Trump Creating ‘MAGA Military’ With Purge of Generals, Veterans Group Warns

VoteVets, a progressive veterans group, has warned that President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to fire top generals would politicize the military and transform it for the worse.
On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s transition team was considering a draft executive order that would establish a “warrior board” to review top military officers.
According to a draft of the executive order reviewed by the outlet, the proposed board would consist of retired senior military members tasked with reviewing three- and four-star generals and recommending the removal of those deemed unfit. The draft order proposes the retirement, within 30 days, of any officer deemed “lacking in requisite leadership qualities.”
In a statement posted to X, formerly Twitter, Paul Eaton, a retired major general and the chairman of VoteVets, said the move would “be remembered as the first step in remaking the military from an apolitical force loyal to the Constitution into a MAGA Military, pledging fealty to Donald Trump.”
If enacted, the executive order could bypass the traditional Pentagon promotion system. Newsweek has contacted VoteVets and Trump’s office for comment via email.
U.S. military officers take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to the country’s governing document. This allegiance binds officers to uphold constitutional principles above any single administration’s directives, and in a long-standing tradition, the U.S. military has remained nonpartisan to avoid becoming a tool of any political faction.
Eaton said the executive order would give Trump “what he said he wanted—Generals like Hitler had, who do not challenge him, do not tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, and do not stand in the way of using the military to crush his political opposition.”
In October, The Atlantic reported that Trump once said: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to remove what he described as “woke generals” and eliminate diversity programs in the military. At an event in October, he said he would establish a task force to monitor “woke generals,” vowing, “They’re gone.”
Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, top generals from Trump’s first administration warned that the Republican was not fit to serve another term in office.
John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who served as Trump’s chief of staff, said Trump was an authoritarian who fell “into the general definition of fascist.” At the time, Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign spokesperson, said Kelly was spreading “debunked stories.”
Mark Milley, a retired Army general who served as Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump was “fascist to the core.” Cheung told Newsweek that Milley was a “woke train-wreck” and that Woodward was a “washed-up fiction writer.”