In a rare instance of bipartisan alarm, Republican-chaired committees in the House and Senate announced that they have launched inquiries into an explosive Washington Post report alleging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a spoken order to “kill everybody” aboard a vessel carrying suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. The occupants included two people who had survived an initial missile strike on the vessel and were seen “clinging” to the wreckage. “We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question,” the leaders of the House Armed Services Committee said in a joint statement on Friday. “The Committee has directed inquiries to the [Department of Defense], and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” leaders in the Senate Armed Services Committee said. The September 2 attack kicked off what has now been nearly two dozen attacks, killing at least 83 people, who the US military claims, without evidence, had been attempting to smuggle drugs into the US. The attacks, which President Trump justifies as a part of an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, have been likened to extrajudicial killings. Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona told CNN on Sunday that Hegseth’s actions, as reported by the Post, appear to be a war crime. “If what has been reported is accurate, I’ve got serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over,” Kelly said. “We are not Russia. We are not Iraq. We hold ourselves to a very high standard of professionalism.” Kelly is locked in a related battle of words with Hegseth after Kelly participated in a social media video with five other Democrats seeking to remind members of the military that they can “refuse illegal orders.” Hegseth has blasted the Post’s reporting on the missile strikes as “fabricated.” “As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” he wrote on X.

Pete Hegseth appears to have found a great workaround for racial integration at military events: When the rules won’t allow you to put up a “No Coloreds” sign, you can just ban soldiers with shaving waivers instead. The Pentagon boss—who now insists on being called the “Secretary of War”—is refusing entry to servicemen with beards at an upcoming meeting at Camp Humphreys in South Korea, according to a report from Task and Purpose. On Sunday, an email from Osan Air Base reportedly stated that “members with shaving waivers are NOT authorized to attend” the event with Hegseth. A screenshot of the message, posted on an unofficial Facebook page, was later confirmed by an Air Force official to be real. Hegseth’s disinvitation is just one more spiteful jab against primarily Black and brown military members who have already been the target of discriminatory anti-beard policies that were unveiled last month. In September, the former Fox News host announced that he would be firing troops who would need a shaving waiver for longer than a year, a policy that would overwhelmingly affect Black armed forces members, who are far more likely to suffer from pseudofolliculitis barbae, a skin condition that makes daily shaving lead to cuts, sores, and scarring. As I wrote at the time: > With more than 200,000 Black active-duty members serving in the > military—historically one of the country’s few avenues of social mobility for > the Black community—Hegseth’s grooming policy will no doubt have a devastating > impact. That’s no accident. A few weeks later, during a presentation in front of more than 800 of the highest-ranking officers in the military, he doubled down on this grooming standard, decrying there would be “no more beardos.” (Don’t worry, he also took the time to slam “females” and “fat troops” too.) Hegseth also took potshots at troops in need of shaving waivers for religious reasons—stating, among other things, that we “don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans.” According to Air and Space Forces magazine, soldiers in need of a religious exemption from shaving, like many Sikhs and Muslims, will be permitted to serve but flagged as “non-deployable,” which would “essentially end their careers” by making them subject to termination. Hegseth’s press spokesman has yet to respond to an inquiry on whether soldiers with religious exemptions would be allowed into Hegseth’s event. (JD Vance’s beard also declined to comment.)

On Friday, the Trump administration escalated its military presence in the Caribbean and South America by announcing the deployment of an aircraft carrier group to the region. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the green light to send the USS Gerald R. Ford—described by the US Navy as “the most capable, adaptable, and lethal combat platform in the world”—to “bolster US capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities,” according to the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson. Also on Friday, Hegseth said the United States had carried out yet another military strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing six people on board. He alleged that the vessel was operated by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration has designated a terrorist organization alongside drug cartels. It has accused Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro of controlling the criminal group and enabling the smuggling of drugs into the United States. Since September, the administration has conducted at least 10 attacks against alleged drug boats, including in the Pacific Ocean. As many as 43 people have been killed so far. The expanding campaign, which legal experts have warned violates international law and amounts to extrajudicial killings, has raised alarm in Latin America, worsening tensions between the Trump administration and leaders in the region, and reviving the specter of American meddling and intervention in other countries. Reacting to news of the deployment of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, Maduro charged the administration with “fabricating a new war.” Speaking last month at the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro condemned the attacks and called for an investigation into President Donald Trump and other US officials involved in the strikes. “Launching missiles over two people in a small boat is a war crime,” Petro told CBS News this week. In response, Trump described Petro as a “bad guy” and a “thug.” On Friday, the war of words escalated into action, as the administration imposed sanctions on the Colombian president and his family, claiming that he had allowed drug cartels to flourish. “What the US Treasury is doing is an arbitrariness typical of an oppressive regime,” Petro fired back on social media. The country’s interior minister, who was also targeted for sanctions, had strong words for the White House. “For the US, a nonviolent statement is the same as being a drug trafficker,” Armando Benedetti wrote on X. “Gringos, go home.” > “For the US, a nonviolent statement is the same as being a drug trafficker.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has also opposed the Trump administration’s strikes. “Obviously, we do not agree,” she said of the military campaign during a recent press conference. “There are international laws on how to operate when dealing with the alleged illegal transport of drugs or guns on international waters, and we have expressed this to the government of the United States and publicly.” As the Trump administration escalates the military build-up in the region to become the largest in decades—ostensibly to fight trafficking and stop the flow of drugs to the United States—government officials have, internally, clarified the goal of the campaign: to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has accused Maduro of being the leader of a narco-terrorist organization and “responsible for trafficking drugs into the United States.” In a recent interview with the AFP, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s adviser Celso Amorim expressed concerns about what a potential direct military intervention in Venezuela to topple Maduro could mean for the rest of the region. “We cannot accept an outside intervention because it will trigger immense resentment,” he said. “It could inflame South America and lead to radicalization of politics on the whole continent.” President Lula, who is expected to meet with Trump in Malaysia over the weekend, indicated to reporters on Friday that he could bring up the issue in conversation with his American counterpart. “If this becomes a trend,” he said, “if each one thinks they can invade another’s territory to do whatever they want, where is the respect for the sovereignty of nations?”

