How George Floyd's Killing Separated Trump From His Generals
I ain’t gonna lie…I’m having a hard time letting this one go. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested that General Brown, being Black, could only have risen to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a “DEI hire”. A Black person could not possibly have risen that far on the merits of their skill and achievements. But it was George Floyd who got Trump to give permission to Pete Hegseth to call the general in his hotel while the general was at the border trying to assess and understand the boarder issue, to tell him to pack his bags and move on.
As I’ve written before, it was also George Floyd who got General Milley, Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in trouble, fired, and then Trump went so far as suggesting that the general be executed. Both generals, one White and the other Black, took a stand against racism. It cost both of them their jobs.
The NYTimes article below dove into all of this and today, I just do not have it in me to let it go. I hear “How did we get here?” on a regular basis. If you’re old enough, you can remember that in 1992, James Carville, Bill Clinton’s senior campaign strategist, in talking about America’s issue of the day, claimed, “It’s the economy, stupid!”
Today, I just do not have it in me to pussy-foot around. Asking how we got here is exactly like asking, “Oh my! Whatever could have led Dylann Roof to shoot and kill those nine nice Black people in July, 2015 in the Emmanual AME (African Methodist Episcopalian) church in Charleston SC?”
Wonder no more. It wasn’t poverty. It wasn’t that he was dropped on his head as an infant. It’s not malnutrition. It’s not time spent on devices. It’s not that his parents weren’t loving enough. It wasn’t the flu…or drugs or alcohol. It wasn’t “The times we live in”. Not Mad Magazine. Not AIDS. Not the fluoride that is or isn’t in the drinking water. you drink. It’s not Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish Space Lasers. And it’s not Trump’s bone spurs – the ones that magically keep the tough guy out of Vietnam.
It's White supremacy, stupid!
Of all the innumerable problems that we have to fix – and there are many, many of which need action and resolution right now…not 20 years from now…the problem on top of the list is America’s Thing With Race, and to be clear and specific, America’s Thing With The Black Race. Not Brown. Not Red. Not Yellow…Black. It’s a heavy anchor around the neck of all our other issues.
If you’ve wondered if our democracy is going to weather the next 47 months, I don’t think you really have to speculate any longer. I’ve written about this race-based danger to our American Democracy again and again and again and again and again and again and again. But it could be that Heather Cox Richardson has written about it here better than I.
If you have a friend who occasionally hints at racism using some form of America’s famous code talk…”I think that BLUE lives matter”…and you do not gently and respectfully help him or her understand what they just said, and then you wonder how America voted a racist into the highest office in the land…well, America did it with your help.
Sadly and unbelievably, in 2010, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell said, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." I, and probably you, would’ve thought that his single most important goal was to do what was a benefit to the American people. And now we’re spectators, watching presidents Musk and Trump tear our democracy apart. And while the leader of the extreme right swore non-cooperation with a president not of his party… A Black president, to be clear… The Democratic Party swore to reach across the aisle to make everything all better. Probably what they should be doing now is everything possible to stop every. single. thing. that Trump and Musk do.
It should be unacceptable that we hear more about and more from Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene than we do from our own representatives. During the days when the Affordable Care Act was ramping up, I learned from professional advocates that no matter how many times you call your representative, even hundreds of times, each call counts. 500 calls from you carries the same weight as 500 calls from different people. So I put my representatives on speed dial and I called them every. single. day. I called seven days a week and left a message that I wanted to see them support the Affordable Care Act. I don’t know if I single-handedly got the Affordable Care Act passed, but who knows, maybe I did. You can thank me by supporting The Civil Conversations Project.
It seems late to talk about voting. Or maybe too soon to talk about the midterms. But it’s not too late for all of us to call our representatives, and to call them every. single. day. Demand that they take action to stop everything that Trump does, to thwart every one of their nominees for every position they are nominated for. Today is not the time to reach across the aisle.
I’m not really sure what else we can do right now, but it’s pretty easy to do that.
George Floyd Killing Separated Trump From His Generals
For the second time, the killing of George Floyd by a police officer has brought about a breakage between President Trump and the American military’s most senior leader.
In abruptly firing Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Friday night purge at the Pentagon, Mr. Trump did not publicly give a reason. In fact, the four-star fighter pilot with 40 years of service was at the border tending to one of the president’s highest priorities when he was dismissed.
But privately, Trump advisers point to a video that General Brown recorded in the furious days after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, an act that sparked a social justice movement. In the four-minute video, General Brown reflected on his experiences as an African American pilot in the Air Force.
The killing of Mr. Floyd also blew up the relationship between Mr. Trump and General Brown’s predecessor, Gen. Mark A. Milley.
Days after Mr. Floyd’s death, General Milley, wearing his Army fatigues, accompanied Mr. Trump in a walk across Lafayette Square near the White House for a photo op after an aggressive clearing of a peaceful demonstration. General Milley was widely criticized for allowing Mr. Trump to drag him into politics.
General Milley apologized publicly, saying, “I should not have been there.”
Mr. Trump was furious. “Why’d you do that?” he asked General Milley, according to Trump officials at the time.
The two were already at odds over Mr. Trump’s desire to use the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty troops to rein in the protesters, a move that General Milley and then Defense Secretary Mark Esper had vehemently opposed.
Mr. Trump would never trust either man again.
