Former Top General Breaks Silence on Trump

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1:26Ben Meiselas:Wayfair, every style, every home. $20 off your first purchase. Terms apply. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General C.Q. Brown Jr. is breaking his silence, and he is torching Donald Trump in an op-ed for Foreign Policy magazine. And in a recent panel discussion before the Aspen Institute, he was not holding back. He was calling out the Trump regime for firing some of our top generals and top admirals for political reasons, frankly, for racist and misogynistic reasons as well. He was calling out Pete Hegseth. And of course, he did use some diplomatic language in how he did it. But he brought this forward in a July 4th message where if you read between the lines or actually read the lines, he compares Donald Trump to the kings of yesteryear under the rule when the United States was ruled by Britain and there was a monarchy.

2:31Ben Meiselas:And he describes how the American experiment was pushing back against monarchs and kings who would put their military as civilian police. Let me show you. I mean, this is some powerful stuff. Here's how the Wall Street Journal characterized it. Former top general warns the military is being politicized. And for those who know C.Q. Brown Jr., you know, they know that for him to get to this level, he is sounding the red alarm, folks. C.Q. Brown, who was fired as Trump's top general by Hegseth early on, questioned Donald Trump's handling of the armed forces. And it goes on to talk about how he published this essay on Friday, also with two co-authors, where he cautioned that sending the military into American cities for politically contentious missions, like under the guise of fighting crime, risk compromising its traditionally apolitical role and diverting it from combat missions.

3:40Ben Meiselas:And then he went and wrote this op-ed in Foreign Affairs magazine following an appearance at the Aspen Institute where he basically said Donald Trump's behaving like a tyrant. I'll get to that in a moment. C.Q. Brown told the Aspen Institute, what's starting to happen right now, it's not about merit. Well, if it was about merit, then C.Q. Brown Jr. wouldn't have been fired. He was appointed by Donald Trump in 2020 as the Air Force Chief of Staff. And then he was appointed by former President Biden, basically unanimously. Every Senate wanted him to be on there. And then Donald Trump fired him because Pete Hegseth didn't want a black leader as the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff.

4:26Ben Meiselas:Let's just call it what it is and not mince our words, folks. Let's talk about what he wrote for Foreign Policy magazine. Here it is. The military and the republic, what America's armed forces can and cannot do for democracy. I thought this was one of the most powerful parts where he says the ideal was better than reality 250 years ago. And so it is today. The military must protect the respect that it is earned from American society by scrupulously following all lawful orders and by demonstrating every day that it is nonpartisan. In so doing, service members honor the oath they swear, not to a particular party or political leader, but to the constitution itself.

5:18Ben Meiselas:What is at stake ultimately is the moral fabric from which the military draws its deepest strength. As Lieutenant General Howell Moore observed in his 1992 book, We Were Soldiers Once and Young, American Soldiers in Battle, don't fight for what some president says on TV. They don't fight for mom or apple pie, the American flag. They fight for one another. This is the same mutual obligation that, at its core, defines citizenship itself. The country's liberty depends on a mutual commitment to one another, regardless of color, creed, party, or military service. We'll get to that in a moment. But I wanna just show you how he starts off this op-ed or this essay in Foreign Affairs Magazine.

6:12Ben Meiselas:He goes, celebrations of America's founding and reflections on its ideals often overlook the central role of civil-military relations. This is a mistake in the Declaration of Independence. A chief complaint was that King George III affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. George Washington himself worried about this abuse of power and went to great pains to avoid it in his own career. Throughout the Revolutionary War, he constantly deferred to the Continental Congress, despite its calamitous delays and erratic instructions, because he recognized that his authority over the Continental Army flowed from the people's representatives.

6:59Ben Meiselas:Given his immense personal popularity, he was often encouraged to redress this or that political dysfunction. But he knew that the republic would suffer in the long run if the military were to become an instrument of the commander's will rather than of the political leaders, the people's political leaders. Hello. Then he goes on to say, in the face of genuine national disaster, the public will readily embrace the military's help. During the Great Depression, for instance, Herbert Hoover directed the military to set up relief camps and President Franklin Roosevelt ordered it to establish the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put unemployed men to work to develop public land.

7:40Ben Meiselas:But when presidents use the armed forces for more politically contentious missions, such as addressing crime in cities, the work of the military becomes more fraught, resorting to a military solution rather than fixing the underlying incapacity or dysfunction in civil institutions diverts the military from focusing on its primary combat mission. And as Washington knew, it is not the military's job to save the republic from political impasse. Indeed, if you ask too much of the military, you risk the entire enterprise. You risk the entire damn enterprise. Could he be any clearer, folks? Well, he can be.

8:25Ben Meiselas:He says the lesson is critical today. He's like, okay, if I haven't been that clear, let me just spell it out for you before I conclude here. The lesson is critical today. Throughout this year of remembrance, the military has played an outside ceremonial role. Asking the uniformed military to serve in an honor guard, lead a parade, or conduct stirring flyovers makes sense. The military excels at ceremony and provides a unifying symbol, and these acts help citizens look with pride in the republic's capacity for strength and resilience. They may even inspire some to join the ranks of all volunteer forces, but they should not be seen as a military monopoly on patriotism.

