital platform is an auction house. Advertisers, political operatives, dark-money networks, and foreign influence operations bid against each other for access to specific audiences. The platform does not read the ad copy or ask whether the claims are true; it runs the auction, delivers the eyeballs, and takes its cut. Honest actors bidding for the same audience, the public-health campaigns and civic organizations and small news outlets, compete at the same rates against buyers who can afford to pay more because their return on investment is orders of magnitude higher. The market, operating exactly as designed, hands the megaphone to whoever is profiting most from public confusion. This is a system that rewards predation and exploitation. That is the structure end to end. Producers manufacture the product, buyers pay for its promotion, platforms distribute it, the audience consumes it, everyone in the chain makes money, and the only thing being degraded is the public’s capacity to tell truth from fiction. Steve Bannon described the strategy in 2018, talking to the writer Michael Lewis. The Democrats don’t matter, he said. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit. Commentators since have treated the quote as a propaganda slogan, but read it again. It is a purchasing strategy. Bannon was telling Lewis what the customers of the for-profit disinformation industry are actually buying, and they are not trying to convince anyone of anything specific. They are buying confusion. They are buying the collapse of the shared factual ground on which coordinated public action depends. A public that cannot agree on what happened yesterday cannot organize around what needs to happen tomorrow, a public that cannot identify a specific perpetrator cannot hold that perpetrator accountable, and a public too exhausted to sort truth from lie will eventually stop trying. That exhaustion is the product being sold. We have seen this operation before, and the tobacco version of it is the one most people remember. Internal memos later revealed that tobacco executives knew by the 1950s that their product caused cancer. They hid the knowledge and spent decades funding scientists, public-relations firms, and friendly journalists to manufacture doubt about the research. When the lawsuits finally caught up with them, they argued their public statements were protected commercial speech. The courts disagreed, juries disagreed, attorneys general disagreed, and the tobacco companies ended up paying more than two hundred billion dollars in settlements and accepting restrictions on how they could advertise. The lie was a product. The product was sold. The sellers paid for the harm they caused. Oligarchs took that loss personally. How dare they be held accountable? As I researched the For-Profit Disinformation Machine, I started to notice a pattern that reminded me of something that on its surface might seem unrelated. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration wanted to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua. Congress said no, and passed a law called the Boland Amendment making it illegal to fund the Contras, the right-wing guerrilla force trying to do the overthrowing. The administration decided to fund them anyway. Part of the money came from secretly selling missiles to Iran. Part of it came from something uglier. Contra leaders and their American handlers moved cocaine into the United States, sold it through West Coast dealers, and routed the profits back to the war in Central America. The CIA knew. In some cases, the CIA helped. In 1996, a reporter named Gary Webb at the San Jose Mercury News published a three-part series called “Dark Alliance” that laid out the supply chain. The Contras. The cocaine. The Los Angeles dealers. The CIA’s awareness of the operation. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times attacked the series. They attacked Webb personally. The Mercury News eventually backed away from his reporting. Webb was pushed out of journalism and could not find work. In 2004, he killed himself. Three years after Webb’s series ran, the CIA’s own Inspector General released a report confirming the substance of what Webb had written. The agency had indeed worked with Contra-connected drug traffickers, had indeed protected some of them from prosecution, and had indeed known that cocaine profits were funding the war. The major papers that had destroyed Webb’s career did not retract their attacks. They wrote polite correctives and moved on. Webb was already dead. That is what happens when a supply chain runs through institutions the legal system is structured to protect. The producers were never the story. The distributors were never the story. The question of who profited was treated as a conspiracy theory even after the CIA itself admitted the conspiracy was real. The blame sat with the users, the parents, and the neighborhoods, which is exactly where the producers and distributors needed the blame to sit in order to keep doing what they were doing. This is the template we are working with. If we accept the framing that disinformation is a problem of gullible consumers, we are already inside the same trap the crack users were in. The producers keep operating. The distributors keep distributing. The blame sits with the people at the end of the chain. And the industry that put the product there in the first place never has to answer for any of it. So we have two models. Tobacco, where the courts eventually caught up. Iran-Contra, where they did not. Which one applies to the disinformation industry depends entirely on whether we create accountability rather than insulation, and the legal framework for accountability already exists. The Supreme Court decided Illinois ex rel. Madigan v. Telemarketing Associates, 538 U.S. 600, unanimously, in 2003. Justice Ginsburg wrote the opinion. A for-profit telemarketing company had been soliciting donations for Vietnam veterans and pocketing 85 cents of every dollar