Last week, dozens of reporters covering the Pentagon staged a historic walkout, handing in their press badges rather than submit to restrictive new media policies promulgated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. This week, there are still news outlets—in a manner of speaking—covering the Pentagon precisely the way Hegseth and his underlings would like to be covered. The results, fawning, uninformative, and insipid though they may be, offer a valuable look at what the Trump administration has in mind when it comes to news coverage. > Right-wing media figures “jumped at the chance” to sign a coverage pledge. The Pentagon’s new rules for the press—a 21-page list including an absurd stipulation that journalists sign a pledge they won’t publish material not authorized for public release—made reporters who had long worked in the building worry they could be prosecuted for doing their jobs. But at least eighteen right-wing outlets, according to the Washington Post, signed on, ranging from obscure Substacks to longtime conspiracy pusher Gateway Pundit, through to MyPillow tycoon Mike Lindell’s LindellTV and Frontlines, the media arm of Turning Point USA, co-founded by recently assassinated activist Charlie Kirk. Together, they essentially function as megaphones for the Trump administration, part of the new state media that’s come to define the president’s second term.  As proof, just consider how they covered news of the Pentagon press corps overhaul. As the Economist’s Shashank Joshi pointed out on X, one of the newly credentialed outlets, a Substack blog called the Washington Reporter, wasted no time in praising Hegseth‘s changes. In an editorial, it dismissed the “media freakout” over the policies as “another example of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Our only concern is that the Department of War has waited until October to implement these new changes.”  The blog, which describes itself as providing “right-of-center news and commentary to a D.C. audience,” added, “We support these guidelines as sound policy. We have signed them. And we are grateful for Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leadership and his remarkable track record of success.”  In its coverage of the rules, the Post Millennial, a Canadian outlet best known for publishing right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo, praised Hegseth for “his approach for high standards, military readiness, and a ‘warrior ethos.'” The Daily Signal, which was founded as a project of the Heritage Foundation before becoming independent in 2024, wrote that it had decided to obtain Pentagon press credentials “after consulting legal advisers, trusted industry colleagues, and national security experts, plus Department of War staff who crafted the policy and explained how it would impact our work.” The outlet accused some journalists who objected to the policy of “deliberately misrepresenting” it, and promised, “Nothing in the Pentagon’s updated guidelines can or will alter our methods and reporting, both of which are of paramount importance for our news organization.” What the outlet considers “reporting,” though, is telling: Their “news” coverage on Thursday consisted of one story quoting White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissing concerns about Trump’s plan to import Argentine beef, and a so-called “exclusive” parrotting State Department talking points defending plans to accept white South Africans as refugees.  The ways some of the remaining outlets approached one of the biggest stories of Hegseth’s tenure makes clear that there’s little journalistic integrity left in the Pentagon press corps. When the secretary accidentally shared classified battle plans with a journalist in group chat, the National Pulse claimed the security breach only “exposed” Hegseth and other administration officials as “professional and focused.” Gateway Pundit blasted the news as a “Deep State leak.” When it was rumored Hegseth might be forced out after the scandal, the Federalist, which also reportedly signed the new Pentagon rules, backed him, declaring that “If Hegseth’s tenure as defense secretary thus far is what ‘total chaos’ is supposed to look like, then by all means keep it coming.” Other outlets that now help make up the official Pentagon press corps have been more honest in essentially admitting the Pentagon’s requirements are little barrier, since they don’t really cover news. “Should a major story unexpectedly come our way that conflicts with press policies, we will prioritize the public’s right to know and transparency,” Far-right podcaster Tim Pool wrote on Twitter, making a pledge to the tens of people who get their news from his Timcast platform. “However, as we are not investigative reporters, we do not anticipate frequently encountering such situations.” In a discussion on the far-right streaming channel Real America’s Voice, Jack Posobiec, a Pizzagate promoter turned self-styled journalist and a senior editor at Human Events, said that he had “jumped at the chance” to get press credentials and praised the Pentagon for curbing an “inappropriate” level of access and working to avoid further “very bad political leaks.” He added, not quite convincingly, that Human Events would exercise its First Amendment rights and continue covering the news: “No one ever tells us what to write.” It would seem that they don’t really have to.

In March, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, glanced at his phone and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He’d been inadvertently included in a secret chat on Signal among the Trump administration’s national security team about imminent military strikes in Yemen. The Signal chat leaks—which inevitably became known as “Signalgate”—called into question President Donald Trump’s national security team and how it handled top secret information. Many of those same officials oversaw recent military operations against Iran and its nuclear facilities. Few journalists have seen how the administration operates from the inside out better than Goldberg. He says those Signal chats revealed something about how he believes Trump’s officials view their jobs, especially Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. “I almost felt like, at a very basic level, he was showing off for the vice president, who was also in the chat,” Goldberg says. “The thought I had was, ‘Dude, you don’t have to cosplay being secretary of defense. You are secretary of defense.’” He adds that while it was happening, he didn’t “contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was.” On this week’s More To The Story, Goldberg sits down with host Al Letson to reflect on the Signal chat leaks, fears of World War III, and what truly worries him about the future of US democracy. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So after the US bombed Iran, I’ve seen all over the place that people feel like this could be the beginning of World War III. What are your thoughts? Jeffrey Goldberg: Yeah, I see that and I read it. I just, no one’s explained to me how this leads to World War III yet. That is not to say that things can’t spin out of control in the Middle East. The Middle East, the only constant in the Middle East is sudden and dramatic change, so something can go off the rails even as we’re speaking. There’s a larger point, and sorry to give you this lengthy answer, but I actually think that we’re in World War III and we’ve been in World War III since the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. And by that I mean, when you have a situation in which Russia, aided by North Korean troops and Iranian drones and supported diplomatically by China, is invading a neighboring country that is supported by Western Europe and until today at least, the United States, that seems like a low-grade world war. Right? It’s controlled, it’s conventional, it’s mostly done through proxies, at least from the western side it’s done through proxies. But we’re having all of these eruptions all the time now, and the world is not at peace because the major powers are battling it out through proxies and in other ways. I think what has been a little bit surprising for me with this new front or change in the Middle East when it comes to Iran and Israel, is seeing that some people on the right are really against American intervention with Iran. And I’m thinking specifically about Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. I saw her saying that she thought that this was going to become a nuclear war. And then you’ve got Tucker Carlson who really grilled Ted Cruz and brought his thoughts to the forefront. I don’t know, I just did not expect to see that happen. I’m going to go deep here for a second and I’m going to argue against the idea that Americans don’t like wars. I think Americans are fine with wars as long as they’re short wars that we win. Agree. So I think, look, one of the differences and I just wrote a piece about this. I covered Barack Obama and as foreign policy, national security policy in depth so I know something about that and I know something about Donald Trump. Barack Obama was interesting because he would study the second and third and fourth order consequences of actions America could take, and that would frequently paralyze him into not taking any action. Remember, the Syrian red line controversy is a good example. Donald Trump, I don’t think understands intellectually the idea that there’s consequences to actions, right? And so they’re wildly different. And so when you have