Silent Treatment

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

The vice president shared this thought yesterday with an audience at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, drawing applause at the end.

 

If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy. And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.

 

Even for J.D. Vance, that’s pretty J.D. Vance. Let’s give the devil his due, though: He’s right.

 

Not about the “deep state” supposedly persecuting poor Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. That’s dumb MAGA chum that a man who aspires to lead his party in 2028 is obliged to dump into the political waters. But he’s correct that Watergate wouldn’t have ended the Nixon presidency had it happened today and probably correct that it wouldn’t have made waves in the press for long.

 

The fact that Vance is happy about that makes what he said an almost pristine expression of postliberal psychopathy, capturing in two sentences everything that’s disgusting about him and his movement. Self-serving revisionist history. Gleeful vice-signaling. Flaunting the corruption of the White House in which he serves. Celebrating the brainless partisan tribalism of degenerate Republican voters.

 

We could do Watergate and no one would blink is just the sort of boast you’d expect from someone bent on undermining the moral assumptions on which Western liberalism is built. It’s elegant shorthand for Trumpism’s core conviction, that the less accountability there is in politics—for the right, not for the left—the better.

 

A timely illustration of that philosophy came a few days ago when Pete Hegseth successfully forced one of America’s most admired soldiers into early retirement.

 

If you don’t know who Gen. Chris Donahue is, take a moment to acquaint yourself. The four stars on his chest and the position he momentarily holds as the top Army commander in Europe barely tell the tale. He led Delta Force in battle against ISIS. As commander of the 82^nd Airborne, he was famously the last man out of Afghanistan when U.S. troops withdrew in 2021. In his current role he’s been “leading the service’s effort to take lessons from Ukraine and apply them to future conflict,” per The Atlantic.

 

Not a man the military would lightly part with, one might think. He must have done something awfully bad for our defense secretary, who famously loves warfightin’ warriors, to send him packing.

 

Nope. No one’s sure why Hegseth wanted Donahue out—and that seems to be how the secretary likes it. “The less accountability there is in politics, the better” means he doesn’t owe Americans any explanation for wrecking the military that’s supposed to keep America safe.

 

Trust in Trump.

 

I wonder if Chris Donahue himself has been given the courtesy of an explanation for his de facto dismissal.

 

Maybe not. Retired Navy Adm. Nancy Lacore spent 35 years in the service before being canned by Hegseth and “has said she was given no cause for her firing,” the New York Times noted this week. We can take an educated guess in her case as to why a guy who thinks one of the big problems with the military is that it isn’t more macho might not want her around.

 

What’s confounding about Donahue’s departure is that he seems to be a Hegseth stereotype about bad-ass soldiers come to life. Why would the secretary want to get rid of him?

 

The closest thing on offer to a meritorious reason is that “Hegseth has sought to oust anyone who doesn’t fit his idea of a military leader, including those involved in the calamitous American exit from Kabul under President Biden.” But Donahue bears no blame for that. He “was called in to restore security at Kabul airport” only after the U.S. withdrawal there had turned chaotic. And it was the Marines, not his Army troops, who failed to secure the airport’s Abbey Gate, where a suicide bomber killed 13 American service members.

 

Besides: Given how the last four months have gone, if failure in war is grounds for dismissal from the military, then Pete Hegseth should be the first person out the door.

 

“Donahue would be at least the sixth three- or four-star Army general to depart unexpectedly, out of the roughly 60 generals in the service who hold those ranks,” according to The Atlantic. That includes former Army Chief of Staff Randy George, another esteemed commander who was let go in the thick of conflict with Iran for similarly unexplained reasons. George’s firing offense appears to have been his support for four officers, two of them black and the other two women, whom Hegseth had declined to promote.

 

But whether that’s the real cause is anyone’s guess. The secretary hasn’t explained.

 

On Thursday, another legendary military officer, retired Adm. William McRaven, a former special ops commander, chimed in to observe how deeply weird it is that the service branches are being purged of their most talented leaders without a word of justification from the man in charge of the Pentagon to the public he allegedly serves.