raised, telling donors most of the money was going to the veterans when most of it was not. The company argued the First Amendment protected their solicitations, and the Court said no. Paid deception targeting a public audience is not protected speech, states can bring fraud actions against commercial speakers who knowingly mislead the public about matters of material fact, and every justice on the Court, left to right, agreed. The groundwork was laid twenty-three years earlier in Central Hudson Gas and Electric v. Public Service Commission, 447 U.S. 557 (1980). The first prong of the Central Hudson test is blunt: for commercial speech to receive First Amendment protection, it must concern lawful activity and must not be misleading. Commercial speech that is false or misleading receives no constitutional protection at all, none, and knowingly false commercial speech can be prohibited, regulated, and punished without the government having to clear any balancing test to do it. So now a question. Why should fraud be lawful so long as it is political in nature? Courts determine truth everywhere else, and that is part of why the fascists work so hard to capture them. But is the answer, then, that you can lie and cheat and steal as much as you want in every context except politics? Does that keep us safe? It does not, and every state in the country already has the statute that says so. The Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices laws exist in all fifty states, and forty-five states and the District of Columbia broadly prohibit deceptive acts. Under that standard the attorney general does not have to prove intent to deceive, only that the statement was false or misleading and that a reasonable person could be misled. New York’s Martin Act gives the attorney general sweeping investigative authority with a tiered penalty structure that escalates from civil fines to criminal prosecution, and it requires no proof of intent to defraud. California Business and Professions Code section 17500 prohibits any statement that is untrue or misleading and known or reasonably knowable to be so. Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 93A authorizes treble damages for willful violations. These statutes were written to handle used-car salesmen who rolled back odometers and grocers who put their thumb on the scale, and they apply, on their own terms, to a cable network that sells election-fraud claims its own hosts privately called asinine. What we do next follows from what we now know. The first step is naming the industry, which means dropping the word misinformation, because misinformation implies an accident, and dropping the phrase fake news, because fake news implies a single bad story. The for-profit disinformation industry is a commercial enterprise with identifiable producers, buyers, distributors, and customers, and every conversation we have about it should use language that reflects that structure. Words shape what people can see. A public that hears “disinformation industry” starts asking who the owners are. A public that hears “misinformation” keeps blaming itself, which is exactly what the industry is selling. The For-Profit Disinformation Industry is arguably a seditious conspiracy to profit from the destruction of the United States and proffer its demise at the behest of the worst actors on Earth. The second step is pressing state attorneys general to use the tools they already have. The Dominion case was a private lawsuit, and it recovered three-quarters of a billion dollars for a company whose revenues that year were under a hundred million. A state attorney general, operating under an existing UDAP statute, can bring the same kind of action on behalf of a state’s residents without waiting for a private plaintiff with deep enough pockets to survive discovery. Letitia James has built most of her career on the Martin Act. Other state attorneys general have the same authority, and they need constituents asking them to use it. The third step is applying the same economic logic to the platforms. A platform that sells algorithmic amplification is selling a product, and when the product it amplifies is a knowingly false claim about a matter of material public interest, the platform is a commercial speaker participating in a commercial transaction. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platforms from liability for what users post, but it does not protect platforms from liability for what they themselves choose to promote. The legal theory is available. It has not yet been tested at scale. It should be. The fourth step is changing what we buy. Every dollar spent on a subscription to an independent outlet with actual reporters is a dollar that does not go to a platform that sells false content to the highest bidder. Every hour of attention given to a verified source is an hour not sold at auction to a buyer of confusion. The industry exists because there is a customer for its product. We are, collectively, that customer, and the consumer side of the equation is the part we control directly. The Dominion settlement is the model and the warning. A jury, presented with the evidence, was prepared to find that a major media company had knowingly broadcast false claims for profit. Fox paid $787.5 million and went back to work the next morning, running the same playbook with different hosts. The settlement did not end the industry. It priced the industry. Every buyer of disinformation in this country now knows what the exposure looks like, and most of them have concluded it is an acceptable cost of doing business. Our job is to make it an unacceptable cost. The tools exist, the precedent exists, the evidence exists, and what we need now is use what we already have, and the language to describe what we are actually fighting, which is an industry that sells price gouges propaganda.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Forget AI: This is the Real Trend Making Life Miserable for Traditional Ad Agencies