somebody like that, like Donald Trump, who doesn’t really ask analytically, what could happen down the road if I do X or Y or Z? You’re really rolling the dice. I think maybe more than any journalist, you have seen up close the incompetence of the Trump Administration. And obviously- Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t know. I mean, you were added to a top secret group chat about a bombing. I think I would stand by my statement just because of that. Okay, maybe yes, in the sense that it was coming in on my phone. Yes, it was very close. Yes, I would say that- I was getting a firsthand glimpse. I’m not going to argue the point. How much confidence do you have in this team? And I’m talking about Secretary of Defense Hegseth, I’m talking about Trump, I’m talking about all the people that are around these decisions. How confident are you in their ability to execute a plan and to protect American lives? I have confidence in, let me put it this way, the General in charge of Central Command, General Kurilla, who oversaw this operation, highly competent. There’s a lot of competent people still in government. I have no confidence in Pete Hegseth’s management or analytic or moral capabilities. Marco Rubio is a mystery to me because I knew Marco Rubio a bit and I was an admirer of his brain and many of his policy ideas and now he’s completely done one of these invasion of the body snatchers things where he’s just whatever Trump says is the thing. Trump himself tweets or Truth Socials or whatever the verb is for posting on Truth Social, a kind of goading text about Russia and its nuclear capabilities. And I worry about Trump’s understanding of the way the national security systems of autocracies work. And I worry that, I mean, it would be the greatest irony of them all, it would be sort of a, that’s a hell of a way to destroy the planet if the planet were eventually destroyed because Donald Trump put something on Truth Social that was misinterpreted by a nuclear armed enemy of the United States who felt as if they had to respond by escalating. I don’t think Donald Trump wants a nuclear war. Donald Trump has actually been very interesting on the subject of nuclear war and warfare in general. And as you know, he’s not very much into generally speaking into foreign adventures, or at least he’s said as much. I worry that he doesn’t have the self-restraint, maturity, analytic ability, and today the advisors to keep us out of an escalatory cycle with a major power. Iran is a minor power, but I’m talking about China and Russia, North Korea to some extent because they already have nuclear weapons. So that’s what I worry about. You want somebody in that office who’s not impetuous and who is not reactionary. I don’t mean reactionary in the political sense, I mean reactionary in the characterological sense, is easily poked, somebody who’s chill. I mean, if you remember, he was goading the leader of North Korea, this was eight years ago. Little rocket man, and my button is bigger than your button. It’s like, you don’t have to spend years in grad school studying nuclear weapons doctrine to know that ridiculing and threatening people with nuclear weapons is not a great idea. And so if the question is how worried I am that this is the man in charge of our nuclear weapons, and remember, even though we are a democracy, the President of the United States is an absolute nuclear monarch. The President of the United States can use a nuclear weapon when he wants to. So I don’t feel great about the match of the responsibility that the president has and this particular person in the role. The foreign power that I think about, the conflict that could be coming, I worry a lot about China and Taiwan and how President Trump would respond to any aggression from China towards Taiwan. And I mean, because I don’t know if you can say that this administration has a definable foreign policy, because you can’t really tell what they’re going to do from one day to the next. I wonder, all bets are off the table if China moves in on Taiwan. Yeah, that’s interesting. By the way, there’s an argument to be made that a president who is unpredictable is useful, in terms of managing adversaries. Sure. It’s known in foreign policy is the crazy Nixon approach. Kissinger would tell the Russian, “Look, I understand what you’re talking about, but my boss, he’s a little bit nuts. We don’t know what he is going to do.” The problem with that is for the crazy Nixon approach to work, the president can’t actually be crazy. It seems to me that this administration, specifically this president, if you whisper sweet nothing’s in his ear and find a way to get money into his coffers, aggression seems to go away. Yes, and, I mean, the Iranians didn’t try, to be fair. So, we don’t know. Right, I mean, the joke in the first term or at least the joke that I heard was that either the Trump presidency ends with Trump bombing Iran or building a casino in Tehran. You don’t know, right? You don’t know which way anything’s going to go. On the Taiwan issue, I would ask you what you think because I have no idea of knowing whether when push comes to shove, Donald Trump would go and defend Taiwan or not. He’s a very transactional person. He wants to do business with China on the one hand, he sees China as an adversary, as another. Does he care who runs Taiwan? No. He cares who’s in control of the smooth flow of semiconductors out of Taiwan into American manufacturing facilities. Right? So I don’t know what he would do. On the one hand, he’s transactional quasi isolationist so he doesn’t seem to be the sort of person who’s going to commit US bodies, meaning soldiers, to a fight to defend Taiwan. On the other hand, he’s very reactive, like we were talking. And so maybe he would be like, “China doesn’t get to do that. Only I get to do that sort of thing, so I’m going to go defend Taiwan.” I don’t know. Do you have any insight into it? I have zero insight into it. I think the thing that I think about a lot is that there’s two paths, right? There’s a path that he says, “I don’t really care, as long as we get the superconductors, who cares?” There’s the other path where maybe China has a little bluster in their step and says something like challenging the United States, then anything could happen at that point. So, who knows? Yeah, that’s what I mean about someone who is emotions based in these situations. Right. No, I mean, if you’re Taiwan, if you’re Poland, if you’re the Baltic States, you have to be asking, especially with the Europeans because he obviously has a softer spot for Putin than he has for Xi. If you’re the Europeans, you have to say, “I don’t know if this guy’s going to actually come in and save us if we need saving.” But on the particular issue of Hegseth and Signalgate, obviously what I saw coming over my phone was to some degree a group of people, mainly Hegseth, cosplaying at running the country and running the national security apparatus of the country. This is why they were sort of putting things on Signal like, “The bombers leave at whatever.” And you know what the thought I had when I was seeing it? The thought I had was, dude, you don’t have to cosplay being Secretary of Defense. You are Secretary of Defense. You are. Right, exactly. You are. We’re good, we’re good. We’re good. I got it, you’re cool. You got all the bombers, that’s great. You don’t have to show… I mean, I almost felt like at a very basic level, he was showing off for the Vice President, who was also in the chat, and I was like, oh, this is not… You just want people in government, the people who have life-and-death responsibilities to be calm, cool, a lot of cool is necessary, mature, analytic. They don’t take things personally, they’re not getting tattoos to show how cool they are. You want smooth professionals who aren’t looking for glory, they just want to do their job because they believe that they have a responsibility to their country. Where were you and what did you think when you realized exactly what was happening? Well, I didn’t realize what was happening until it was happening. What happened was I got a connection request from Mike Waltz who, despite what Mike Waltz later said, I do know, I have met, my phone number would be in his phone. That’s not an impossible thing. And so I sort, oh, wow, Mike Waltz wants to chat, I haven’t talked to that guy in a long time. Maybe he wants to open up a channel, that’s great. So I accepted it and then the next day or two days after that, I was added to the, I think PC Houthi Small Group, it was called. And I thought, oh, this is somebody’s punking me. This is obviously some kind of scam. And then it continued in that vein until the actual messages about the bombing started coming in and I thought, well, if this is real, then we’re about to see some bombing in Yemen. And sure enough, it was real. And this is a couple of months ago already, and when I do think about it, it still seems absurd because I was in the middle of this. And it’s not that common, as you know, for a reporter to be part of the story in the way that I became part of that story for a week. So in the middle of that swirl, I didn’t really contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was. What are the chances of that happening, right? And that goes back to your original question, which is, are these guys good at their jobs? In this case, they weren’t very good at their jobs. No. Why did you decide to take yourself out of the chat? You are making an assumption that I was making decisions alone. All I can say is