9:06Ben Meiselas:Instead, patriotism means recognizing the promise of America's founding, the progress of its past, and the potential of a shared future. Patriots should also find inspiration to serve in government or to deepen their involvement in local communities. The military can help by honoring the important national service that civilians do out of uniform. Now, he previously spoke at Harvard at the Institute of Politics there. And here he is speaking out about the Trump war crimes in Manab. Let's play this clip. Most of you all know, the United States made a horrible mistake and hit an Iranian girls' school during the first wave of attacks that killed about 175 people.

9:57Most of them were young women who were under the age of 13. And the initial explanation that came out was mixed. The president said the Iranians did it. The Office of the Secretary of Defense of Public Affairs said the advanced AI model did it. The military, to their credit, said we made a mistake. And there have been different explanations for that, too. So it leads to the question, Chairman, is when there's a targeting process like that, or later down the road, if there is a more autonomous type weapon, And you're trying to figure out who should be accountable in a situation like that, which has always been super important to the U.S.

10:43military. How have you thought about that? It's a really hard question. It is. But I still think there's a commander or someone that signs off on, whether it's an analyst that signs off that this is a good target. In this example that you just talked about, the school, when things get recharacterized or you have bad intel or late intel, I mean, the same thing happened with the Allied Force where we struck a building that we thought we didn't know was a Chinese embassy. Yeah, right. Yeah. In Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia. So you can make those kinds of mistakes based on the data you have. But the big picture here is, you know, I'd say the commander is ultimately responsible.

11:29But it may be somebody down at a lower level that should be checking these things. That's why you want to have a human in a loop that can cross-check it against. It doesn't even look right. Does this make sense based on our experience? Which is why I think it's still important that we understand some of the basic fundamentals so we don't just kick back and let AI do it all and go, it was AI's fault. And then, you know, is it the person that asked the prompt? Is it the developer of the AI? is that you could go down several different lawsuits to figure out who would ultimately be responsible. The issue is we've got to figure out how in a conflict, how do you continue to keep moving forward and making sure we're being effective, but also doing things in line with the law of armed conflict.

12:13Ben Meiselas:Great. Thank you. Here he talked about how the United States rushed to war with Iran, and it had disastrous results, play this clip. Finding the right capability for our warfighter, both on the offensive and defensive end, our casualty numbers could match, you know, the equivalent of World War II of Vietnam, which is not something we've had to deal with, mostly throughout my career. And so we can't walk in with a bunch of hubris of, this won't happen to us. Well, we just saw it happen with 13 service members that have been killed, 350 or so that have been injured, and not to mention the number of aircraft that have been lost which you know that's not something we haven't lost a lot of aircraft particularly like an AWACS sitting on a ramp and those are the kinds of things that should shock us a bit into reality that you know war and going into a conflict is not something we you know you just take lightly you got to take it seriously because you're putting men and women's lives at risk And I'll just tell you personally, with every loss, it impacts me.

13:21Because I know someone's going to show up in their dress uniform to knock on somebody's door to tell them, you know, your son, your daughter, your husband or wife is no longer with us. And that just disrupts the family. And that weighs heavily on me. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Chairman. And finally, here he was talking on this panel about the erosion of our promotion boards in the military.

13:47Ben Meiselas:And he's responding to a question about how Pete Hegseth is allowing Apache helicopters to do flyovers with Kid Rock and how after there's discipline, then Hegseth says, I'm overturning the discipline right there. I'm overturning discipline. This goes back to the essay that he wrote in Foreign Policy magazine, where he says, doing shit like he's doing stuff like that erodes the very confidence of our military. It makes us weaker. It doesn't make us look stronger. You think the rest of the world looks at that crap and goes, oh, look how tough they are. No, they think we're clown shows. That's what he's saying.

14:26Ben Meiselas:That's what General C.Q. Brown is saying. Here, play this clip. There were certain things that would never have even crossed our minds that over the past couple of days I've seen that make me nervous for the institution. This sounds funny, but an Army helicopter doing an overflight of Kid Rock, that's like super unprofessional. The Secretary of Defense deciding there's going to be no accountability for that when the uniformed military says that they'll be held accountable is crazy. The Secretary of Defense pulling members off a one-star promotion list for reasons that are almost certainly to do with their identity is crazy.

15:11That's not something that would have happened before. So, again, Chairman, you know, you're too professional to comment on news because that's not your role. But can you just talk about if you're the chairman and you're thinking about civilian political appointee leadership, what role do they have to build that trust in the institution? Well, part of this, you know, you think about the role of a military member at the senior level, particularly as a chairman, when you're providing advice. And part of that is being able to provide the advice of how you would handle those types of situations. And I'll just tell you, just like you, I'm concerned.

15:47I don't have all the facts on some of these, but having had to deal with situations of unauthorized flybys as a commander, having sat on promotion boards, reviewed results from promotion boards, I know they're fair based on merit. and if what I'm hearing is being reported is true, it is very concerning because it does start to get over and discipline and ensuring that people that are all giving a fair opportunity. No one wants to be advantaged or disadvantaged based on their background. They just want to have an opportunity to compete. And once you've gone through a promotion board and having sat on promotion boards, as I said, from my experience, They've been fair.

16:41Ben Meiselas:There you have it, folks. Let me know what you think. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. Seriously, let's try to get to 7 million. We're getting there, but just double check that you're subscribed. Let's keep on going. Help us hit 7 million subscribers. We appreciate you all so much. Thank you so much. New Midas merch. Head to store.midastouch.com today and get yourself the best pro-democracy gear and show your support. That's store.midastouch.com.