Here’s why brands are ditching massive agencies for this low-cost alternative.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Jun 30, 2026

While the ad agency world freaks out about A.I. being infinitely better than humans at a multitude of tasks, including every kind of content creation, it turns out that there are much more subversive activities underway. These efforts by influencers, remote gig workers, and at-home creators are far more likely to make life really miserable for traditional advertising executives, some of whom are still sucking down three-martini expense account lunches while the world shifts radically around them. Even the Apple TV+ show Your Friends and Neighbors presents a far more realistic view of the economic pressures and other personnel issues at agencies than you’ll find talking to execs from Madison Avenue who apparently haven’t yet gotten the memo.

The big firms and spin-outs that are trying to position themselves as new and innovative, youth-oriented enterprises are still largely hawking the same tired and antiquated pitches while offering expensive, highly polished creative, which is too slick and woefully off target. Sadly, those old models, stories and approaches no longer connect—emotionally or intellectually—with the demographics that every advertiser wants to target and reach.

If the customers and their audiences aren’t looking and listening, it doesn’t matter how wonderful your messaging and ads may be. You can tee me up for flattering articles in the old business magazines that might matter to my parents, but no one I know reads those rags or cares about anything they have to say. The giant agencies are out of touch and no longer have the access, reach or ability to connect to the people that matter, and yet these are the links and connections that the old-line agencies are still bragging about. It’s largely the same issue with cable, where the wrong crowd may be hearing the chatter, but even they aren’t listening to what’s being said or sold. It’s just background noise to keep them awake.

The game today is about an entirely new reality where massive teams and abundant resources and a decades-old track record really don’t matter, but where credible and authentic relationships and accessible networks of engaged fans are the keys to the kingdom. What smart advertisers, promoters and product managers are looking for and attracted to today is very simple—User Generated Content (UGC)—which is unvarnished, live, authentic, presented as peer-to-peer, easy and inexpensive to create, and immediately publishable at virtually no cost (thank the Internet for that) to millions of engaged fans and buyers.

The entire space has rapidly advanced and grown up, and now the content offerings are extensive and addressed to every conceivable market and interest. Even more importantly from the standpoint of any advertiser is the extent to which both the providers and the audience can be sliced and diced with degrees of accuracy and precision that only directly connected networks can offer. And finally, the actual cost to connect to the right audience in the correct context and at the right time is pennies compared to any other offering.

I’m watching several new startups, including Selfie, which offers a mobile app used to quickly create a personal digital twin, implement a comprehensive rollout plan that turns out to be ideal for one or more of these new fangled influencer networks because (a) the Selfie product and service is AI and mobile-first, so the phone app is the key; and (b) Selfie’s primary targets and ideal end users are, in fact, the very highly-regarded influencers already having tons of fans and followers who are active participants in these kinds of networks; and (c) the marketing brief for this Selfie campaign requires each influencer who joins the Selfie Influencer Network to download and build their own Selfie and create and post a demo video of their Selfie, along with an explanation of how they will be using it and why having their own Selfie makes sense for them and saves them time. Hard to imagine more of a win-win situation for all concerned.