that I had a great number of very, very skilled lawyers assisting me through this process because none of them had ever seen anything like this before. And so the prudent course of action was to remove myself from the chat, and obviously we thought that that would trigger… When you leave a Signal chat, the rest of the people on the chat are told that you’ve left the Signal chat. So we were expecting all kinds of high jinks to ensue. They didn’t because it seemed like nobody noticed that I had left the chat. What I would say is, apart from various legal exposures and all the rest, I didn’t want to be in that chat. I have to be honest with you. I want to know as much as I can about the decision-making process and the arguments and the strategy of the United States National Security Complex. I do not as a civilian want to know when the bombers are taking off, from what base they’re taking off, what ships are firing, what missiles at what targets. I don’t want to know. I am not qualified to have that information, I don’t think it’s the place of a journalist to have that. I’m happy to find out later, but I don’t want specific tactical information to be coming to me. And not just because of all the exposure that that would open up, open you up to all kinds of Espionage Act issues. I don’t need to know what kind of gun the soldiers are using. Well, it’s also a heavy responsibility, right? I mean- That’s what I mean. It’s not my… that’s not what I- Yeah, I don’t want to know that. I don’t want to know that, and I have no problem with this. I’ve gotten into this argument subsequently. It’s like, what is your role as a journalist in these kind of circumstances? And for some people, for a lot of people, by staying in the chat at all and writing about it, I was a traitor and I was violating something. I don’t know what I was violating. To them I say, “Look, my job is to figure out what powerful people are doing on our behalf.” And so if they wanted to invite me to the chat, I’m in the chat and I’m going to tell the readers of The Atlantic what’s going on. There are some people who’ve said, “You should stay in the chat forever and then report out immediately what they’re attacking.” And it’s like, look, I’m an American journalist, right? I’m a patriotic American, I’m not doing anything. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do anything that endangers the lives of another American. So, what went into your decision to publish the chat? Well, there are two phases. One, I wasn’t going to. A lot of the stuff, as you know, seemed to me to be obviously classified, secret information. What kind of missiles, when they’re going to leave, when they’re going to land, who they’re targeting, etc, etc, etc. What I did with all that information is along with colleagues, we measured the question of publishing, what benefit would become from publishing that specific information and what harm could ensue? So I willingly held back information that I thought was operational because it’s not my interest to provide operational details to stated sworn adversaries of America. And remember, the Houthis slogan is, “Death to America, death to the Jews, or whatever.” I’m like all the categories, right? I mean, death to left-handed Yankees fans. I’d be like, oh my God, they really know me. And so, I have no interest in sharing that kind of information. They come out and call me all kinds of names and say that I’m lying and that there was nothing in the chat that was secret. And so they actually kind of weirdly forced my hand. So we spent the day after the first story appeared, vetting again the information that I had that I had not published, and making sure that no American would be harmed by the publication of that information. And then we went to all the different agencies and said, “Look, this is what I’m going to put in The Atlantic tomorrow. If you can make a compelling case why I shouldn’t publish this, make it now.” The CIA came back and asked that we not publish one specific thing about a specific person and I said yes, because my interest is not harming that specific person. Other than that, they were like, “Nope, we’re not raising objections.” So then I published it. They could have had this become a two-day story by simply saying, and look, this is what an ideal administration or even a normal administration might’ve done. They might have said, “Oh, wow, that was a doozy. We really shouldn’t have been communicating on Signal. From now on we’re not going to communicate on Signal anymore and we’re going to investigate how this happened and investigate how this journalist was brought in.” And for whatever reason, their impulse was to attack me and say that I’m lying and call me a scumbag and call me… I mean, Mike Waltz literally called me a loser. And the funniest part of that is that I didn’t ask you to send me all this stuff. Right, you, you added me. I was literally, I mean, was literally sitting in a supermarket when I got off. I was shopping and I’m getting all this stuff, and it’s like, well, you could call me a loser but at least I know how to text. Right, right. I think in normal times though, it wouldn’t just be, we’re not going to use Signal again. It would be, we’re not going to use Signal again and someone’s going to be held accountable. We’re going to fire somebody. And really, that didn’t happen here. This administration just kind of doubled down and said, “Jeff is stupid,” and that’s where it ends, Jeff was stupid. No, but here’s a serious thing and anyone who is active duty military or works in the intelligence community who’s listening to this or any veteran is going to understand what I’m saying immediately. You can get in serious trouble if you’re a soldier for revealing the fact that you’re in a truck moving from X base to Y base, right? You can get into trouble for… The government over classifies, let’s stipulate that, they classify everything. But let’s also stipulate that there’s some stuff that’s worth classifying, making secret. There are so many soldiers who’ve been punished, including jail time, for revealing things that are so much less serious than the stuff that was revealed in the Signal chat. And what I heard from non-political rank and file soldiers, veterans, etc, was, “I would’ve gone to jail for that. These guys don’t even lose a day’s pay, but I would’ve gone to jail.” And that hypocrisy, let’s talk about what leadership is, right? That on the part of Pete Hegseth, Mike Waltz, etc, that is not modeling good leadership for the people who report to you. Yeah. Are you scared for this country, where we are right now? In my mind, we’re either experiencing a midlife crisis, a nervous breakdown, or a terminal illness. I know we’re going through something. We’re going through something. Social media, reality TV before it and the coming AI, it created a situation in which one of these things could happen. I don’t even know if democracy can survive in an age of social media, that’s a large question for another day. But I literally don’t know if we’re going through a thing where it’s like, all we need to do is buy a sports car and we’re going to be fine, or we just need a little bit of rest and relaxation and maybe some drugs and we’ll be fine, or if the American experiment is under such pressure that maybe it doesn’t make it. I would note, colleague of mine, Yoni Appelbaum has noted this in writing in the past, that there’s never been this sort of experiment before in human history. A large, very large, multi-ethnic democracy has never flourished before over the long term. And I do think that introducing social media and conspiracism and the fakery of AI and all the rest has really affected our ability to keep it together. But I just don’t know. Obviously, I’m hoping for the best. I do think that America’s a great country. I think that we’re an indispensable nation. I think we are a force for good more than we’re a force for bad in the world, especially when you look around the world and see what actually is out there. I’ve got kids, I want them to live in a flourishing country, but I don’t know where we’re at. I do know this. I do know that passivity in the face of outrage is not going to get us anywhere. And I do know that there are some people who believe that as long as we shovel enough cheap calories at Americans and multifarious forms of entertainment, we’ll keep them quiet and quiescent. And I think that people need to really contemplate what we have and what our system is and think about ways to make it better and not just let it get destroyed by people who don’t care about our democratic experiment. Sorry, I didn’t mean to start giving you a big speech there, but I really feel this. I feel like there’s a lot of passivity right now about things. I agree with you. I think passivity, and I think that in a lot of ways, so many things, social media, the media we consume, all of it brings us further away from our humanity. And I think that- Look at the way people talk to each other in this country. Exactly, the way we talk to each other. Also, the fact that we’ve just lost touch with having empathy for people who aren’t in our immediate circle, and- Well, this goes to my exact point. It’s like, you know what? You know what I call MAGA supporters? Americans. I want them to call us Americans too. I want people to look at journalists as patriots and not as traitors. I want people to operate within the boundaries of decent behavior and self-restraint, because we’re going to be living here together no matter what, so it might as well work.