 

“I can tell you from experience that Generals C.Q. Brown, Randy George, Jim Mingus, J.P. McGee, Dave Hodne, Jim Slife, and Joe Berger and Admirals Lisa Franchetti and Jamie Sands were war fighters through and through,” McRaven wrote, naming a few of the brass inexplicably purged by Hegseth. “When crucial decisions regarding the professionalism, effectiveness, or morale of the military are made, the people and their duly elected representatives have a right to know why these decisions were made.”

 

Under liberalism, sure. But not under postliberalism.

 

To postliberals, electing a figure like Trump implicitly amounts to a sort of waiver by voters of their right to accountability from their government. You don’t hand power to a nationalist strongman expecting that he’ll dutifully explain his thinking on policy periodically like some egghead technocrat. You do it because you don’t expect that. You trust him. Your vote is a vote of confidence in him and his instincts.

 

Under postliberalism, the people’s role in government ends on election night. (Unless the Democrats win, of course, in which case rigorous oversight going forward is a must.) The administration couldn’t be any plainer about that. “TRUST IN TRUMP,” the official White House Twitter account declared a few weeks ago amid spiking anxiety over gas prices, going on to quote the president: "Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!"

 

That’s your answer as to why Chris Donahue was fired: Trust Trump and Hegseth. It’s what Americans supposedly agreed to do in 2024, so that’s all the explanation to which they’re entitled.

 

The last 16 months are littered with examples of that ethos at work. DOGE ran roughshod over federal agencies with little explanation to Congress or voters about what it was cutting and why. Dozens of outrageous federal pardons were issued without elaboration because the obvious reason for them was indefensible. The “Liberation Day” trade war arrived without warning of how ambitious and disruptive it would be, and later a hot war was launched on Iran with the same problem.

 

Even the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, an obsession of the president’s own base, would still be hidden if not for a revolt in Congress that forced their publication. MAGA fans who turned out in 2024 may have thought they were voting for transparency on Epstein by voting for the president, but that’s not how postliberalism works. To Trump, they were voting to signal their absolute trust in him.

 

If he thought they shouldn’t see the Epstein material, that should have been good enough. No further explanation required.

 

The virtue of arbitrariness.

 

If I had to guess the actual reason that Pete Hegseth wanted Chris Donahue out, I’d bet on some combination of fragility about being out of his depth as defense secretary and the weird grudge he seems to hold against the Army, a recurring target of his purges.

 

The nature of that grudge is unclear, but Hegseth is a former Army man himself and claimed in one of his books that he quit the service in a rage after it identified him as a potential “insider threat” due to one of his sketchier tattoos. He’s also allegedly paranoid about being replaced as defense secretary by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and has moved to sideline Driscoll by dumping allies of his like Randy George. Maybe Donahue was another ally.

 

Or maybe it simply bugged Hegseth to have someone in the chain of command as universally admired as Donahue is. It’s not just a matter of jealousy (although it probably is that too). An officer as distinguished as Donahue having to answer to a cosplaying yutz who used to host Fox & Friends Weekend only made Hegseth’s yutziness more glaring by contrast to the brass, I’m sure.

 

A more mediocre military will make the secretary’s own mediocrity less conspicuous.

 

Wittingly or not, by refusing to explain Donahue’s dismissal, Hegseth is advancing postliberalism in a few ways. For one thing, he’s conditioning the public—and its representatives—not to expect accountability from their leaders, even in matters as grave as who’s in charge of the military on which Western civilization’s survival depends.

 

As with every other form of recurring Trumpist corruption, outrage at the Pentagon purges has become increasingly hard to sustain due to the sheer enervating familiarity of it. Pay-for-play pardons, rampant White House graft, firing generals like Donahue, all of it without explanation: That’s just how things work now. A country that’s been forced to adapt to authoritarianism expects nothing more from its leadership.

 

That’s why Watergate would be a 12-hour news story in 2026 and why Vance is darned excited about it.

 

McRaven identified another postliberal achievement in his essay about the Pentagon purges:

 

What is particularly concerning about these firings is the effect the dismissals will have on the officer ranks. Throughout my time as a senior officer, I never hesitated to provide my best military advice to the secretary or the president even when that advice ran contrary to their stated position. Never once did I fear that by providing my advice I would be fired or asked to retire early. Not only was it my obligation to be forthcoming, but it was also the expectation of those leaders that I would be brutally candid. Hopefully, that level of honest engagement kept the secretary and the president from making poor military decisions. However, these recent firings raise a real risk that senior officers will be overly cautious about providing their best advice and, therefore, that the chance for military miscalculation will grow dramatically.

