Purging the Pentagon

The Dispatch Podcast

The Dispatch

News, Politics

4.6 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2020

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper got the boot on Monday in a characteristic Twitter announcement from President Trump. Esper’s sudden dismissal was accompanied by a firing spree of numerous other Pentagon officials who were quickly replaced with Trump loyalists, raising a lot of questions and alarm bells in D.C.’s national security bubble. Sarah and the guys break down competing theories that have tried to dissect what the Pentagon purge is all about. According to David, “the moves only really make sense in the context of planning for a second term.” Tune in for a discussion of emerging arguments surrounding the future of the GOP, ongoing election lawsuits, and the conspiratorial trajectory of conservative media. Show Notes: -The Dispatch Fact Check. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to another episode of the dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger joined by Steve
0:06.2	Hayes, Jonah Goldberg and David French all exhausted after our two day. What's next event
0:12.8	extravaganza? We have the recorded sessions up at what's next event.com. And even so, even
0:21.2	though we just spent the last two days talking nonstop to each other, we've got lots more
0:26.0	to cover more news. So we're going to start with the Pentagon. We're going to talk about the
0:30.7	future of the Republican Party again because there is more than we're going to talk about vote fraud
0:36.9	and we're going to talk about the media hypocrisy and you know all the stuff that's going on this week.
0:43.7	Plus a little great man theory of history indulgence at the end. Steve has some terrible,
0:49.7	terrible takes to share with you. Let's dive right in. Steve, news coming out of the Pentagon
1:10.0	yesterday and today. Quite a bit of news coming out of the Pentagon. In the last 48 hours,
1:15.7	you've seen the Secretary of Defense remove from his position replaced by an interim for the
1:22.4	final 70 days of the Trump administration. You've seen the head of policy at the Pentagon,
1:27.4	the head of intelligence, the Pentagon also removed the chief of staff to the secretary,
1:32.2	also removed and replaced by what I think can accurately be described to Trump loyalists.
1:40.0	Needless to say, in national security world, this is raising, I would say a lot of questions,
1:46.4	also a lot of alarms. People are worried about it. There are a variety of theories as to why this
1:55.7	is happening, but it's unclear exactly what the correct theory is. I mean, there are basically
2:04.0	four. The first that the president is putting in his top national security loyalists, two people
2:15.0	who used to work for Congressman Devon Nunez, one at the Pentagon, the other as the top lawyer
2:20.5	at the national security agency. Having something to do with their Russia, their internal
2:28.9	Trump administration push back on the claims of Russia collusion and the Mueller report.
2:36.3	The second that this is just Donald Trump peak, he wants to fire people he doesn't like,
	...

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