Donald Trump often does not tell the truth. The intelligence community produces classified reports that are unavailable for outside evaluation. Thus, the public cannot trust what Trump and his crew say about the intelligence. This is a fundamental problem. We cannot accept as fact what Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard or other senior administration colleagues tell us about the US military strike on Iran. It certainly caused immense damage. But what was the impact? Did it end Iran’s nuclear program or merely set it back? If the latter, is that for months, a few years, or longer? This a key question. Yet whatever Trump says about this will be suspect—as is true for most topics. His administration cannot be considered a reliable source for anything, especially military matters, for which the truth can be hazy in the best of times. In the run-up to the bombing raid, Trump and his gang demonstrated that they were willing to play politics with intelligence. In March, Gabbard testified to Congress that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program—a finding that was included in the intelligence community’s annual worldwide threat assessment. Yet last week Trump declared that Iran was close to a nuclear weapon and that he didn’t care what Gabbard (and, by extension, the entire intelligence community) had concluded. Gabbard quickly showed that her allegiance is to Dear Leader, not her own team, by asserting that she and Trump were on the same page. Amid Washington speculation that Trump was not happy with Gabbard, she placated him rather than represent the truth as the intelligence agencies saw it. This sent a message: The intelligence system is rigged. > Throughout this episode, Trump has conveyed—yet again—that he doesn’t care > about facts. When Hegseth, following the raid, was asked whether new intelligence had come in since Gabbard’s March testimony, he ducked the question. That seemed to mean no. On Meet the Press, Vice President JD Vance said he and Trump had faith in the intelligence assessments: “Of course we trust our intelligence community, but we also trust our instincts.” That is, we will trash assessments that undermine our policy desires. And as we’ve seen for a decade now, Trump is an inveterate liar, highly erratic. He indicated last Friday that he was seeking a negotiated settlement, and then he launched the attack on Saturday. On June 17, he told reporters on Air Force One, “We’re not looking for a ceasefire [in the Israel-Iran war]. I didn’t say I was looking for a ceasefire…We’re looking for a real end, not a ceasefire. Something that would be permanent, giving up entirely.” But when an uneasy ceasefire came, he hailed the development and claimed credit for it. At one point, he urged the evacuation of Tehran, as if the United States would be bombing the city. After Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted regime change was not on the agenda, Trump, in a social media post, hinted it might be. Trump also proclaimed the bombing raid resulted in the total “obliteration” of the Iranian nuclear program; Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported the morning after only that there had been “extremely severe damage.” (On Thursday, Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency said the strikes rendered the centrifuges at the Fordow site “no longer operational” but noted it would be “too much” to assert that the nuclear program was “wiped out.”) The culture of lying that imbues Trumpworld has dangerous ramifications. The US public cannot believe statements from him and his top officials on vital national security matters, and members of Congress ought not trust the briefings they receive from this administration. (A military briefing for senators and representatives was scheduled for Thursday, but news reports noted the White House would be limiting the classified information it intended to share.) And given how the Trump crew operates, intelligence analysts ought to fear producing intelligence that contradicts Trump’s pronouncements and policies—a career killer. (During his first presidency, Trump complained mightily about intelligence reports that said Russia had continued interfering in US elections after attacking the 2016 election to help him win.) Trump’s ever-shifting stances and false statements are a national security threat. They render him less effective as a negotiator with other nations. Allies and foes cannot rely upon his word. He often makes hollow threats. (He told Putin he had two weeks to demonstrate he was serious about ending his war against Ukraine. Putin did nothing; Trump said nothing.) And if Trump pledges to negotiate, well, maybe he won’t. Initially skeptical of attacking Iran, he reportedly changed his mind after watching Fox News segments celebrating Israel’s strikes on Tehran and encouraging US involvement. Intelligence is often a political matter. So is war. And the Trump administration is hitting new heights in this regard. At a Pentagon press briefing Thursday morning, Hegseth started off with a long diatribe against the media, complaining it was more interested in tearing down Trump than accurately reporting the glories of the Iran assault. Hegseth singled out reporters—including one from Fox, where he used to be a commentator—and accused them of seeking to undermine the nation. He was behaving more like a minister of propaganda than the civilian head of the military. Asked about whether Iran had removed highly enriched uranium from the Fordow facility before the bombing, he sidestepped the matter. There’s plenty of precedent for abuse of intelligence. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated and politicized the intelligence in the run-up to their misguided 2003 invasion of Iraq. (I co-wrote a whole book on that.) But Trump and his aides have gone much further. The Bush-Cheney administration toiled hard to present a case for war. They cherry-picked intel, ignoring inconvenient findings. They spent months manufacturing arguments full of purported facts and conclusions from the intelligence community about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda. It was all bunk. But it was important to them to convince he public that they were acting rationally and responsibly on the basis of solid intelligence. Trump felt no such obligation. He dismissed the intelligence assessments and then shifted his stance back and forth without tying it to any new intelligence. He prematurely declared the total annihilation of Iran’s nuclear program. Throughout this episode, he has conveyed—yet again—that he doesn’t care about facts. War is just another chapter in his reality-TV presidency, in which reality takes a backseat to the demands of the Trump Show.