 

On the one hand, we needn’t worry too much about the quality of the advice military officers are giving the president. If he wants to do something, he’s going to ignore them regardless.

 

But insofar as firing people like Donahue signals to the rest of the military that no soldier is indispensable if he displeases Hegseth, it surely will influence the willingness of military advisers to say things to Hegseth that displease him. The secretary himself is a notorious yes-man, of course. He “strives to tell the president exactly what he wants to hear,” as one source put it to The Atlantic in April, with others pointing to Hegseth’s insufferable press briefings during the war about all the stuff being blown up as obviously designed to pander to his boss.

 

To postliberals, the great virtue of not telling anyone why Donahue was fired lies in its arbitrariness. If a dissenter in the ranks knows which lines he can and can’t cross, he’ll avoid the latter but might test the former. If he doesn’t know where the lines are, though, he’ll err on the side of biting his tongue in all situations lest he inadvertently step over one. In a sycophantic authoritarian personality cult, in which dissent is seen as disloyal even when it involves telling hard truths, that sort of arbitrariness is essential to enforcing conformity.

 

Not coincidentally, as the last four months have demonstrated in Iran and the last four years have demonstrated in Ukraine, authoritarian personality cults tend not to be very successful at war.

 

Demoralization.

 

There’s one more benefit to postliberalism in Hegseth’s arrogant silence about his purges. It’s demoralizing to the military.

 

That seems counterintuitive. Why would any administration, particularly one as theatrically militaristic as Trump’s, want to hurt morale? To which I would answer: for the same reason postliberals seek to demoralize any institution. The more demoralized it is, the easier it is to co-opt.

 

The last 16 months can be understood as one long exercise in demoralization for the Pentagon. Trump’s second term began with a bombing campaign against the Houthis, which was cut short after it became too costly and is remembered now mainly for the editor of The Atlantic being accidentally added to the Cabinet group chat. The president then began deploying the National Guard to left-wing cities like Los Angeles and Washington, pitting the troops against public opinion and dragging Guardsmen away from home for long stretches. (At last check the force in D.C. was standing watch over the slime in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.)

 

Soon the White House started targeting boats in the Caribbean with airstrikes over alleged drug trafficking, the very first instance of which resulted in a probable war crime. Service members participating in the operation began consulting with attorneys due to the questionable lawfulness of what they were doing. Hegseth, meanwhile, went out of his way to make clear that atrocities would no longer be punished by a military that prioritized toughness and “lethality.”

 

The administration did score some impressive successes, destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities last year and capturing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro with no loss of American life. But both victories were largely spoiled.

 

Not much has changed for Venezuelans since their leaders began answering to Trump. The Maduro operation was little more than a play to coerce Caracas into forking over some of its oil, turning the U.S. military into muscle in a shakedown. And last year’s successful strikes on Iran were superseded by a strategic debacle this spring that depleted American munitions, damaged American bases, and led to a capitulation over the Strait of Hormuz so humiliating that the president has lately resorted to defending the regime’s right to have ballistic missiles.

 

Through it all, the secretary of defense has behaved like a clown, interrupting his frequent made-for-Instagram workouts to lecture generals about haircuts and physical fitness, take joyrides in military aircraft with Kid Rock, wage culture war on right-wing bugaboos like vaccinations with predictable results—and of course rid the Pentagon of figures like George, Donahue, and others whose authority the rank-and-file might respect more than his own.

 

Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is like Todd Blanche’s Justice Department, a formerly disciplined and (somewhat) ethical institution from which those who are discomfited by the ethos of postliberalism will be forced out, incentivized to quit, or discouraged from joining in the first place. As the quality of personnel degrades, so will the quality of the institution—but whoever’s left to staff it will accept, whether grudgingly or enthusiastically, that they’re now working for a government that thinks Watergate was either fine or ackshually good.

 

Like any virus, postliberalism will infect everything it touches if it isn’t stopped. In the long run, there’s no such thing as a “partial” kakistocracy.