As President Trump continues to threaten to send various military outfits into cities across the United States, actual senior military officials are being pushed out. On Monday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow offered a theory as to why.
“Trump isn’t announcing any firings, right? Everybody just gets to be an ambassador to something when they get pushed out in this term,” she pointed out during her show. “But in the military and national security part of the U.S. government, if you watch what they’re actually doing, it is really starting to look like mass firings of everyone with any kind of standing, everyone of consequence.”
Maddow then named several officials who have been dismissed, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, the second in command of the Air Force, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, the Chief of Naval Operations, the deputy head of the NSA and several others.
“You can follow these stories one by one, or you can look at the big picture and recognize that what’s happening here might be quite important, particularly in the national security sphere,” she said.
“Right at the same time the president is repurposing all federal law enforcement agencies and the U.S. military into an armed force — in some cases, a masked armed force — that patrols and polices and occupies U.S. cities, he is simultaneously degrading the professional core of those entities. Degrading the professional core of federal law enforcement, the military, the intelligence agencies and even emergency response.”
Maddow then suggested that anyone could ask Trump specifically why he is “de-professionalizing” these organizations, but his answer likely wouldn’t be truthful. So, she offered an explanation instead.
“I can say, if this were happening in any other country, what we would know instinctively was that the reason a leader would do something like that is because that leader wants to use those forces differently than what they’ve been trained for,” Maddow said. “Differently than what they’ve been used for.”
The host also pointed to the lowered recruiting standards for the FBI and the gutting of FEMA as examples. So, Maddow argued, de-professionalizing law enforcement and the military makes them more compliant.
“Because he wants to remove any professional restraint or internal ethics or culture that might otherwise hold those forces back from what he is now going to ask them to do,” she said. You can watch Maddow’s full argument in the video above.