On Sunday evening, The New York Times published details of another potentially damning security scandal involving the chat app Signal and discussions of “detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15″—this time centered on a group chat created by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Citing four people with knowledge of the group chat, the report describes strikingly similar details to those revealed last month by The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who earlier disclosed that he had been inadvertently added to a different Signal group chat discussing the same Yemen war plans. According to the Times, Hegseth shared information that “included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis” in a “chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.” The Times noted that Hegseth’s brother, Phil, holds a job at the Pentagon, as does his lawyer, Tim Parlatore. His wife, Jennifer, has recently become notable for accompanying her husband to high-profile meetings abroad. The Times reports: > Unlike the chat in which The Atlantic was mistakenly included, the newly > revealed one was created by Mr. Hegseth. It included his wife and about a > dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle in January, > before his confirmation as defense secretary ,and was named “Defense | Team > Huddle,” the people familiar with the chat said. He used his private phone, > rather than his government one, to access the Signal chat. > > The continued inclusion following Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation of his wife, > brother and personal lawyer, none of whom had any apparent reason to be > briefed on operational details of a military operation as it was getting > underway, is sure to raise further questions about his adherence to security > protocols. The report cites a US official claiming that there was no national security breach: “Nothing classified was ever discussed on that chat,” the official said. Nonetheless, news of the second Signal group comes amid a dramatic leak probe at the Pentagon that has resulted in the departure of top Hegseth advisors and aides. Read the full Times report here.

President Trump’s absence at the dignified transfer of four U.S. servicemen who died during a training exercise in Lithuania is being noticed. While thousands gathered in Lithuania—including the Lithuanian president—to send the soldiers off, our commander in chief was busy (as he has been for over a quarter of his second presidency) playing in his Saudi-backed golf tournament at Mar-a-Lago. > View this post on Instagram > > > > > > > > > A post shared by Mother Jones (@motherjonesmag) This is not the first time that Trump has missed a dignified transfer—he only attended four out of 96 during his first term, per an investigation by HuffPost. Presidents are not required to be at the transfers and generally only attend a handful each term. (These four were met on US soil by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and several Democratic senators.) However, there is a particular ire since Trump is missing the transfer for such a trivial reason. Chris (who asked us not to use his last name) is an Air Force veteran who spoke to my colleague Peter Berger at a Hands Off Rally in San Francisco on Saturday, calling Trump’s choice “the ultimate lack of respect to our military.” He held a sign that said “4 US Soldiers bodies returned home, where is their Commander in Chief? In Florida—Golfing.” He also decried the administration’s cuts to the Veterans Affairs. “[Trump] really needs to look at what he is doing to the VA because after these military service members leave the military, it’s our duty as a nation to take care of them.” The Trump Administration has announced plans to cut 80,000 employees from the VA. It has already announced the end of a program that saved the homes of 17,000 military veterans facing foreclosures and ended specific healthcare for trans and intersex veterans. I spoke to T Dianne Smith, a Navy vet, at a protest in Eugene, Oregon. As a retiree, Trump’s tariffs and proposed changes to Social Security and Medicaid threaten her entire income. She felt most compelled to come not because of the effects on her, but because it was her duty. “When you enter the military, you take an oath to defend the Constitution and to obey the orders of the president, but the Constitution comes first,” she explained. “If someone gives you an unlawful order, you are required by law to not follow that order and to follow your conscience.”

On the last day of January, the Department of Defense—now run by ex-Fox News host and alleged domestic abuser Pete Hegseth—declared so-called “identity months,” like Black History Month, “dead” at the DoD. On the very same day, President Trump signed a proclamation affirming that February was Black History Month. > “Basically, what the DOD said is, ‘We’re not doing that, he’s Black and this > is February so, no.'” The DoD guidance says both that “the valor and success of military heroes of all races, genders, and backgrounds” should be celebrated and that the department “will focus on the character of [military members] service instead of their immutable characteristics.” The consequences of the memo soon became clear. In early February, the Maryland National Guard announced that it would not participate in an event to honor the life and legacy of famed slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass, citing the DoD memo. (The White House proclamation mentions Douglass as an example of a pioneering Black America.) “Since this event is organized as part of a Black History month celebration, the Maryland National Guard cannot support,” says the letter from Maryland National Guard Lt. Col. Meaghan Lazak, which adds that they cannot provide a band, troops, a flyover, or military vehicles for the event. The letter was posted on Facebook by Tarence Bailey Sr., who identifies himself as a distant relative of Douglass and is one of the organizers of the event. Bailey also told the Washington Post that the Massachusetts National Guard, which participated in the parade last year, bowed out this year, citing the DoD guidance. (He did not immediately respond to a Facebook message on Sunday.) Bailey told the newspaper that the news prompted the organizers to cancel the parade portion of the event. (It will still include performances, dinner, and awards, according to the website.) “Basically, what the DOD said is, ‘We’re not doing that, he’s Black and this is February so, no,’” Bailey told the Washington Post. “You’re discrediting everything—all of the work he did for this nation not as a Black man but as an American…They should really be ashamed of themselves.” Spokespeople for the White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday. Douglass was born enslaved in Maryland in 1818, taught himself to read, and escaped slavery to the North at 20 years old. He gave speeches against slavery around the country with the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and recounted his years spent in slavery in his autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845. He later helped people on the Underground Railroad; ran his own newspaper, The North Star; published two more autobiographies, titled My Bondage and My Freedom and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; and worked in several high-ranking federal positions under five different presidents. He died in 1895, at 77 years old. (His biography is still available on the National Park Service website.) The incident offers some of the clearest proof of the absurd impacts of the anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion executive orders Trump issued last month, as my colleague Alex Nguyen covered at the time. And with new reporting from the Washington Post published Saturday showing that internal documents from DOGE suggest Trump plans to expand the anti-DEI directives over the next six months, including by firing workers in offices established to ensure equal rights, expect more impacts to come.

