An investigation into the machinery of Donald Trump's second administration reveals how a core group of advisors—Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Susie Wiles, Dan Scavino, Karoline Leavitt, James Blair, and Vince Haley—are translating presidential authority into concrete policy through immigration enforcement, military operations, personnel control, and institutional reorganization. Miller's documented influence has produced more than 200 executive orders targeting immigration, while Hegseth faces bipartisan congressional scrutiny over a Pentagon Inspector General report finding he violated protocols by sharing classified information on Signal and over controversial Caribbean military strikes. Scavino now controls "almost all positions in government" through the Presidential Personnel Office. This examination of Trump's first eleven months back in office documents how loyalty-based staffing, agency reorganizations, and centralized decision-making are reshaping federal institutions in ways that may outlast this administration.
Tag: Trump administration
Examining the Implications of Mass Leadership Dismissals Under the Trump Administration
Between January and November 2025, the Trump administration dismissed or forced into retirement more than a dozen senior military officers in what represents the most extensive peacetime purge of military leadership in modern American history. The dismissals included the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—removed less than 17 months into his statutory four-year term—the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs, the commanders of the Coast Guard, Navy SEALs, Navy Reserve, U.S. Cyber Command, and the National Security Agency, as well as all three service judge advocates general simultaneously.
Five former secretaries of defense, representing both Republican and Democratic administrations, issued an extraordinary joint letter calling for congressional hearings, warning that the dismissals raised "troubling questions about the administration's desire to politicize the military" and removed legal constraints on presidential power. The scale and manner of these actions—combined with the administration's explicit emphasis on personal loyalty and the firing of officers who provided intelligence assessments contradicting presidential claims—threaten the apolitical character of the U.S. military that has been a cornerstone of American democracy for more than two centuries.
This analysis examines the documented facts of these dismissals, their implications for civil-military relations, national security effectiveness, and constitutional governance, and what these unprecedented actions reveal about the evolving relationship between civilian and military authority in the United States. The article draws on official government statements, news reports from multiple sources, congressional testimony, and analysis from former defense officials to provide a comprehensive assessment of a critical juncture in American military history.
First They Came for My Milk, Then They Came for My Chicken
Budget-driven cutbacks have altered two federal pillars of U.S. food safety. The Food and Drug Administration has paused its proficiency-testing program for laboratories that certify Grade “A” milk, leaving states and processors without a federal benchmark for detecting pathogens and drug residues. At the same time, the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has withdrawn a rule that would have treated high-risk Salmonella strains in raw poultry as adulterants, ending the first major attempt in a decade to lower infection rates linked to chicken and turkey. The second Trump administration cites regulatory streamlining; industry groups welcome the moves. Public-health officials warn that raw-milk illnesses and multidrug-resistant Salmonella strains remain significant threats, especially as independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaigns to legalize interstate raw-milk sales. Absent federal backstops, states, processors and consumers must shoulder more responsibility for keeping milk and poultry safe.
Trump’s 2025 Deportation Architecture and the Unlearned Lesson of the Removal Act
Expedited removal is the twenty‑first‑century descendant of the Indian Removal Act: a policy engineered for speed, distance, and silence. When a government normalizes exile without a hearing, it is not testing the margins of due process—it is erasing them, and the targets keep expanding until the line between non‑citizen and citizen turns to vapor.
Doha to Kabul. How the 2020 U.S.–Taliban Agreement Set the Stage for Afghanistan’s Collapse
The collapse of Afghanistan in August 2021 is often framed as a singular failure of the Biden administration, but the record shows a far more complex lineage. Under the 2020 Doha Agreement, the Trump administration negotiated directly with the Taliban while excluding the Afghan government, committed to a rapid U.S. withdrawal without enforceable conditions, and orchestrated a dramatic reduction in American forces. These decisions—combined with the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners, the closure of key U.S. airbases, and a refusal to share transition briefings with the incoming administration—left the United States with shrinking leverage and diminished capacity to execute a safe, orderly exit. This feature examines the documented diplomatic, military, and political choices that shaped the withdrawal trajectory, grounding each claim in primary-source evidence from inspector general reports, Pentagon testimony, and contemporaneous news accounts. The result is a clearer view of how policy choices made between 2018 and 2021 directly constrained the final months of the U.S. presence and shaped the outcome on the ground.