After Trump chose Milley to be his chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he repeatedly accused him of disloyalty and later suggested that he had committed “treason” and that the punishment should be execution.
Last month, Trump delivered a highly partisan speech at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, ruthlessly attacking his political foes, such as Governor Gavin Newsom of California and former President Joe Biden. Trump’s broadsides drew both raucous laughter and boos from the uniformed military troops in attendance.
A White House spokesperson dismissed concerns about partisanship as an element of the interviews.
“President Trump wants to ensure our military is the greatest and most lethal fighting force in history, which is why he meets with four-star-general nominees directly to ensure they are war fighters first — not bureaucrats,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson.
Recent presidents have elected to meet with some officers being considered for sensitive positions, such as the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the four-stars leading the military services, or combatant commanders overseeing US troops in war zones, former officials said.
But the officials said it could be impractical and unnecessary for the president to meet with nominees for all four-star openings.
There are about three dozen four-star generals and admirals in the US military.
“While these officers are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, they are not political appointees,” said retired Colonel Heidi Urben, a professor in the Security Studies Programme at Georgetown University.
Trump’s decision to interview most or all of them creates the impression that “they’re political appointees selected on the basis of their personal loyalty and partisan alignment”.
Some former US officials and scholars who study civil-military relations said the meetings with Trump could help the senior officers better understand his goals for the military.
“If the President is meeting with the four-stars to share his vision for Golden Dome or other initiatives, that’s one thing,” said Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke University who served in the White House under President George W. Bush.
“If he’s meeting with them to share his critiques of the Biden Administration and see how they react, that would be problematic.”
Feaver said Bush’s defence secretaries — Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates — would most likely have bristled at White House requests for blanket interviews of four-star nominees.
“We had two exceedingly strong secretaries who jealously guarded their prerogatives,” he noted.
“They were not going to overly share with the White House if they didn’t have to.”
The Pentagon declined to comment on the new approach to four-star nominations.
A former Fox News host and Iraq war veteran, Hegseth came to the Pentagon job with little government experience and has suffered through some significant miscues in his first six months in office.
His inner circle of advisers has been plagued by infighting. Several have resigned or been fired.
Hegseth is also still contending with a review by the Pentagon’s inspector-general related to his disclosure on the Signal messaging app of the precise timing of US fighter jets’ airstrikes against the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen in March.
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, disparaged that review as “a political witch-hunt by Biden Administration holdovers”.
Hegseth provided a statement to the inspector-general, he said, “which points out why this entire exercise is a sham, conducted in bad faith and with extreme bias”.
Despite his rocky spring, Hegseth remains in good standing with the President, according to two people with knowledge of Trump’s thinking, partly because of the B-2 bunker-buster operation against three nuclear sites in Iran.
Some Pentagon officials said the requirement that four-star nominees meet Trump, initiated at Hegseth’s request, had slowed down the promotion process because it is often difficult to find time in the President’s busy schedule.
But the new policy also carries upsides for Hegseth. Because he has young children, Hegseth has less time to socialise with Trump at the White House or his clubs, an official said. The four-star meetings, which Hegseth attends, provide him valuable face time with the President.
If Trump becomes dissatisfied or angry with one of the nominees, the interviews could help insulate Hegseth from the blame.
“The President has a right to military leaders he trusts and has confidence in,” said Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defence policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute who was a national security aide to Bush.
Schake noted that Trump was not the first president to probe senior military leaders for their political leanings, even as she sounded a cautionary note: “Politics is a poor way to select military leaders”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman
Photograph by: Haiyun Jiang
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
