Inside Trump's Crackdown at America's Military Academies

Banned books, hazing rites, Mike Flynn, and a Secret Service agent knocking on my door

On an unseasonably chilly Saturday in late May, I arrived in upstate New York to document the ever-widening civilian-military divide. This much-discussed but largely intangible phenomenon is well-visualized here, in the beleaguered town of Highland Falls, home to West Point: America’s citadel for soldier scholars.

I was in town to cover President Donald Trump’s West Point commencement address, an assignment that was easier said than done. For two years, I’ve been reporting a book on military education, and for two years West Point’s press office has essentially stonewalled me at every turn. Hoping to break the curse, I inquired about credentials a full month before Trump’s remarks, and went so far as to call in a favor from a notable West Point alumnus, Robert McDonald, whom I know from his time serving as VA Secretary. McDonald now chairs West Point’s powerful Association of Graduates, but his word, whatever it was, didn’t seem to help. Two days before Trump’s speech, my application was curtly denied.

While I was unable to witness the commander-in-chief and his red MAGA hat fill Michie Stadium, I observed plenty outside the perimeter that testified to the dysfunctional divide between America’s soldiers and its citizens. When I later read a headline from the event in an official Pentagon bulletin, I understood that Trump’s words had only inflamed the issue further. It read: “Trump Lauds Cadets for Choosing Service, Honor Over Civilian Life” – the implication being that such virtues are exclusively reserved for those in uniform.

On its surface, Highland Falls is an exceptionally patriotic place, one littered with historical markers and war memorials, plus a static Abrams Tank that sits proudly on Main Street. Local shops display signs in their windows hailing the academy’s vaunted football team, the Black Knights, and American flags hang intermittently on telephone poles.

As with many college towns, the economy of Highland Falls is yoked to the school. West Point once employed three-quarters of its working population, and local businesses have long relied on foot traffic from football games. ''We almost pattern our lives around football Saturdays,” the town’s mayor told The New York Times in 1986, describing dynamics that persist to this day.

Unlike most universities, however, West Point wields the special powers of the Pentagon, which, at times, it has ruthlessly deployed. Over the last century, Highland Fall has lost about 95 percent of its land to West Point through eminent domain, severing the town’s base of taxable property and, at one point, even threatening its access to drinking water. The community that remains is now surrounded by a military campus and all that goes on there, which, as one recent West Point bulletin to residents warned, includes the din of low-flying helicopters and other aircraft, plus blasts from infantry, artillery, and demolition trainings.

As West Point has taken town land, it has simultaneously slashed the number of jobs available to local residents, inflaming resentments and deepening divides. Now, West Point and its sister service academies are targeting another class of outsiders within its walls — civilian professors — part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s orders that the military prioritize “lethality” above all else. At his confirmation hearings, Hegseth pledged to “rip, root and branch” liberal arts courses from military schooling environments, largely by driving out civilian professors that, in Hegseth’s telling, have been poisoned by “left-wing, woke universities.”

Hegseth and his allies have cast this crackdown as singularly focused on removing “woke” from the military. But their true aims are far more pernicious: to fundamentally reshape and restrict the military’s elite officer class to breed unbending loyalty.

---

In his first term, Donald Trump selected senior military staff based on surface-level considerations, fretting over appearance and persona to build what he viewed as a brawny and deeply loyal bunch. At first, Trump affectionally called these men “my generals.” But as it quickly became clear, they didn’t belong to him.

Time and again, these figures stymied Trump’s orders internally, then publicly denounced him in retirement. Trump’s first Defense Secretary, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, deemed him a threat to the constitution, while his second one, Mark Esper, declared him unfit for office. Trump’s former Joint Chiefs Chairman, Mark Miley, labeled him a “fascist to the core.” Shortly thereafter, Trump’s second Chief of Staff, former Marine General John Kelley, agreed. As his first term drew to a close, Trump had become profoundly distrustful of the traditional military establishment, venting in the White House of his desire for “the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

Now in his second term, Trump seems deadset on avoiding the mistakes of his past, in large part by zeroing in on the training grounds for future generals.

In a just-published investigation for POLITICO Magazine’s “War Issue,” I go deep on this campaign. Read it here.