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter. Twelve years ago, Army 1st Lt. Alivia Stehlik walked the parade route for President Obama’s second inauguration, making sure everything would go smoothly. Stehlik spent weeks planning for the Army’s role in the inaugural parade, training troops, and instructing a group of high-ranking generals and admirals on marching in step. Six-foot-two, with a West Point pedigree, a Ranger tab, ramrod straight posture, and an infectious smile, Stehlik was an ideal instructor. As a ceremonies officer stationed at the Army’s Old Guard in Washington, DC—which guards the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, conducts military funerals at Arlington, and serves as the president’s ceremonial escort—Stehlik was an expert in marching. The generals and the admirals, on the other hand, needed some refreshers. Once, Stehlik was training a female admiral who asked why there were no women in the Army’s honor guard. Back then, Stehlik presented as a man. She would transition years later after the military allowed transgender troops to start serving openly. Stehlik had wondered about the admiral’s question too—other services’ honor guards were mixed gender. But the Old Guard’s ceremonial company pulled exclusively from Army infantry, and women weren’t allowed in the infantry until 2016. “Ma’am,” Stehlik told the admiral, “that’s way above my pay grade.” Today, Stehlik, now a major, is waiting for another decision from far above her pay grade about who has the right to serve. President Trump made transgender issues a centerpiece of his campaign, promising to “stop the transgender lunacy” and “get transgender out of the military.” During his first term, Trump banned transgender people from serving in the military, though ultimately troops who had already transitioned—like Stehlik—were grandfathered in. That may not be the case this time. On Monday, in his inaugural address, Trump proclaimed that the government recognizes “only two genders: male and female.” Later that day, he repealed an executive order by President Biden allowing transgender people to serve. Now, Stehlik and thousands of other troops, stationed from Connecticut to Kentucky to California, are bracing to see if Trump orders a new trans ban. While the wait—and weight of the decision—may be agonizing, there is little transgender service members can do to make their case. Like any good soldier, Stehlik, now an Army physical therapist, went to work at Fort Campbell in Kentucky on the frigid morning after Trump’s inauguration.  “I actually don’t spend time speculating about it,” she said. “I’m just trying to be good at my job.” > “Being perfect means not standing out.” The lessons carried over from the Old Guard, where everything was drilled to perfection: every footstep in lockstep, every uniform exactly tailored. Nothing could be out of place. “There was no allowance for, ‘We messed up this time.’ There was no lexicon for that in the Old Guard,” Stehlik said. “Being perfect means not standing out.” When Stehlik first transitioned in 2017, she worried about standing out. “I was the only six-foot-two chick with a Ranger tab,” she said. But these days, there are other female Rangers who wear the revered badge, other transgender soldiers in uniform. She has deployed to Afghanistan and traveled with the Army to Jordan, the UAE, Lebanon. She has treated thousands of soldiers. Today, she is the director of holistic health and fitness for the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell. She lives about an hour south of base in Nashville with her partner and a wildly affectionate dog named Mozzie. She rides her motorcycle, plays keyboard and piano, guitar and bass, and browses bookstores on the weekend. Despite the growing political tension over trans issues, life is normal most of the time. She does not feel much like she stands out anymore; she does not want to talk about standing out. Instead, she wants to talk about her job. On Tuesday, the day after the inauguration, there was a quarterly brigade training briefing and a suicide prevention planning meeting. A peer-reviewed paper on optimizing women’s performance in sports demanded attention on her desk at home, where an Army Ranger flag hangs above the squat rack in her garage. In 2022, an opportunity came up for Stehlik to travel to the Middle East as a physical therapist. As a trans soldier, she needed a medical waiver to go. Nobody in her unit knew the correct protocol for that, so Stehlik cold-emailed the US Central Command surgeon asking for permission. “She’s top notch,” said Becky Wagner, a former active duty Army physician’s assistant who served with Stehlik during her deployment to Afghanistan. “She’s just a good soldier.” When you’re a good soldier, Stehlik says, you stay out of politics. “That’s kind of a fundamental part of being a soldier,” she said. Thousands of transgender service members serve in the military, though the exact number is unclear. Estimates from two research centers, the Williams Institute at UCLA and the now-defunct Palm Center have put the figure around 15,000, but the Pentagon does not publicly track the number. Data from UCLA also shows that transgender Americans sign up to serve their country at a rate twice that of cisgender people. Most transgender servicemembers have more than 12 years of service, said Rachel Branaman, the executive director of the Modern Military Association of America, which advocates for LGBTQ service members. Any talk of a ban “harms readiness,” Branaman said. Removing thousands of long-serving troops, she said, represents “a lot of specialized training that essentially costs billions of dollars and creates an operational gap.” Transgender soldiers and sailors were first explicitly banned from military service in the 1960s. But things started changing after the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that had prohibited gay and lesbian troops from serving openly. In 2013, the Army permitted Cpt. Sage Fox, a transgender woman, to return briefly to active duty, and by 2015, the military branches had made it difficult to dismiss service members for their gender identity. In 2016, the Obama White House officially ended the ban on transgender service members. But in July 2017, amid a growing backlash among conservatives, Trump tweeted that he was reinstating the ban. “After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US Military,” he wrote. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.” Stehlik grew up the eldest child of an Army officer, a West Point graduate, and from her earliest memories, she wanted the same life for herself. She remembered the tanks from her father’s early career—the “real” Army, she says—before he settled into a more sedate second act in operations research at the Pentagon. She spent much of her childhood and teenage years in northern Virginia, where her mother homeschooled her and her four younger siblings. In what would have been her senior year of high school, she took classes at a local community college, and then got an appointment to West Point, arriving in the summer of 2004. It was years before Stehlik realized she was transgender, but she felt at home in the Army. From the beginning, she knew she had been right: The life of a soldier was the life for her. Even during West Point’s notoriously difficult first year, she loved it—fellow cadets called Stehlik the “happy plebe.” “I think I felt seen, I felt valued for the things that I could do,” Stehlik said. “I like doing hard things. I just find intrinsic value in soldiering and being around soldiers.” So when Stehlik graduated from West Point, she chose to be a soldier’s soldier, commissioning as an infantry officer. It was 2008, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were in full swing, and it would be nearly eight years before women would be permitted to serve in combat roles, like the infantry. But Stehlik had not yet come out as transgender. Like any good soldier, she wanted to be where the action was. Stehlik graduated from the Army’s grueling Ranger school course and then was stationed at Camp Casey in South Korea, where she served as an infantry platoon leader. Her plan had been to apply from there to the 75th Ranger Regiment. But she was newly married and worried the intensive training and deployments would take a toll on her relationship. So instead, she accepted orders to the Army’s storied Old Guard. She still tears up when she thinks about greeting the caskets of fallen troops coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan. “There’s not a lot that you can compare to having to give a flag to somebody’s surviving family,” she said. “How do you do right by the people who are willing to give their lives for this idea of what we’re doing here in America, this idea of our country, and of freedom and opportunity?” Stehlik began her transition at Fort Carson in 2017, not long after she graduated from physical therapy school at the Army’s medical training program at Baylor University. Even then, anti-trans sentiment and legislation were growing across the country. By 2017, legislators in Texas, where Baylor is located, had started introducing bills seeking to regulate which bathrooms trans people could use. Anti-LGBTQ bills under consideration across the country have swelled in recent years, from 81 in 2020 to more than 530 in 2024, according to the ACLU. In Kentucky, where Stehlik is currently stationed, lawmakers in 2023 overrode a veto to pass a law restricting discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in schools and requiring most transgender minors to detransition, among other things. That same year, at a conservative conference, the political commentator Michael Knowles called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated from public life … for the good of society.” When Trump tweeted that he was going to ban trans soldiers, Stehlik was stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado. At first, she missed the news. Her first patient of the day came in and told Stehlik with conviction, “I don’t care what anybody says, I want you to be my therapist.” “I was like, ‘OK…cool. Yep, I’m your therapist,’” Stehlik said. But then her sister texted, asking if she was all right, and explained what had happened. Trump’s tweet reportedly took the Pentagon by surprise, and it took two months for Defense officials and the White House to hash out what exactly it meant. Ultimately, military policy prohibited new transgender troops from enlisting and active-duty service members from transitioning, but it did not remove transgender servicemembers from duty, nor did it prohibit them from re-enlisting. Stehlik said she just kept doing her job. Shortly after taking office in 2021, President Biden signed an executive order rescinding the ban. Stehlik had moved into physical therapy because she loved helping people stay fit and saw the field as a way to directly help soldiers on the front line, keeping them deployable and supporting the mission. But she worried how troops would react to being treated by a transgender therapist, especially as she prepared to go to Afghanistan. She was concerned her fellow soldiers might feel uncomfortable, closed off to her, which could make providing care more difficult. But that wasn’t the case, she said. “People were way more vulnerable with me than I expected them to be. Even these young hotshot infantry and Special Forces guys that are out there, the last thing I expected was higher levels of vulnerability from them about how they were actually doing. But I got that way more often than I expected. “And I think it was because I just exist as myself. I’m really unapologetically who I am. And I think that gives other people the freedom to be that too.” Other soldiers who have served with Stehlik said they saw the same thing. “I’ve brought in some of the oldest, crustiest Green Berets that I know,” said Lt. Col. Dan Brillhart, an Army physician who has run medical training exercises with Stehlik. Initially, he said, some of them were uncomfortable about working alongside Stehlik. “They inevitably, universally fall under her spell,” Brillhart said. “They’re like, ‘She’s amazing…When I come back next year, I want to work with Alivia.’” He wasn’t the only one who spoke about a sort of magic she brought to her work. “I used to call her the brigade healer,” said Col. Jon Post, who worked with Stehlik at the security forces assistance command, providing support to partner countries in the Middle East. “She is incredibly emotionally intelligent.” “Her thing was always: Be a better human,” said Staff Sgt. Logan Haller, who served as her physical therapy tech during her deployment to Afghanistan. “She sat me down and said, ‘OK, Logan, where do you want to go with your life, with your career? … As a soldier, she was awesome.” Haller remembered one soldier who kept calling Stehlik “sir” instead of “ma’am,” kept saying “he” instead of “she.” Stehlik, he said, corrected him from time to time. But Haller finally pulled the soldier aside. “I told him, ‘Hey, either get it right or get out. Find somebody else to take care of you,’” he said. He reminded the soldier of a core Army value: “You treat everyone with dignity and respect.” “He figured it out after that,” Haller said. A Quinnipiac poll from the time of Trump’s first military trans ban found that nearly 70 percent of Americans supported transgender troops being permitted to serve openly. A 2020 study found a similar level of support among active-duty service members. But throughout his second run for the White House, President Trump talked about reinstating the ban. In December, he promised to “sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation, get transgender out of the military, and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools.” His nominee to lead the Defense Department, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has railed against the military being overrun by “woke” policies that he claims have demoralized service members and weakened our fighting force. Other Republican lawmakers have claimed that caring for trans troops is costing the military too much money. Between 2016 and 2021, the Pentagon spent about $15 million on healthcare for transgender troops, the vast majority of that on therapy visits, many of which are mandated by military policy on transgender service members and not necessarily requested by troops themselves. By comparison, in 2014, as the military began to consider allowing trans people to serve openly, it spent more than $80 million on erectile dysfunction drugs. Experts who spoke with The War Horse were hesitant to speculate on what a new ban might look like. But they said it could span a range of possibilities, from merely not allowing new transgender enlistees to discharging thousands of active-duty troops. “I think everybody is just waiting to see what’s coming,” Branaman said. She and other experts said that the more extreme possibility—removing active-duty transgender troops—could be logistically very difficult for the military branches. “There’s going to be administrative chaos,” Branaman said. > “Who’s going to join the military from Gen Z or Gen Alpha if you can’t bring > your gay friend or your trans friend?” Sue Fulton, a senior advisor to SPARTA Pride, an association of active-duty transgender military members, said that “trying to implement some sort of new ban would be a mess and a problem for commanders.” Typically, service members who are removed from active duty for nonpunitive reasons are discharged either administratively or through a medical route. Both processes can be time-consuming and burdensome, with various policies spelling out procedures for required hearings, boards, and potential appeals. It can be more complicated to separate people in certain critical specialties or service members who are close to retirement. When the military discharges a service member for medical reasons, it can take anywhere from six months to more than a year. Speeding things up would likely require changes to other military policies. Luke Schleusener, the head of Out in National Security, a nonpartisan nonprofit for queer national security professionals, said that those sorts of changes would be “kind of capricious.” “It’s going to say to a population that has been serving pretty much continuously that you are suddenly not eligible, not because you no longer meet requirements, but because we’ve changed requirements to specifically expel you.” He and other experts also highlighted concerns about recruiting goals, which the military branches have struggled to meet in recent years. A 2024 study from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 30 percent of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. “Who’s going to join the military from Gen Z or Gen Alpha if you can’t bring your gay friend or your trans friend?” Schleusener said. Twelve years ago, after weeks of training and preparation, Stehlik watched the inaugural parade from CNN’s press box, on hand to provide expert commentary on parade protocols. This Inauguration Day, she was at home in Nashville. It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so she had the day off, although her boss had already emailed her with a work question. She kept half an eye on her phone, waiting to see if any more messages from her boss came in, while playing around on a keyboard in an upstairs spare bedroom. Stehlik has played the piano since she was seven. She says it’s the thing she’s done the longest in her life. The thing she’s done the second longest is serve in the Army. At West Point, in Eisenhower Hall, a nine-foot Steinway grand piano sits in a ballroom. Stehlik remembers when she first played it, framed by floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River. “I assumed that it wouldn’t be there when I came back,” she said. It seemed out of place; she thought it must usually be stored somewhere else. But when she next went back to the ballroom, months later, the Steinway was still there. She got in the habit of playing it, walking down the hill from the barracks to the ballroom whenever she needed a break from the grind of cadet life. On Inauguration Day in Nashville, Stehlik did not want to talk about politics; the inauguration seemed political. But she talked about West Point, where she began her life in the Army. “I am as optimistic and idealistic as West Point is,” she said. “Sometimes it feels naive to be idealistic, but I just am. I am a hopeful, optimistic human.” Whenever Stehlik goes back to West Point, she makes it a point to walk down to Eisenhower Hall to play the piano. “Sometimes it’s hiding in a back corner behind curtains, and sometimes it’s out in the middle of the ballroom.” But, she said, “That piano is always there.” This War Horse story was reported in Nashville by Sonner Kehrt, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines. Photos for the story were provided through a partnership with The 19th, an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy.