CINXE.COM
What Top Military Officers Really Think About Trump - The Atlantic
<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en" dir="ltr"><head><meta charSet="utf-8"/><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"/><link rel="icon" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/favicon-3888b0e329526a975703e3059a02b92d.ico"/><link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/apple-touch-icon-default-b504d70343a9438df64c32ce339c7ebc.png"/><link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="76x76" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/apple-touch-icon-76x76-d5accc11b8265af76495fbfa9d38dd3b.png"/><link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="120x120" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/apple-touch-icon-120x120-419ba228184c040a691628d3dd82c206.png"/><link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="152x152" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/apple-touch-icon-152x152-aafde20dd981a38fcd549b29b2b3b785.png"/><meta name="application-name" content="theatlantic"/><meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content="#FFFFFF"/><meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/apple-touch-icon-default-b504d70343a9438df64c32ce339c7ebc.png"/><meta property="og:site_name" content="The Atlantic"/><meta property="og:locale" content="en_US"/><meta property="fb:admins" content="577048155,17301937"/><meta property="fb:app_id" content="100770816677686"/><meta property="fb:pages" content="29259828486,1468531833474495,1061579677251147,457711054591520,370457103090695,1631141167169115,148681772342453,1510507419185410,128344747344340,128377530562508,236061986423933"/><meta name="p:domain_verify" content="68e1a0361a557708fefc992f3309ed70"/><meta name="twitter:site" content="@theatlantic"/><meta name="twitter:domain" content="theatlantic.com"/><script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"WebSite","name":"The Atlantic","url":"https://www.theatlantic.com","inLanguage":"en-US","issn":"1072-7825","potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":"https://www.theatlantic.com/search/?q={q}","query-input":"required name=q"}}</script><script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Organization","@id":"https://www.theatlantic.com/#publisher","name":"The Atlantic","url":"https://www.theatlantic.com","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","width":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":224},"height":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":224},"url":"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/atlantic-logo--224x224.png"},"sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/TheAtlantic","https://twitter.com/theatlantic"]}</script><style id="_vis_opt_path_hide">#paywall,#nonMeteredNudge,#gate {opacity:0;}</style><title>What Top Military Officers Really Think About Trump - The Atlantic</title><meta name="description" content="The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?"/><meta property="krux:title" content="What Top Military Officers Really Think About Trump - The Atlantic"/><meta property="krux:description" content="The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?"/><link rel="canonical" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/"/><link rel="image_src" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/RCPMk_PyviJiFTuIttnynrc8SU0=/0x43:2000x1085/1200x625/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg"/><meta name="author" content="Mark Bowden"/><link rel="ia:markup_url" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/facebook-instant/article/598360/"/><meta property="article:publisher" content="https://www.facebook.com/TheAtlantic/"/><meta property="article:opinion" content="false"/><meta property="article:content_tier" content="metered"/><meta property="article:tag" content="international"/><meta property="article:section" content="Politics"/><meta property="article:published_time" content="2019-10-07T16:00:00Z"/><meta property="article:modified_time" content="2019-11-06T19:28:34Z"/><meta name="robots" content="index, follow, max-image-preview:large"/><meta property="og:title" content="Top Military Officers Unload on Trump"/><meta property="og:description" content="The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?"/><meta property="og:url" content="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/"/><meta property="og:type" content="article"/><meta property="og:image" content="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/RCPMk_PyviJiFTuIttnynrc8SU0=/0x43:2000x1085/1200x625/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg"/><meta property="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/><meta name="FacebookShareMessage" content="The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines? Mark Bowden interviewed officers up and down the ranks to find out."/><meta name="TwitterShareMessage" content="The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines? Mark Bowden interviewed officers up and down the ranks to find out."/><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="The Atlantic" href="/feed/all/"/><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Best of The Atlantic" href="/feed/best-of/"/><meta name="referrer" content="unsafe-url"/><meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"/><meta name="apple-mobile-web-status-bar-style" content="black"/><meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-title" content="The Atlantic"/><meta name="keywords" content="different branches of the military, American troops, careful process of decision making, practical realities of war, American forces, good decisions, warrior ethos, much choice.General Joseph Votel, Trump’s case, General H. R. McMaster, president’s Twitter feed, national defense, Trump, missile strike, generation of officers, senior military officers, long-standing U.S., generals, world of national security, Trump’s pronouncements, field commanders, American drone, General James Mattis, chain of command, General Joseph Votel, John F. Kennedy, rank serve, unnecessary wars, Iran’s leaders, Trump’s statements, key allies, North Korea, America’s local allies, White House, Don Bolduc, self-sacrifice, deep state, military exercises, special authority, terrorist attacks, advantage of the good relationship, command positions, immediate resignations of the secretary of defense, military leadership, president, worse problems, trust of allies, McMaster’s tenure, highest ranks, Barack Obama" itemID="#keywords"/><meta name="news_keywords" content="different branches of the military, American troops, careful process of decision making, practical realities of war, American forces, good decisions, warrior ethos, much choice.General Joseph Votel, Trump’s case, General H. R. McMaster, president’s Twitter feed, national defense, Trump, missile strike, generation of officers, senior military officers, long-standing U.S., generals, world of national security, Trump’s pronouncements, field commanders, American drone, General James Mattis, chain of command, General Joseph Votel, John F. Kennedy, rank serve, unnecessary wars, Iran’s leaders, Trump’s statements, key allies, North Korea, America’s local allies, White House, Don Bolduc, self-sacrifice, deep state, military exercises, special authority, terrorist attacks, advantage of the good relationship, command positions, immediate resignations of the secretary of defense, military leadership, president, worse problems, trust of allies, McMaster’s tenure, highest ranks, Barack Obama"/><meta name="sailthru.title" content="Top Military Officers Unload on Trump"/><meta name="sailthru.description" content="The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?"/><meta name="sailthru.tags" content="politics,international,features,author-mark-bowden"/><meta name="sailthru.date" content="2019-10-07T16:00:00Z"/><link rel="preload" as="font" type="font/woff2" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/packages/fonts/garamond/AGaramondPro-Regular.woff2" crossorigin=""/><link rel="preload" as="font" type="font/woff2" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/packages/fonts/graphik/Graphik-Regular-Web.woff2" crossorigin=""/><link rel="preload" as="font" type="font/woff2" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/packages/fonts/graphik/Graphik-Semibold-Web.woff2" crossorigin=""/><link rel="preload" as="font" type="font/woff2" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/packages/fonts/logic/LogicMonospace-Medium.woff2" crossorigin=""/><link rel="preload" as="font" type="font/woff2" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/packages/fonts/logic/LogicMonospace-Regular.woff2" crossorigin=""/><script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"What Top Military Officers Really Think About Trump","alternativeHeadline":"Top Military Officers Unload on Trump","description":"The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?","url":"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/","datePublished":"2019-10-07T16:00:00Z","dateModified":"2019-11-06T19:28:34Z","isAccessibleForFree":false,"hasPart":{"@type":"WebPageElement","isAccessibleForFree":false,"cssSelector":".article-content-body"},"publisher":{"@id":"https://www.theatlantic.com/#publisher"},"mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/"},"image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","width":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":1080},"height":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":1080},"url":"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/uWGeft6Z7eS5gbVYszpX8TSZ_qc=/438x0:1563x1125/1080x1080/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg"},{"@type":"ImageObject","width":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":1200},"height":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":900},"url":"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/eVrbHiGUCXcMilpQaCn8f6ArEwc=/249x0:1749x1125/1200x900/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg"},{"@type":"ImageObject","width":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":1600},"height":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":900},"url":"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/8ZQnWt4MrQ7mwL_1MENRl71km2w=/0x0:2000x1125/1600x900/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg"},{"@type":"ImageObject","width":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":960},"height":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":540},"url":"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/5NaBGbAvnUlhPmwQzQym3a_S66o=/0x0:2000x1125/960x540/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg"},{"@type":"ImageObject","width":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":540},"height":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","unitCode":"E37","value":540},"url":"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/KzI80wZNkPsosAFgbaa7WVoxVyQ=/438x0:1563x1125/540x540/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg"}],"author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Mark Bowden","sameAs":"https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-bowden/"}],"articleSection":"Politics"}</script><link rel="preload" as="image" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/foPND8sZZf18ptMXaVoMfqlwLPc=/0x0:2000x1125/1440x810/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg" imageSrcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/hBKw1FPwXcCEbArGE1dBFnfl_i8=/0x0:2000x1125/640x360/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 640w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/W72GiSytnb1oR0Y88tLwbtbeuJg=/0x0:2000x1125/750x422/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 750w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MptP3lmL4b6KMs62gmRpb7cB_LM=/0x0:2000x1125/850x478/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 850w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/CQifVYY66JLkUE-DphGvoQhHzpE=/0x0:2000x1125/1536x864/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/yw_4l8iO2j3zA-041NJvirRgx-I=/0x0:2000x1125/1920x1080/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 1920w" imageSizes="(min-width: 1920px) 1920px, 100vw"/><meta name="next-head-count" content="64"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/b95b4320f6718b0c.css" as="style"/><link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/b95b4320f6718b0c.css" data-n-g=""/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/3692c2fff3abdffb.css" as="style"/><link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/3692c2fff3abdffb.css" data-n-p=""/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/5097cfbd4c6bc22d.css" as="style"/><link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/5097cfbd4c6bc22d.css" data-n-p=""/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/1dce418bce276353.css" as="style"/><link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/1dce418bce276353.css" data-n-p=""/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/3e5015900a74444f.css" as="style"/><link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/3e5015900a74444f.css" data-n-p=""/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/0a33952225252f86.css" as="style"/><link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/0a33952225252f86.css" data-n-p=""/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/46047a12f0663966.css" as="style"/><link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/css/46047a12f0663966.css"/><noscript data-n-css=""></noscript><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/9587.e62a84643012a04f.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/5303-a81934d6e8e761ae.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/649.81412a92c899897e.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/webpack-2462136f7fddc57d.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/framework-ca706bf673a13738.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/main-7cf71189bb4b30b4.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/pages/_app-ff1d27643a500c40.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/6729-7978443139836095.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/5303-a81934d6e8e761ae.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/9843-3905ec2636af2c3c.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/899-30da5ef51c1b6fdb.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/2912-ebf029ed4116b01f.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/4747-71d47472f5c4beea.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/6392-1397c4f8500d73b6.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/4947-02b1b9c56798b167.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/3297-031e2fc5be155f31.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/365-e835216503d223da.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/1124-b1cf3a9d4ae92dcb.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/9310-d0d5baafd7a7f3b8.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/5169-3adfae2cce1eb773.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/6346-ef3edb895c92109b.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/663-0fc7e1b7a52e2587.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/2544-aaa838d354b1cbbb.js" as="script"/><link rel="preload" href="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/pages/%5Bchannel%5D/archive/%5Byear%5D/%5Bmonth%5D/%5Bslug%5D/%5Bid%5D-0fee4688858b18b9.js" as="script"/></head><body><div id="__next"><div data-category="story page" data-event-surface="article"><div></div><nav class="Nav_root__HcZek" aria-labelledby="site-navigation" data-category="Site Nav" data-event-module="site nav" id="main-navigation"><div class="Nav_mainNav__iPsWc"><a href="#main-content" class="Nav_skipLink__P4Y5R">Skip to content</a><h2 id="site-navigation" class="Nav_visuallyHide__Lzzui">Site Navigation</h2><div class="Nav_flexContainer__9iJ4H"><ul class="Nav_leftContainer__Xs54R"><li class="Nav_navListItem__l2afO Nav_visuallyHideOnMobile__N9bs2"><a href="/" class="Nav_navLink__34Bol"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 87.83 134" class="Nav_bigA__c1aIb"><title>The Atlantic</title><path d="M24.48 95.13c-.56 0-.74-.37-.74-.93l13.08-55.88c.19-.94.93-.94 1.12 0L50.09 94.2c0 .56-.19.93-.75.93zM48.22.19a22.54 22.54 0 01-7.66 5.05c-.75.19-.94.37-1.13 1.12l-26.72 112.5c-2 9-4.67 10.66-11.77 11.22a.88.88 0 00-.94.93v2.06a.88.88 0 00.92.93h25.6a.88.88 0 00.93-.93V131a.88.88 0 00-.93-.93c-9.53 0-10.47-2.81-8.6-10.66l4.49-19.25a1.18 1.18 0 011.12-.93h26.74a1.19 1.19 0 011.13.93l5 23.18c1.12 5-.75 6.17-7.1 6.73a.88.88 0 00-.93.93v2.06a.88.88 0 00.93.93h37.62a.88.88 0 00.94-.93V131a.88.88 0 00-.94-.93c-5.79-.56-8.22-1.5-9.34-6.73L49.34.57c-.19-.56-.75-.75-1.12-.38"></path></svg></a></li><li class="Nav_navListItem__l2afO Nav_hamburgerLi__gP6Dn"><button class="NavHamburgerButton_root__OgJkB" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="expanded-nav" aria-label="Open Main Menu" data-action="Open Menu"><div class="NavHamburgerButton_burger__jIWmI"><div class="NavHamburgerButton_box__J5rDn"><div class="NavHamburgerButton_inner__dKlIy"></div></div></div></button><div class="Nav_expandedNav__o5Zj_"><div hidden="" class="ExpandedNav_root__r3hKE" id="expanded-nav"><div class="ExpandedNav_mobileHeader__QEenD" data-event-element="mobile links"><button class="ExpandedNav_searchButton__85mWm" aria-label="Search The Atlantic" data-action="open search"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 16 16" class="ExpandedNav_searchIcon__2EngD"><path d="M15.85 15.15l-5.27-5.28a6 6 0 10-.71.71l5.28 5.27a.48.48 0 00.7 0 .48.48 0 000-.7zM1 6a5 5 0 115 5 5 5 0 01-5-5z"></path></svg></button><div><a class="ExpandedNav_mostPopular__EbSyn" href="/most-popular/" data-action="expanded">Popular</a><a class="ExpandedNav_latest__zSrBe" href="/latest/" data-action="expanded">Latest</a><a class="ExpandedNav_newsletters__W83ni" href="/newsletters/" data-action="expanded">Newsletters</a></div></div><div class="ExpandedNav_container__sDhOz"><div class="ExpandedNav_sections__oGeXo" data-event-element="sections"><h2 class="ExpandedNav_title__C8QcN ExpandedNav_sectionTitle___xWBI">Sections</h2><ul class="ExpandedNav_sectionUl__mLUY1"><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/politics/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Politics</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/ideas/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Ideas</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/category/fiction/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Fiction</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/technology/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Technology</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/science/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Science</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Photo</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/business/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Business</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/culture/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Culture</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/projects/planet/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Planet</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/international/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Global</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/books/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Books</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/audio/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Audio</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/health/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Health</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/education/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Education</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/projects/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Projects</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/category/features/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Features</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/family/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Family</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/events/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Events</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/category/washington-week-atlantic/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Washington Week</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/progress/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Progress</a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_sectionLi__tZz7K"><a href="/newsletters/" data-action="expanded" class="ExpandedNav_sectionLink__3iXo9">Newsletters</a></li></ul></div><div class="ExpandedNav_moreLinks__G4VPb" data-event-element="more links"><ul class="ExpandedNav_moreLinksList__u0bVY"><li class="ExpandedNav_moreLinksListItem__UrTkv"><a href="/archive/" class="ExpandedNav_moreLinksItem__JhFzM" data-action="archive"><img alt="" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV ExpandedNav_moreLinksImg__IY3fl" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/nav-archive-promo-5541b02ae92f1a9276249e1c6c2534ee.png" width="80" height="80"/><span>Explore The Atlantic Archive</span></a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_moreLinksListItem__UrTkv"><a href="/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/" class="ExpandedNav_moreLinksItem__JhFzM" data-action="crossword"><svg width="80" height="80" viewBox="0 0 64 64" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="ExpandedNav_moreLinksImg__IY3fl"><g clip-path="url(#crossword-promo_svg__clip0_1939_66324)"><path fill="#E7131A" d="M0 0h64v64H0z"></path><path d="M37.988 26.531H26.516v11.474h11.472V26.53zM37.988 38.805H26.516V50.28h11.472V38.805zM25.715 26.531H14.243v11.474h11.472V26.53zM50.26 26.531H38.789v11.474h11.473V26.53zM36.469 16.842c.096.183.156.39.156.612a1.326 1.326 0 11-1.326-1.327c.197 0 .384.047.552.124.167-.464.303-1.137.338-1.993h-5.287c-.039.968-.217 1.908-.527 2.584.096.183.156.39.156.612a1.326 1.326 0 11-1.327-1.327c.198 0 .384.047.552.124.167-.464.303-1.137.339-1.993h-3.58v11.474h11.472V14.258h-.992c-.038.968-.216 1.908-.526 2.584z" fill="#fff"></path><path d="M47.487 17.853a.4.4 0 010-.8c.135 0 .36-.27.552-.803a1.313 1.313 0 00-.552-.124 1.326 1.326 0 101.326 1.327c0-.222-.06-.428-.156-.612-.282.615-.674 1.012-1.17 1.012zM41.393 17.853a.4.4 0 010-.8c.135 0 .36-.27.552-.803a1.313 1.313 0 00-.552-.124 1.326 1.326 0 101.326 1.327c0-.222-.06-.428-.156-.612-.282.615-.673 1.012-1.17 1.012zM35.298 17.853a.4.4 0 010-.8c.135 0 .36-.27.552-.803a1.313 1.313 0 00-.552-.124 1.326 1.326 0 101.326 1.327c0-.222-.06-.428-.156-.612-.282.615-.673 1.012-1.17 1.012zM29.204 17.853a.4.4 0 010-.8c.136 0 .36-.27.552-.803a1.313 1.313 0 00-.552-.124 1.326 1.326 0 101.327 1.327c0-.222-.06-.428-.156-.612-.282.615-.673 1.012-1.17 1.012zM23.11 17.853a.4.4 0 010-.8c.135 0 .36-.27.552-.803a1.313 1.313 0 00-.552-.124 1.326 1.326 0 101.326 1.327c0-.222-.06-.428-.156-.612-.282.615-.673 1.012-1.17 1.012zM17.016 17.853a.4.4 0 010-.8c.135 0 .36-.27.552-.803a1.313 1.313 0 00-.552-.124 1.326 1.326 0 101.326 1.327c0-.222-.06-.428-.156-.612-.282.615-.672 1.012-1.17 1.012z" fill="#E7131A"></path><path d="M50.66 13.458h-1.476c-.072-1.85-.652-3.605-1.698-3.605-1.045 0-1.624 1.753-1.697 3.605h-2.7c-.071-1.85-.651-3.605-1.698-3.605-1.045 0-1.624 1.753-1.697 3.605h-2.7c-.072-1.85-.652-3.605-1.698-3.605-1.045 0-1.624 1.753-1.697 3.605H30.9c-.072-1.85-.652-3.605-1.698-3.605-1.045 0-1.624 1.753-1.697 3.605h-2.697c-.072-1.85-.652-3.605-1.698-3.605-1.045 0-1.624 1.753-1.697 3.605h-2.7c-.071-1.85-.651-3.605-1.698-3.605-1.045 0-1.624 1.753-1.697 3.605h-1.476a.4.4 0 00-.4.4V50.68c0 .22.18.4.4.4H50.66a.4.4 0 00.4-.4V13.858c0-.221-.178-.4-.4-.4zm-20.565.8c-.035.855-.171 1.528-.338 1.992-.192.532-.417.803-.552.803a.4.4 0 000 .8c.497 0 .888-.398 1.17-1.012.31-.676.488-1.616.527-2.583h5.288c-.036.855-.172 1.528-.339 1.992-.192.532-.417.803-.552.803a.4.4 0 000 .8c.498 0 .888-.398 1.17-1.012.311-.676.489-1.616.528-2.583h.992V25.73H26.515V14.258h3.58zm20.166 23.747H38.788V26.53h11.473v11.474zM14.243 26.53h11.472v11.474H14.243V26.53zm34.57-9.078a1.326 1.326 0 11-1.327-1.327c.198 0 .384.047.552.124-.192.532-.416.803-.552.803a.4.4 0 000 .8c.498 0 .888-.398 1.17-1.012.097.184.157.39.157.612zm-7.42.4c.497 0 .888-.398 1.17-1.012.096.183.156.39.156.612a1.326 1.326 0 11-1.326-1.327c.197 0 .384.047.552.124-.192.532-.417.803-.552.803a.4.4 0 000 .8zm-3.405 20.152H26.515V26.53h11.473v11.474zM24.436 17.453a1.326 1.326 0 11-1.326-1.327c.197 0 .384.047.552.124-.192.532-.417.803-.552.803a.4.4 0 000 .8c.497 0 .888-.398 1.17-1.012.097.184.156.39.156.612zm-6.094 0a1.326 1.326 0 11-1.326-1.327c.198 0 .384.047.552.124-.192.532-.417.803-.552.803a.4.4 0 000 .8c.498 0 .888-.398 1.17-1.012.097.184.156.39.156.612zm8.173 21.352h11.473V50.28H26.515V38.805zm20.971-28.152c.253 0 .817.96.892 2.805h-1.782c.075-1.844.638-2.805.89-2.805zm-6.093 0c.253 0 .817.96.891 2.805h-1.782c.076-1.844.638-2.805.89-2.805zm-6.095 0c.253 0 .817.96.892 2.805h-1.782c.075-1.844.638-2.805.89-2.805zm-6.094 0c.253 0 .817.96.891 2.805h-1.781c.075-1.844.637-2.805.89-2.805zm-6.094 0c.252 0 .816.96.89 2.805h-1.78c.074-1.844.637-2.805.89-2.805zm-6.094 0c.253 0 .817.96.891 2.805h-1.781c.075-1.844.637-2.805.89-2.805z" fill="#000"></path></g><defs><clipPath id="crossword-promo_svg__clip0_1939_66324"><path fill="#fff" d="M0 0h64v64H0z"></path></clipPath></defs></svg><span>Play The Atlantic crossword</span></a></li><li class="ExpandedNav_moreLinksListItem__UrTkv"><a href="/audio/" class="ExpandedNav_moreLinksItem__JhFzM" data-action="audio"><svg width="80" height="80" viewBox="0 0 64 64" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="ExpandedNav_moreLinksImg__IY3fl"><path fill="#FAF4EB" d="M0 0h63.998v64H0z"></path><path d="M25.267 31.27h-1.171v12.138h1.17a.392.392 0 00.393-.392V31.662a.392.392 0 00-.392-.393v.002zM38.34 31.662v11.354c0 .217.175.392.392.392h1.171V31.271h-1.17a.392.392 0 00-.393.392v-.002z" fill="#000"></path><path d="M44.605 33.479c.106-.69.163-1.398.163-2.12 0-7.343-5.718-13.296-12.77-13.296-7.05 0-12.768 5.953-12.768 13.296 0 .722.057 1.429.163 2.12l-1.413.58v6.56l2.033.834a3.194 3.194 0 001.586 1.65c.411.193.869.305 1.353.305h.34V31.271h-.34c-.174 0-.345.017-.511.044a3.14 3.14 0 00-1.236.48c-.005-.145-.011-.289-.011-.434 0-6.25 4.847-11.334 10.805-11.334 5.958 0 10.805 5.085 10.805 11.334 0 .145-.005.29-.01.433a3.163 3.163 0 00-1.748-.523h-.34v12.137h.34a3.197 3.197 0 002.939-1.953l2.033-.835v-6.56l-1.413-.58v-.001zM35.71 49.806a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM30.235 50.8a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .997zM28.059 48.218a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM32.104 50.072a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM33.105 47.731a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM29.675 48.09a.498.498 0 10.996 0 .498.498 0 00-.996 0zM35.71 48.156a.498.498 0 10-.997 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM37.508 49.085a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM39 47.336a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM39.159 45.754a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM40.74 46.07a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM40.266 44.33a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM34.47 49.983a.498.498 0 10-.996 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM27.746 51.075a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM29.736 51.668a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM32.375 52.8a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM48.894 42.2a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM50.794 25.623a.497.497 0 10.7.082.497.497 0 00-.7-.082zM50.32 27.679a.497.497 0 10.7.082.497.497 0 00-.7-.082zM48.52 25.229a.497.497 0 10.78-.614.497.497 0 00-.78.614zM48.809 20.633a.498.498 0 10.616.781.498.498 0 00-.616-.781zM52.468 24.48a.497.497 0 10.78-.614.497.497 0 00-.78.615zM54.84 24.769a.498.498 0 10.617.781.498.498 0 00-.616-.781zM55.338 27.141a.497.497 0 10.782-.617.497.497 0 10-.782.617zM53.817 27.018a.497.497 0 10-.781.614.497.497 0 00.781-.614zM57.145 29.216a.498.498 0 10-.616-.781.498.498 0 00.616.781zM55.064 23.779a.498.498 0 10-.617-.782.498.498 0 00.617.782zM40.054 13.142a.498.498 0 10-.617-.781.498.498 0 00.617.781zM53.735 21.578a.498.498 0 10-.616-.78.498.498 0 00.616.78zM55.85 31.981a.497.497 0 10-.78.614.497.497 0 00.78-.614zM54.84 33.58a.498.498 0 10.617.781.498.498 0 00-.616-.78zM56.316 35.18a.497.497 0 10.617.784.497.497 0 00-.617-.783zM55.966 37.762a.498.498 0 10.616.781.498.498 0 00-.616-.781zM56.498 33.18a.498.498 0 10.617.781.498.498 0 00-.617-.781zM53.13 41.909a.498.498 0 10.617.78.498.498 0 00-.617-.78zM42.078 49.183a.498.498 0 10.617.781.498.498 0 00-.617-.781zM40.255 50.41a.498.498 0 10.616.782.498.498 0 00-.616-.782zM36.42 51.49a.498.498 0 10.618.782.498.498 0 00-.617-.782zM33.851 51.728a.498.498 0 10.617.78.498.498 0 00-.617-.78zM38.312 50.842a.498.498 0 10.616.781.498.498 0 00-.616-.78zM50.653 43.918a.498.498 0 10-.617-.78.498.498 0 00.617.78zM50.393 44.936a.498.498 0 10.616.782.498.498 0 00-.616-.782zM57.489 31.298a.497.497 0 10-.782.617.497.497 0 10.782-.617zM51.652 19.689a.497.497 0 10-.617-.784.497.497 0 00.617.784zM51.154 21.688a.498.498 0 10-.616-.782.498.498 0 00.616.782zM48.69 19.641a.497.497 0 10.781-.614.497.497 0 00-.781.614zM48.465 17.63a.498.498 0 10-.617-.782.498.498 0 00.617.781zM46.498 16.596a.5.5 0 00.554-.435.5.5 0 00-.99-.118.5.5 0 00.436.553zM46.244 18.243a.5.5 0 00.435.554.5.5 0 00.554-.436.5.5 0 00-.435-.553.5.5 0 00-.554.435zM45.325 15.307a.5.5 0 00.554-.435.5.5 0 00-.989-.118.5.5 0 00.435.553zM42.096 13.917a.5.5 0 00.554-.435.5.5 0 00-.435-.553.5.5 0 00-.554.434.5.5 0 00.435.554zM49.606 18.61a.5.5 0 00.554-.435.5.5 0 00-.989-.119.5.5 0 00.435.554zM45.478 17.63a.498.498 0 10-.616-.782.498.498 0 00.616.781zM43.392 17.311a.497.497 0 10-.782.617.497.497 0 10.782-.617zM54.34 36.596a.498.498 0 10.781-.618.498.498 0 00-.782.618zM53.384 36.69a.498.498 0 10-.617-.782.498.498 0 00.617.782zM51.95 37.01a.497.497 0 10-.7-.082c.172.217.483.253.7.083zM53.176 31.27a.498.498 0 10.616.782.498.498 0 00-.616-.781zM54.792 30.407a.498.498 0 10.616.782.498.498 0 00-.616-.782zM52.13 32.454a.498.498 0 10.617.781.498.498 0 00-.617-.781zM53.656 35.098a.498.498 0 10-.616-.781.498.498 0 00.616.781zM53.384 30.417a.498.498 0 10-.617-.782.498.498 0 00.617.782zM54.654 28.826a.498.498 0 10-.616-.782.498.498 0 00.616.782zM51.187 31.662a.497.497 0 10-.781.616.497.497 0 10.781-.616zM48.774 26.268a.497.497 0 10.7.082.497.497 0 00-.7-.082zM49.475 29.322a.498.498 0 10-.617-.781.498.498 0 00.617.781zM49.974 33.465a.498.498 0 10-.617-.782.498.498 0 00.617.782zM50.242 35.438a.498.498 0 10-.616-.78.498.498 0 00.616.78zM48.915 34.097a.497.497 0 10-.662.742.497.497 0 00.662-.742zM47.957 35.54a.497.497 0 10-.662.743.497.497 0 10.662-.743zM47.582 37.525a.497.497 0 10-.662.743.497.497 0 10.662-.743zM51.792 34.599a.498.498 0 10-.617-.782.498.498 0 00.617.782zM49.54 29.909a.498.498 0 10.617.781.498.498 0 00-.617-.781zM52.032 28.215a.498.498 0 10.617.78.498.498 0 00-.617-.78zM53.158 26.426a.497.497 0 10-.7-.082c.171.217.483.253.7.082zM48.578 32.179a.498.498 0 10-.617-.782.498.498 0 00.617.782zM50.89 30.403a.5.5 0 00.988.118.5.5 0 00-.989-.118zM46.624 25.265a.498.498 0 10.617.78.498.498 0 00-.617-.78z" fill="#000"></path><path d="M45.827 31.83a.497.497 0 10.7.082.497.497 0 00-.7-.083zM47.58 33.16a.497.497 0 10-.781.613.497.497 0 00.781-.614zM47.74 27.738a.498.498 0 10-.616-.782.498.498 0 00.616.782zM47.95 30.243a.5.5 0 00-.99-.119.5.5 0 00.99.119zM46.367 30.243a.5.5 0 00-.99-.119.5.5 0 00.99.119zM46.683 28.345a.5.5 0 00-.99-.119.5.5 0 00.99.119zM45.734 26.921a.5.5 0 00-.99-.118.5.5 0 00.99.118zM51.545 23.233a.497.497 0 10.781-.614.497.497 0 00-.781.614zM6.538 28.26a.499.499 0 10.51-.853.499.499 0 00-.51.852zM7.67 26.127a.499.499 0 10.51-.854.499.499 0 00-.51.854zM22.566 14.925a.499.499 0 10.51-.853.499.499 0 00-.51.853zM14.93 46.545a.499.499 0 10-.51.854.499.499 0 00.51-.854zM14.43 45.648a.499.499 0 10-.856-.512.499.499 0 00.856.512zM8.545 24.343a.499.499 0 10.51-.853.499.499 0 00-.51.853zM9.538 22.678a.5.5 0 10.51-.853.5.5 0 00-.51.853zM8.556 29.822a.499.499 0 10-.856-.512.499.499 0 00.856.512zM17.15 16.267a.498.498 0 10-.616-.781.498.498 0 00.616.781zM6.896 33.144a.498.498 0 10-.616-.782.498.498 0 00.616.782zM9.125 33.325a.498.498 0 10-.616-.781.498.498 0 00.616.781zM7.207 34.31a.498.498 0 10-.782.617.498.498 0 00.782-.618zM15.916 46.436a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM16.595 48.48a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .997zM18.442 49.436a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM13.869 18.485a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM18.393 15.409a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM21.04 14.363a.497.497 0 10-.701-.704.497.497 0 00.702.704zM25.524 12.75a.497.497 0 10-.702-.704.497.497 0 00.702.704zM28.182 12.285a.497.497 0 10-.702-.704.497.497 0 00.702.704zM18.673 47.005a.498.498 0 10-.997 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM12.707 42.075a.498.498 0 10-.001.997.498.498 0 000-.997zM12.512 39.8a.498.498 0 10-.07-.993.498.498 0 00.07.994zM10.954 40.65a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM11.492 41.112a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM9.543 41.143a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM14.316 40.844a.498.498 0 10-.996 0 .498.498 0 00.996 0zM13.704 38.478a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM15.03 36.2a.498.498 0 10-.997 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM14.652 33.933a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM11.635 35.752a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM12.41 33.66a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .997zM8.618 37.754a.498.498 0 10-.996 0 .498.498 0 00.996 0zM8.329 39.347a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM11.083 38.577a.498.498 0 10-.997 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM10.124 37.434a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM7.317 36.843a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM12.525 37.447a.497.497 0 10-.702-.704.497.497 0 00.702.704zM12.242 29.982a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM9.54 35.253a.498.498 0 10-.997 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM11.192 33.647a.498.498 0 10-.996 0 .498.498 0 00.996 0zM15.171 28.82a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .996zM17.296 28.661a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM16.7 29.59a.498.498 0 10-.997 0 .498.498 0 00.996 0zM18.282 30.064a.498.498 0 10-.996 0 .498.498 0 00.996 0zM19.386 21.03a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM17.714 32.372a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM16.665 33.488a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM16.225 35.07a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM16.665 36.63a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .996zM11.908 25.748a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM15.123 21.001a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM15.047 20.157a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM16.58 18.614a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .997zM15.621 17.62a.498.498 0 10.001-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM13.37 20.775a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM11.91 20.248a.498.498 0 10.001-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM11.35 21.843a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM14.343 26.426a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM13.206 25.16a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .996zM11.76 27.034a.498.498 0 10.997 0 .498.498 0 00-.996 0zM9.499 25.113a.498.498 0 10.997 0 .498.498 0 00-.997 0zM13.357 22.923a.498.498 0 10-.07-.994.498.498 0 00.07.994zM11.248 23.943a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM9.829 30.444a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM6.477 30.706a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM40.136 14a.5.5 0 10.857.513.5.5 0 00-.857-.512zM39.218 15.744a.499.499 0 10.51-.853.499.499 0 00-.51.853zM39.038 17.507a.499.499 0 10.51-.853.499.499 0 00-.51.853zM37.456 17.982a.499.499 0 10.51-.853.499.499 0 00-.51.853zM41.253 15.885a.499.499 0 10.51-.854.499.499 0 00-.51.854zM41.353 17.536a.499.499 0 10-.857-.512.499.499 0 00.857.512zM8.566 31.717a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM9.944 31.593a.498.498 0 10.997 0 .498.498 0 00-.997 0zM11.185 29.07a.498.498 0 10.996 0 .498.498 0 00-.996 0zM8.995 27.706a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM10.51 28.41a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM13.48 29.227a.498.498 0 10.001-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM15.417 32.092a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM13.704 32.215a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM14.501 30.37a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .996zM44.77 48.378a.498.498 0 00-.518.85.498.498 0 00.518-.85zM44.012 45.958a.499.499 0 00.517-.85.498.498 0 00-.517.85zM42.917 46.809a.498.498 0 10-.851-.517.498.498 0 00.851.517zM46.904 44.45a.498.498 0 10.516-.849.498.498 0 00-.517.85zM46.057 44.471a.498.498 0 10-.852-.516.498.498 0 00.852.516zM44.79 43.206a.498.498 0 10-.851-.517.498.498 0 00.851.517zM46.407 46.65a.498.498 0 10-.852-.516.498.498 0 00.852.517zM44.657 47.563a.498.498 0 10-.852-.516.498.498 0 00.852.516zM46.963 47.375a.498.498 0 00-.517.85.498.498 0 00.517-.85zM39.595 48.876a.498.498 0 00-.518.85.498.498 0 00.518-.85zM41.32 47.967a.498.498 0 00-.517.849.498.498 0 00.517-.85zM36.547 47.83a.498.498 0 10.851.517.498.498 0 00-.851-.516zM33.264 45.833a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM35.394 45.468a.498.498 0 10-.997 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM36.23 46.249a.498.498 0 10.852.517.498.498 0 00-.852-.517zM37.813 44.351a.498.498 0 10.852.517.498.498 0 00-.852-.517zM47.713 45.044a.498.498 0 00-.517.85.498.498 0 00.517-.85zM49.34 44.473a.499.499 0 00-.518.85.498.498 0 00.518-.85zM48.94 46.502a.498.498 0 10-.516.849.498.498 0 00.516-.849zM50.182 41.493a.498.498 0 10.347.933.498.498 0 00-.347-.933zM49.576 40.558a.498.498 0 10-.934.348.498.498 0 00.934-.348zM46.79 42.667a.498.498 0 10-.346-.933.498.498 0 00.347.933zM47.899 39.962a.498.498 0 10-.933.348.498.498 0 00.933-.348zM51.826 41.47a.497.497 0 10-.346-.932.497.497 0 00.346.933zM49.417 38.224a.498.498 0 10-.933.347.498.498 0 00.933-.347zM50.899 38.714a.498.498 0 10-.933.348.498.498 0 00.933-.348zM49.917 36.489a.498.498 0 10-.934.348.498.498 0 00.934-.348zM51.808 37.923a.498.498 0 10.347.933.498.498 0 00-.347-.933zM25.17 15.247a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM25.17 16.549a.498.498 0 10.998 0 .498.498 0 00-.997 0zM41.896 19.856a.498.498 0 10-.996 0 .498.498 0 00.996 0zM43.262 18.78a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.997zM52.1 43.393a.498.498 0 10-.414.906.498.498 0 00.414-.906zM54.618 40.212a.496.496 0 00-.494.501.496.496 0 00.502.494.496.496 0 00.494-.502.496.496 0 00-.502-.493zM54.758 37.561a.496.496 0 00-.493.501.496.496 0 00.501.494.496.496 0 00.494-.502.496.496 0 00-.502-.493zM53.63 39.454a.496.496 0 00-.502-.493.497.497 0 10.502.494zM15.092 23.477a.498.498 0 10.347.932.498.498 0 00-.347-.932zM16.58 20.122a.498.498 0 10.996 0 .498.498 0 00-.997 0zM15.584 26.195a.498.498 0 10.997 0 .498.498 0 00-.997 0zM18.37 27.473a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM17.454 22.898a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM17.454 24.796a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM19.924 19.307a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM18.988 23.441a.498.498 0 10-.07-.994.498.498 0 00.07.994zM16.878 21.428a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM30.591 13.057a.497.497 0 10.346.932.497.497 0 00-.346-.932zM30.323 15.714a.498.498 0 10-.346-.933.498.498 0 00.346.933zM32.607 12.294a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM27.075 16.225a.498.498 0 10.933-.348.498.498 0 00-.933.348zM32.284 16.261a.498.498 0 10-.347-.933.498.498 0 00.347.933zM36.416 13.586a.499.499 0 10-.71-.699.499.499 0 00.71.7zM37.33 12.522a.499.499 0 10-.712-.7.499.499 0 00.712.7zM35.19 12.328a.499.499 0 10-.71-.7.499.499 0 00.71.7zM35.425 16.1a.499.499 0 10.697-.709.499.499 0 00-.697.709zM37.708 15.619a.499.499 0 10-.712-.7.499.499 0 00.712.7zM37.516 14.336a.499.499 0 10.697-.708.499.499 0 00-.697.708zM32.283 13.41a.499.499 0 10.711.7.499.499 0 00-.711-.7zM43.28 15.606a.499.499 0 10.71.7.499.499 0 00-.71-.7zM43.688 14.83a.499.499 0 10-.711-.7.499.499 0 00.71.7zM34.645 14.847a.499.499 0 10-.711-.699.499.499 0 00.711.7zM22.876 13.54a.499.499 0 10.51-.854.499.499 0 00-.51.855zM26.427 13.996a.499.499 0 10.51-.853.499.499 0 00-.51.853zM28.11 13.745a.499.499 0 10.857.511.499.499 0 00-.856-.511zM30.125 12.127a.499.499 0 10.51-.853.499.499 0 00-.51.853zM19.727 46.404a.498.498 0 10.139-.688.497.497 0 00-.14.69v-.002zM21.264 16.28a.498.498 0 10.584-.807.498.498 0 00-.584.807zM23.283 17.712a.497.497 0 10-.806-.584.497.497 0 00.806.584zM21.883 20.704a.497.497 0 10-.806-.584.497.497 0 00.806.584zM22.367 18.346a.498.498 0 10-.584.806.498.498 0 00.584-.806zM23.632 19.295a.498.498 0 10-.583.806.498.498 0 00.583-.806zM21.258 21.825a.498.498 0 10-.583.807.498.498 0 00.583-.807zM19.194 44.97a.498.498 0 10-.984-.156.498.498 0 00.984.155zM17.093 44.084a.498.498 0 10-.156.983.498.498 0 00.156-.983zM18.877 43.184a.498.498 0 10.156-.983.498.498 0 00-.156.983zM19.72 47.355a.498.498 0 10-.156.983.498.498 0 00.156-.983zM13.898 44.147a.498.498 0 10.156-.983.498.498 0 00-.156.983zM11.166 43.092a.498.498 0 10-.156.983.498.498 0 00.156-.983zM12.732 44.693a.497.497 0 10-.643.758.497.497 0 00.643-.758zM25.903 49.082a.498.498 0 10-.156.983.498.498 0 00.156-.983zM25.294 48.085a.497.497 0 10.983.156.497.497 0 00-.983-.156zM24.187 46.662a.498.498 0 10.983.155.498.498 0 00-.983-.155zM25.294 45.397a.498.498 0 10.983.155.498.498 0 00-.983-.155zM26.56 43.657a.498.498 0 10.983.155.498.498 0 00-.983-.155zM26.718 47.136a.498.498 0 10.983.156.498.498 0 00-.983-.156zM27.826 45.397a.498.498 0 10.983.155.498.498 0 00-.983-.155zM29.567 46.187a.497.497 0 10.982.156.497.497 0 00-.982-.156zM31.308 45.238a.498.498 0 10.983.156.498.498 0 00-.983-.156zM31.308 47.294a.498.498 0 10.983.156.498.498 0 00-.983-.156zM26.826 51.355a.498.498 0 10-.156.983.498.498 0 00.156-.983zM30.548 44.587a.498.498 0 10-.997 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM29.282 42.847a.498.498 0 10-.996 0 .498.498 0 00.996 0zM29.575 38.505a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM31.662 35.834a.498.498 0 10-.997 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM30.306 40.375a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM32.148 40.878a.498.498 0 10-.996 0 .498.498 0 00.996 0zM31.79 37.449a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM31.722 43.48a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM30.529 42.559a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM29.302 36.017a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM28.369 37.669a.498.498 0 10-.997 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM28.526 40.805a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM26.943 39.856a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM27.832 41.465a.497.497 0 10-.782.616.497.497 0 10.782-.617zM34.047 41.036a.498.498 0 10-.997 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM34.413 43.321a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM33.305 44.903a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM36.224 34.494a.498.498 0 10-.156.983.498.498 0 00.156-.983zM32.743 34.494a.498.498 0 10-.156.983.498.498 0 00.156-.983zM34.484 35.601a.498.498 0 10-.156.984.498.498 0 00.156-.984zM33.692 37.341a.498.498 0 10-.156.984.498.498 0 00.156-.984zM34.642 39.081a.498.498 0 10-.156.983.498.498 0 00.156-.983zM32.585 39.081a.498.498 0 10-.156.983.498.498 0 00.156-.983zM27.256 36.342a.498.498 0 10-.983-.156.498.498 0 00.983.156zM27.732 34.76a.498.498 0 10-.983-.156.498.498 0 00.983.156zM24.091 50.586a.497.497 0 10.2.974.497.497 0 00-.2-.974zM18.644 19.065a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM20.551 18.461a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM23.87 48.901a.498.498 0 10-.993.073.498.498 0 00.993-.073zM22.269 50.1a.498.498 0 10.072.994.498.498 0 00-.072-.994zM20.79 49.487a.498.498 0 10.072.993.498.498 0 00-.072-.993zM22.41 47.385a.498.498 0 10.994-.073.498.498 0 00-.993.073zM21.18 47.61a.498.498 0 10.072.994.498.498 0 00-.072-.993zM18.676 16.562a.498.498 0 10.934-.348.498.498 0 00-.934.348zM14.854 39.586a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM15.8 43.505a.498.498 0 10-.072-.993.498.498 0 00.072.993zM17.084 40.175a.498.498 0 10-.991-.098.498.498 0 00.991.098zM16.189 38.41a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM15.417 41.84a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .997zM17.218 42.632a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM13.37 35.253a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM49.084 22.632a.498.498 0 10.617.781.498.498 0 00-.617-.781zM50.237 24.878a.497.497 0 10.782-.614.497.497 0 00-.782.614zM45.455 19.456a.498.498 0 10-.616-.781.498.498 0 00.616.781zM47.968 22.41a.498.498 0 10-.616-.78.498.498 0 00.616.78zM44.428 24.595a.498.498 0 10.616.781.498.498 0 00-.616-.781zM46.643 19.785a.498.498 0 10.616.781.498.498 0 00-.616-.781zM43.84 20.982a.497.497 0 10.781-.617.497.497 0 10-.781.617zM45.445 23.155a.498.498 0 10.617.782.498.498 0 00-.617-.782zM47.057 24.12a.497.497 0 10.781-.614.497.497 0 00-.781.614zM45.431 22.146a.497.497 0 10.782-.617.497.497 0 10-.782.617zM23.47 16.052a.498.498 0 10.997 0 .498.498 0 00-.996 0z" fill="#000"></path><path d="M32 9.223C16.56 9.223 4 19.44 4 32s12.56 22.777 28 22.777c15.438 0 27.998-10.217 27.998-22.777S47.438 9.223 32 9.223zm0 45.268C16.718 54.49 4.285 44.4 4.285 32 4.286 