But equally important to any new business or established firm thinking about using one of these influencer networks—even if your products or services aren’t quite as ideal as the Selfie app—are the selection, specification and management tools available to the client that permit practical choices including the age, gender, geography, video experience, presentation skills, other relevant skill sets, and size of the fan and follower audiences segmented by social media channel for each influencer that the client invites to participate in a given promotion across the network. In addition, the client can set other performance requirements and metrics as well as compensation arrangements for each influencer signing on to a specific campaign.

There are a growing number of players in the influencer network space and many of the newcomers most likely offer access to the same influencers who are under no obligation to provide their services exclusively to a single network. Each campaign stands alone—the costs are variable but incredibly modest compared to typical agency fees (there are no media or creative costs), and the entire commitment has a specific time frame and no further obligation beyond the initial campaign. Whatever your market, targets and budgets, this new channel is a must to check out before you start your next marketing programs.

Why Bitcoin is Crashing - Ed Elson

 

The Great Brotation Why Bitcoin is crashing I want you to cast your mind to 2024. Donald Trump has just won the Presidential Election. America prepares for an era of “anti-wokeness” and “no foreign wars.” Heard faintly in the background, the celebrations of a newer sect of the MAGA coalition: crypto-bros. Trump was supposedly going to be America’s first crypto President, which meant Bitcoin was “going to the moon.” To the moon Bitcoin went. It started with a promise to fire the “anti-crypto” SEC Chair. Later, Trump spoke at the Bitcoin conference. Each of Trump’s pro-crypto actions sparked another rally. Soon enough, Trump had his own cryptocurrency: TRUMP Coin. He even hosted pay-to-play crypto dinners (where Presidential pardons went to the highest bidders). By October 2025, the price of Bitcoin had risen to $126,000, an all-time high. Trump had made America the “crypto capital of the world,” and as President, he’d “never let crypto down.” Fast-forward to today: Bitcoin trades at less than $60,000 — down more than 50% in the past eight months. The coin is now less valuable than before Trump was elected. Fifty-three percent of all Bitcoin in circulation is currently held at a loss. The crypto markets have erased nearly $9 billion worth of value per day for 261 days straight. More than $2 trillion … vanished overnight, and the crypto-bros are eerily silent. What the f**k happened? Share Red Herrings There are several stories that supposedly explain Bitcoin’s downfall: interest rate uncertainty, a more hawkish Fed, a strengthening dollar, etc. Those sound plausible, but anyone who understands crypto markets knows they’re red herrings. The reality is there’s only one thing that moves the needle for Bitcoin, and it’s the same thing that moved the needle in late 2024: vibes. Here’s how it works: When vibes are good, the line goes up. When vibes are bad, the line goes down. Different forces create different vibes. For example, “the President likes crypto” = good vibes. On the flip side, “Sam Bankman-Fried goes to prison” = bad. Did SBF’s arrest change anything about the fundamental nature of Bitcoin? No. But it was bad vibes, so Bitcoin tanked. Well, the line’s going down again … which means the vibes are off. The question is why. You can never nail a vibe with 100% certainty, but I have a theory I’m pretty confident about. The Great Brotation If markets were a high-school, Bitcoin would be the cool kid: mysterious, rebellious, futuristic, and hard to define — all the things that make a person (or asset) cool. But it’s hard to be cool when you’re also the teachers’ pet, and with the President’s embrace, Bitcoin’s lost its punk rock feel. The more damaging event for Bitcoin, however, was the arrival of a new cool kid. A cool kid who’s not only cool … but cooler. So much cooler that Bitcoin looks like a nerd by comparison. I’m talking, of course, about AI. It started with the VCs, who abandoned their BFF more quickly than Regina George. Crypto went from attracting $12 billion in venture funding in the first quarter of 2022 to $4 billion in the first quarter of this year — a 70% drop in just four years. Nothing summarizes Silicon Valley’s change of allegiance better than investor Jason Calacanis’s now-legendary 2023 tweet: “If you’re in crypto pivot to AI.” Then came Bitcoin’s real fallout: the retail investors. For years, BTC was the go-to investment for “degen” traders around the globe, the ultimate “bro asset.” However, as soon as once-obscure AI names started putting up triple-digit quarters that put Bitcoin’s returns to shame (SK Hynix, Sandisk, Seagate, etc.), crypto started to fall by the wayside. The bros started rotating out of the old shiny object, and into the new one. The excellent Financial Times commentator (and my friend) Robert Armstrong and his readers have a name for this dynamic, which I’m now borrowing: The Great Brotation. To add insult to injury, Bitcoin had also engaged repeatedly with a cool-but-highly-addictive substance known as leverage. As with cocaine, leverage made the highs a lot higher and the lows a lot lower. The most extreme variant was a “perpetual future” (also known as a “perp”), an options contract with no expiration date and almost no leverage cap. Perps quickly became the most popular way to trade Bitcoin, accounting for nearly 70% of all trading volume last year. This is extremely unusual and not talked about nearly enough. It also explains why the price of Bitcoin swung so violently up, and then, so violently down. The result was a giant sucking sound in the vibes department. The most interesting person in the room was no longer Bitcoin, but AI. And the longer that remained true, the darker the vibes became. Bitcoin’s Problem We all have years where we’re cool and years where we’re not. My coolest year was age 11, as I was on the A-Team for football and was surprisingly good at magic. (My least cool year was 14, as I was no longer on the A-Team and still surprisingly good at magic.) I was taught early on, however, that what mattered most wasn’t others’ perception of me, but who I was at my core. This was a corny but useful framework that helped me ride the ups and downs. Strangely, this same philosophy applies to the stock market. Stocks have years where they’re “cool” (Micron today) and years where they’re not (Micron ten years ago). If all an investor cared about was the stock price, they’d be miserable. Fortunately there are more important things to care about — specifically, fundamentals. Companies create goods and services, which they sell for profits. If a company can figure out how to grow those profits and turn them into free cash flows, it’s investable. Wonderfully, this is the only thing that really matters, and once you realize it, the price (i.e. “what other people think”) becomes background noise. However, the same cannot be said about crypto. Why? Because there are no fundamentals. Without profits and cash flows, a floor of value cannot be set. When the vibes are up, the vibes are up. When the vibes are down, the vibes are down. This is Bitcoin’s problem: The only thing that matters is what other people think. In many ways, Bitcoin is an investing nightmare. “Interesting” I’m reminded of an interview I did in 2024 with Michael Saylor, the Godfather of Bitcoin. At the time, Saylor’s “bitcoin treasury” company, Strategy, was on a tear. The stock had exploded more than 300% in a matter of months. I, however, was extremely bearish, as there was nothing to back up the sexiness of the price other than .. its own sexiness. “A lot of people are going to lose a lot of money,” I said on Prof G markets. I even called it a Ponzi scheme. Since then, Strategy has lost roughly 80% of its value. But the most important moment in that interview came when I asked Saylor what would happen if investors stopped finding Bitcoin “interesting.” (Saylor had mentioned multiple times how “interesting” the asset was.) He balked at my question. “If you want to spend a few hours studying it,” he (wrongly) assumed of me, “you’ll find it is the most interesting thing in the world.” He soon doubled down: “I don’t even think it’s debatable. I don’t think there is a second-most interesting thing. It’s interesting in the same way that electricity and clean water and steel and airplanes and fire and nuclear power are interesting, because it’s the single biggest way to improve your quality of life.” (Many people now say the same thing about AI, crypto’s problem in a nutshell.) Since then, Bitcoin has become considerably less interesting: Google search volume for the cryptocurrency has fallen more than 40% since Trump’s election. “Sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin” was long Saylor’s mantra — that was until last month when he … sold his Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin may go up tomorrow, or it may go down. Frankly, I don’t care, as England will be playing Congo at the World Cup, Djokovic will be attempting to make history at Wimbledon, and I will be celebrating my best friend’s birthday at the Clemente Bar. In sum, there are more interesting things.

THE PEDO'S POOL

 

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.