The president would later fire Mr. Esper (by tweet). As for General Milley, Mr. Trump would eventually suggest he should be put to death.
And after Mr. Trump returned to power, their portraits were removed from the walls of the Pentagon.
It is unclear whether General Brown will get a portrait of his one year and four months as the Joint Chiefs chairman. Mr. Trump has not publicly criticized General Brown, whom he is seeking to replace with the retired three-star Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, another fighter pilot.
Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s new defense secretary, previously questioned whether General Brown was selected as the Joint Chiefs chairman because he was Black and said on a podcast in November that he should be fired over the military’s diversity efforts.
In his 2024 book “The War on Warriors,” Mr. Hegseth wrote of the general’s promotion: “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt — which on its face seems unfair to C.Q. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter.”
General Brown electrified the military rank and file on June 4, 2020, when as Pacific Air Forces commander, he released his four-minute video, which he called, simply, “What I’m thinking about.”
On the streets of some cities, Black Lives Matter protests were raging over the killing of Mr. Floyd by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer who knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck while Mr. Floyd was handcuffed and lay dying facedown.
General Brown would later say in an interview that one of his two sons asked him: “What is Pacific Air Forces going to say?” As the commander of Pacific Air Forces, General Brown said he knew that was code for “Dad, what are you going to say?”
Against a dark background, a solemn General Brown, clad in fatigues, stared into the camera, and said this: “As the commander of Pacific Air Forces, and a senior leader in our Air Force, and an African American, many of you may be wondering what I’m thinking about the current events surrounding the tragic death of George Floyd,” General Brown began. “Here’s what I’m thinking about.”
For four and a half minutes, General Brown would speak, in stark terms, about his life as an African American fighter pilot.
“I’m thinking about how full I am with, with emotion, not just for George Floyd, but the many African Americans that suffered the same fate as George Floyd,” he said, a slight tremor underlying his voice. “I’m thinking about protests in my country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, the equality expressed in our declaration of independence, in the Constitution, that I’ve sworn my adult life to support and defend.”
General Brown spoke of “living in two worlds, both with their own perspectives and views.” He described what those worlds were like for him. He and his sister were the only Black children at his elementary school, he said, and they tried to fit in. In their high school, half of the students were Black and they still tried to fit in.
“I’m thinking about my Air Force career, where I was often the only African American in my squadron, or, as a senior officer, the only African American in the room,” he said.
At the time, about 43 percent of the 1.3 million men and women on active duty were people of color, but nearly all of the people making crucial decisions at the top were white and male. In a photo taken in October of the previous year, Mr. Trump was surrounded by his top four-star generals, a sea of white faces, a portrait of the top commanders who led an otherwise diverse institution.
In his video, General Brown continued: “I’m thinking about wearing the same flight suit, with the same wings on my chest as my peers, and then being questioned by another military member, ‘are you a pilot.’”
He limited his words to his own experience, and reflected on the other world in which he lived, the Black one. “I’m thinking about being a captain at the O Club with my squadron, and being told by other African Americans that I wasn’t Black enough, since I was spending more time with my squadron than with them.”
He spoke of how most of his mentors could not relate to his experience as a Black man. He spoke of wondering whether airmen who have not had similar experiences “don’t see racism as a problem because it doesn’t happen to them, or whether they’re empathetic.”
General Brown finished by talking about the weight he felt as the first African American nominated to be chief of the Air Force. Mr. Trump had nominated him for that position, on Mr. Esper’s recommendation.
General Brown would go on to become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in an 83-11 Senate vote. For the first time in its history, the Pentagon was led by two Black men, with Lloyd J. Austin III, Mr. Biden’s defense secretary.
But in Mr. Trump’s eyes, one Trump adviser said on Saturday, there was no coming back for General Brown after he made his video.
After Mr. Trump took office on Jan. 20, General Brown insisted he would carry out the lawful orders of the president, in words similar to his predecessor, General Milley.
He was fired anyway. So was Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, and Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of staff of the Air Force, who had urged airmen to think about institutional racism after Mr. Floyd’s death.
“By their own words, the president and secretary of defense have signaled that these leaders served the country well and faithfully carried out the missions assigned to them by their political leaders,” said Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University who has studied the military for decades. “The abruptness of the action leaves so many questions hanging and unanswered.”
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent. More about Helene Cooper
Excellent Wayne. Thanks for the inspiration. I say call them all anyway. no matter what their politics Speak to fundamental decency, the history of America fighting fascism and for EQUALITY opportunity for ALL and true freedom, the sacrifice of our countries political and economic power to an oligarchy and leadership now taking the side of communist states and dictators . Thanks for your strength and determination. Been making a many many phone calls. You just inspired me to call my extremely conservative representatives. Every. Single. Day. There is always a new topic to call them about that I have not spoken with them about before. They are trying to flood the zone with changes. We can call them back and flood their zone with complaints about the same changes. Endless topics of moral turpitude on their part. Corruption and chaotic destructive inhumane decisions, despicable treatment of veterans and dedicated civil servants throughout our society the dog whistle of “DEI” and elimination of an excellent general and man just standing up for his very being. Elimination of his deep experience excellent skills and calmness under fire and duress with steadfast leadership. When we beat this thing, CQ should be put back into position.
I'm calling Bennett and Hickenlooper. Not sure Hurd gives a damn, but I will call him anyway. Putting cronies in charge and stripping any DEI progress ain't going down without resistance.