19.598 16.72 9.51 32 9.51c15.28 0 27.713 10.088 27.713 22.49S47.28 54.49 31.999 54.49z" fill="#000"></path><path d="M20.474 43.53c-.633 0-.633.982 0 .982s.633-.982 0-.982zM22.063 44.815c-.633 0-.633.982 0 .982s.633-.982 0-.982zM23.804 44.34c-.633 0-.633.982 0 .982s.633-.982 0-.982zM19.265 25.229c.633 0 .633-.982 0-.982s-.633.982 0 .982zM26.64 18.624c.634 0 .634-.982 0-.982-.632 0-.632.982 0 .982zM24.925 18.14c-.633 0-.633.982 0 .982s.633-.982 0-.982zM29.206 16.432c-.633 0-.633.982 0 .982s.633-.982 0-.982zM31.105 16.432c-.633 0-.633.982 0 .982s.633-.982 0-.982zM34.036 17.08c.633 0 .633-.982 0-.982s-.633.982 0 .982zM42.333 21.879c.633 0 .633-.982 0-.982s-.633.982 0 .982zM39.453 18.273c-.633 0-.633.982 0 .982s.633-.982 0-.982zM35.813 17.008c-.633 0-.633.982 0 .982s.633-.982 0-.982zM43.673 23.527c.633 0 .633-.982 0-.982s-.633.982 0 .982zM42.463 44.949c.633 0 .633-.982 0-.982s-.633.982 0 .982zM36.468 38.162a.498.498 0 100 .997.498.498 0 000-.997zM36.943 39.586a.498.498 0 100 .996.498.498 0 000-.996zM37.22 43.013a.498.498 0 10-.851-.517.498.498 0 00.851.517zM36.745 44.595a.498.498 0 10-.851-.517.498.498 0 00.851.517zM35.123 37.075a.498.498 0 10.851.517.498.498 0 00-.85-.517zM36.547 36.443a.498.498 0 10.851.516.498.498 0 00-.851-.516zM35.342 41.944c.633 0 .633-.983 0-.983s-.633.983 0 .983zM25.778 28.582a.498.498 0 10-.156.983.498.498 0 00.156-.983zM25.462 26.684a.498.498 0 10-.156.983.498.498 0 00.156-.983zM27.222 28.14a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .996zM24.373 25.925a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM22.79 30.037a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM24.215 30.512a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM23.581 28.297a.498.498 0 10.001-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM28.171 26.083a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM33.013 27.19a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM35.188 28.462a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM31.143 27.603a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM30.141 28.947a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM33.572 28.59a.498.498 0 10-.996 0 .498.498 0 00.996 0zM27.855 29.47a.498.498 0 10.996 0 .498.498 0 00-.996 0zM28.459 27.33a.498.498 0 10.997 0 .498.498 0 00-.997 0zM35.501 26.602a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM33.827 25.487a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM30.712 25.825a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM29.554 24.634a.498.498 0 10-.617-.78.498.498 0 00.617.78zM29.983 30.845a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM27.696 31.21a.498.498 0 10.997 0 .498.498 0 00-.997 0zM26.114 30.736a.498.498 0 10.997 0 .498.498 0 00-.997 0zM36.212 32.864a.497.497 0 10-.982-.156.497.497 0 00.982.156zM37.794 33.654a.498.498 0 10-.983-.155.498.498 0 00.983.155zM36.054 29.7a.497.497 0 10-.983-.156.497.497 0 00.983.156zM35.42 31.282a.498.498 0 10-.983-.156.498.498 0 00.983.156zM37.478 31.44a.498.498 0 10-.983-.155.498.498 0 00.983.155zM33.68 30.491a.498.498 0 10-.983-.156.498.498 0 00.983.156zM31.939 31.44a.498.498 0 10-.983-.156.498.498 0 00.983.156zM31.939 29.384a.498.498 0 10-.983-.156.498.498 0 00.983.156zM36.42 25.324a.498.498 0 10.157-.983.498.498 0 00-.156.983zM33.32 22.1a.498.498 0 10.001-.996.498.498 0 000 .997zM31.234 22.195a.498.498 0 10.997 0 .498.498 0 00-.997 0zM29.84 23.27a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .996zM28.256 22.479a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM27.465 24.06a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM25.725 24.218a.498.498 0 100-.996.498.498 0 000 .996zM26.516 25.958a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .997zM33.436 23.64a.498.498 0 100-.997.498.498 0 000 .996zM35.951 22.891a.498.498 0 10.997 0 .498.498 0 00-.997 0zM34.685 21.784a.498.498 0 10.996 0 .498.498 0 00-.996 0zM31.577 24.483a.498.498 0 10.156-.984.498.498 0 00-.156.984zM30.31 21.794a.498.498 0 10.156-.984.498.498 0 00-.156.984zM37.907 24.483a.498.498 0 10.156-.984.498.498 0 00-.156.984zM34.69 23.586a.498.498 0 10.983.155.498.498 0 00-.983-.155zM32.858 33.265a.498.498 0 10-.996 0 .498.498 0 00.996 0zM31.434 33.74a.498.498 0 10-.996 0 .498.498 0 00.997 0zM28.48 34.175a.498.498 0 00.517-.85.498.498 0 00-.517.85zM26.58 33.384a.498.498 0 00.518-.85.498.498 0 00-.517.85zM33.945 31.92a.498.498 0 00-.517.85.498.498 0 00.517-.85zM34.578 33.344a.498.498 0 00-.517.85.498.498 0 00.517-.85zM41.224 30.097a.5.5 0 10-.59-.805.5.5 0 00.59.805zM39.008 28.357a.5.5 0 10-.59-.805.5.5 0 00.59.805zM40.674 28.579a.5.5 0 10-.59-.806.5.5 0 00.59.806zM40.32 26.947a.5.5 0 10-.59-.806.5.5 0 00.59.806zM37.943 26.547a.5.5 0 00-.587-.806.5.5 0 00.587.806zM39.24 25.726a.5.5 0 10-.59-.806.5.5 0 00.59.806zM37.302 28.013a.497.497 0 10-.702-.704.497.497 0 00.702.704zM39.813 29.885a.497.497 0 10-.966.235.497.497 0 00.966-.235zM38.303 29.757a.497.497 0 10-.966.235.497.497 0 00.966-.235zM29.075 32.14c0 .632.983.632.983 0 0-.634-.983-.634-.983 0z" fill="#000"></path></svg><span>Listen to Podcasts and Articles</span></a></li></ul></div><div class="ExpandedNav_print__7d4vw" data-event-element="print edition"><h2 class="ExpandedNav_title__C8QcN ExpandedNav_printTitle__PKCL7">The Print Edition</h2><div class="ExpandedNav_printContainer__Lp_nj" data-action="magazine"><a href="/magazine/" data-action="cover" class="ExpandedNav_printImgLink__gcbdt"><img alt="" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV ExpandedNav_printImg__hHeRU" src="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/images/current-issue.large.jpg" width="266" height="200"/></a><div class="ExpandedNav_printLinks__gNywy"><div class="ExpandedNav_topPrintLinks__UytSB"><a href="/magazine/" data-action="latest" class="ExpandedNav_latestIssue__iDXQm">Latest Issue</a><a href="/magazine/backissues/" data-action="past issues" class="ExpandedNav_pastIssues__nkE14">Past Issues</a></div><hr class="ExpandedNav_hr__5T2Ez"/><a href="https://accounts.theatlantic.com/products/gift" data-action="give a gift" class="ExpandedNav_giveAGift__vyp0c">Give a Gift</a></div></div></div></div></div></div></li><li class="Nav_navListItem__l2afO Nav_hideOnTablet__wyFPd Nav_searchLi__yxgD4"><button class="NavSearchButton_root__DcP_y" aria-label="Search The Atlantic" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="nav-desktop-search" data-event-element="search icon" data-event-verb="opened" data-event-surface="search" data-event-module="search overlay"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 16 16" class="NavSearchButton_searchIcon__Acpm1" data-action="Open Search"><path d="M15.85 15.15l-5.27-5.28a6 6 0 10-.71.71l5.28 5.27a.48.48 0 00.7 0 .48.48 0 000-.7zM1 6a5 5 0 115 5 5 5 0 01-5-5z"></path></svg></button><div data-event-surface="search" data-event-module="search overlay" class="SearchOverlay_root__lmUcH" hidden="" id="nav-desktop-search"><div data-focus-guard="true" tabindex="0" style="width:1px;height:0px;padding:0;overflow:hidden;position:fixed;top:1px;left:1px"></div><div data-focus-lock-disabled="false" aria-modal="true" aria-labelledby="search-label" role="dialog"><form method="GET" action="/search/" class="SearchOverlay_searchForm___U0R_" data-action="search submit"><div class="SearchInput_root__6XLPB"><div class="VisuallyHidden_root__yoK4r"><label for="search-input-:R2srl2mm:">Search The Atlantic</label></div><button type="submit" title="Submit" class="SearchInput_searchButton__u0CP0"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 16 16" aria-hidden="true" width="20"><path d="M15.85 15.15l-5.27-5.28a6 6 0 10-.71.71l5.28 5.27a.48.48 0 00.7 0 .48.48 0 000-.7zM1 6a5 5 0 115 5 5 5 0 01-5-5z"></path></svg></button><input type="search" name="q" id="search-input-:R2srl2mm:" class="SearchInput_searchInput__5hWhI SearchInput_hideClear__re5AE" placeholder="Search The Atlantic..." autoComplete="off" required=""/></div><div class="QuickLinks_quickLinksContainer__F_iFd"><div class="QuickLinks_quickLinksHeading__ms7Ht">Quick Links</div><ul class="QuickLinks_quickLinksList__e7x66"><li class="QuickLinks_quickLinkListItem__59_09"><a class="QuickLinks_quickLink__w_Fp0" href="/projects/dear-therapist/" data-action="click link - quick link" data-label="Dear Therapist" data-event-element="quick link" data-event-position="1"><img alt="Dear Therapist" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV QuickLinks_quickLinkImage__FTMBA" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/img/specialreports/lead/2020/10/14/Thumbnail.jpg" width="148" height="148"/><div class="QuickLinks_quickLinkLabel__TYtIC">Dear Therapist</div></a></li><li class="QuickLinks_quickLinkListItem__59_09"><a class="QuickLinks_quickLink__w_Fp0" href="/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/" data-action="click link - quick link" data-label="Crossword Puzzle" data-event-element="quick link" data-event-position="2"><img alt="Crossword Puzzle" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV QuickLinks_quickLinkImage__FTMBA" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/nav-crossword.png" width="148" height="148"/><div class="QuickLinks_quickLinkLabel__TYtIC">Crossword Puzzle</div></a></li><li class="QuickLinks_quickLinkListItem__59_09"><a class="QuickLinks_quickLink__w_Fp0" href="/archive/" data-action="click link - quick link" data-label="Magazine Archive" data-event-element="quick link" data-event-position="3"><img alt="Magazine Archive" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV QuickLinks_quickLinkImage__FTMBA" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/archive-thumbnail.png" width="148" height="148"/><div class="QuickLinks_quickLinkLabel__TYtIC">Magazine Archive</div></a></li><li class="QuickLinks_quickLinkListItem__59_09"><a class="QuickLinks_quickLink__w_Fp0" href="https://accounts.theatlantic.com/accounts/subscription/" data-action="click link - quick link" data-label="Your Subscription" data-event-element="quick link" data-event-position="4"><img alt="Your Subscription" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV QuickLinks_quickLinkImage__FTMBA" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/YourSubscription_300x300.jpg" width="148" height="148"/><div class="QuickLinks_quickLinkLabel__TYtIC">Your Subscription</div></a></li></ul></div><button type="button" aria-label="Close Search" class="SearchOverlay_closeButton___zntA" data-action="close search" data-event-verb="closed" data-event-element="close icon"><svg viewBox="0 0 16 16" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="SearchOverlay_closeIcon__DrMMb"><path d="M9.525 8l6.159 6.159a1.078 1.078 0 11-1.525 1.525L8 9.524l-6.159 6.16a1.076 1.076 0 01-1.525 0 1.078 1.078 0 010-1.525L6.476 8 .315 1.841A1.078 1.078 0 111.841.316L8 6.476l6.16-6.16a1.078 1.078 0 111.524 1.525L9.524 8z" fill-rule="evenodd"></path></svg></button></form></div><div data-focus-guard="true" tabindex="0" style="width:1px;height:0px;padding:0;overflow:hidden;position:fixed;top:1px;left:1px"></div></div></li><li class="Nav_navListItem__l2afO Nav_hideOnTablet__wyFPd"><a class="Nav_navLink__34Bol" href="/most-popular/" data-action="popular">Popular</a></li><li class="Nav_navListItem__l2afO Nav_hideOnTablet__wyFPd"><a class="Nav_navLink__34Bol" href="/latest/" data-action="latest">Latest</a></li><li class="Nav_navListItem__l2afO Nav_hideOnTablet__wyFPd"><a class="Nav_navLink__34Bol" href="/newsletters/" data-action="newsletters">Newsletters</a></li></ul><div aria-hidden="true" class="Nav_middleContainer__7JzLF" data-event-element="wordmark"><a href="/" class="Nav_hideAboveMobile__1lhmL Nav_mobileBigALink__eWXD_" tabindex="-1" data-action="big a"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 87.83 134" class="Nav_mobileBigA__9PTCs Nav_hideOnMobile__IESg8"><path d="M24.48 95.13c-.56 0-.74-.37-.74-.93l13.08-55.88c.19-.94.93-.94 1.12 0L50.09 94.2c0 .56-.19.93-.75.93zM48.22.19a22.54 22.54 0 01-7.66 5.05c-.75.19-.94.37-1.13 1.12l-26.72 112.5c-2 9-4.67 10.66-11.77 11.22a.88.88 0 00-.94.93v2.06a.88.88 0 00.92.93h25.6a.88.88 0 00.93-.93V131a.88.88 0 00-.93-.93c-9.53 0-10.47-2.81-8.6-10.66l4.49-19.25a1.18 1.18 0 011.12-.93h26.74a1.19 1.19 0 011.13.93l5 23.18c1.12 5-.75 6.17-7.1 6.73a.88.88 0 00-.93.93v2.06a.88.88 0 00.93.93h37.62a.88.88 0 00.94-.93V131a.88.88 0 00-.94-.93c-5.79-.56-8.22-1.5-9.34-6.73L49.34.57c-.19-.56-.75-.75-1.12-.38"></path></svg></a><a href="/" class="Nav_navLink__34Bol" tabindex="-1" data-action="logo"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 214 33.24" class="Nav_logo__RLN3C"><path d="M39.39 13.2c-2.4 0-4.43 1.82-7 5.32-1.18 1.64-2.7 4-3.37 5-.38.51-.68.43-.47-.12l1.78-4.56 6.36-17.5C37 .62 34.46-.25 34 .62v.09c-1.09 2.32-3.12 3.08-6.75 2.95S16.32 1.52 10.8 1.52C3.88 1.52 0 5.78 0 10.8c0 2.82 1.85 4.64 4.34 4.55a2.27 2.27 0 002.41-1.81 1.2 1.2 0 00-1.56-1.43c-2.45.51-3.29-1.18-3.29-2.49 0-3.12 2.66-5.44 8.22-5.44 1.43 0 4.22.34 7.17.67-3.75 11.3-7.55 21.77-8.48 24.25a2.07 2.07 0 01-1.35 1.44c-1.34.42-1.77.46-2.61.67-1.27.3-1.06 1.35-.17 1.31 1.6-.09 3.67-.3 5.31-.3 2 0 5.61.17 6.16.21 1 .09 1.14-1.14.3-1.26-.59-.09-1.56-.25-2.49-.38-1.1-.13-1.43-.59-1.18-1.48.55-1.47 7-20.11 8.27-24 2 .25 3.71.42 4.84.5 2.33.14 4.57 0 6.5-1.41l-5.1 14.4-4.47 12.33c-.76 2 2.1 2.15 2.74.93a81.64 81.64 0 017.63-12.36c1.86-2.7 3.59-4.31 4.81-4.31.93 0 1.47.51 1.47 1.65 0 1.52-.71 3.88-2.15 7.89-1.89 5.23-2.61 6.62-3.24 6.66s-1.86-1.52-2.53-1.69a1.39 1.39 0 00-1.65.72c-.34.59-.12 2.49 2.74 2.62 3.42.16 6.33-3.34 8.35-8.94 1.39-3.8 1.73-5.74 1.73-7.13 0-2.7-1.26-3.97-3.33-3.97zm57.9 18.09c-2.15-.5-3-1.3-3-2.15l.09-1.77c0-1.3 1-20.49 1.22-23.36.17-2.11-2.24-2-3.25-.76l-2 2.57C87.89 8.9 78 21.68 73.17 27.67A11.5 11.5 0 0168 31.25c-.8.21-.72 1.06.17 1.06.71 0 2.82-.25 4.38-.25s4.43.12 5.15.16 1-.76 0-1c-2-.59-3-1-3-1.52s.46-1.22 1.56-2.74c.84-1.18 2.86-3.84 5.1-6.79H91c-.21 4.05-.46 8.31-.5 9.15a1.14 1.14 0 01-.93 1.14l-2.15.63c-.59.17-.85 1.27.08 1.23 2.11-.13 3.88-.3 4.81-.3 1.39 0 3.75.3 4.85.34s.94-.85.13-1.07zm-6-15.47c0 .76-.09 1.6-.13 2.49h-8.25c3.84-5.07 7.89-10.38 8.23-10.89s.67-.25.63.13c-.13 1.86-.34 5.27-.5 8.27zM55.08 13.5c-3.67-.17-7.76 4.09-9.7 10.5-1.9 6.2.21 8.77 2.53 8.77 1.69 0 4.51-2.19 6.07-4.72.55-.89.13-1.82-.71-.89-1.06 1.14-2.49 2.36-4 2.07-1-.17-1.94-1.9-.46-6.2 3.54-.17 7.71-2.19 8.77-5.53.92-2.88-.98-3.96-2.5-4zm.38 3.12c-.89 2.61-4 4.8-6.24 5.35 2.15-5.69 4.21-7.21 5.52-7.17.72 0 1.06.82.72 1.82zm53.94-1h3.42c.76 0 1.14-.21 1.3-.76.3-.72.13-1.06-.63-1.06h-3.42l1.65-4.38c.21-.59 0-.89-.34-.89h-1.77c-.46 0-.63.13-.84.72L107 13.83h-2.7c-.38 0-.68-.08-.93 1.06-.09.55 0 .76.55.76h2.4l-4.09 10.67a45.64 45.64 0 00-1.69 4.68c-.25 1.48.64 2.07 1.73 1.86 2.15-.38 5.23-2.62 8-6.12.76-1 .13-1.64-.63-.84a34.4 34.4 0 01-3.67 3.16c-1.1.72-1.64.21-1.26-.84zm38.04-1c.25-.59-.59-.76-2.53-1.13-.59-.13-.93.5-1.94 2.61a4 4 0 00-3.5-1.43c-3.08.08-6.88 2.86-10 7.12-2.49 3.42-3.25 5.78-2.78 8.31a3.11 3.11 0 003.08 2.52c2.32.08 4.64-2.11 7-4.52l1.48-1.48c.42-.42.8-.17.54.34a23.77 23.77 0 00-1.89 4.17c-.3 1.48.5 1.86 1.64 1.69 2.19-.29 5.61-2.32 8.23-5.94.75-1.06 0-1.65-.68-.85a26.62 26.62 0 01-3.75 3.29c-1.14.76-1.65.55-1.31-.34.17-.55.8-2.07 6.41-14.36zm-9.74 11c-2.66 2.45-4.81 4.22-6.29 4.22-1 0-1.47-.43-1.56-1.14-.25-1.86 1.44-4.68 2.83-6.58 2.4-3.16 5.36-5.78 7.25-5.78 1.31 0 2 .55 2.11 1.35.25 1.46-2.19 5.93-4.34 7.87zm58.58-12.71c-2.07 0-4.85 1.47-7.47 4.38-.84 1-.21 1.65.59.93a20.28 20.28 0 012.87-2.19c.89-.55 1.48-.13 1.22.67-.21.64-.84 2.2-1.3 3.25l-2.87 6.58c-.8 1.86-1.56 3.71-1.73 4.22-.38 1.31.29 2 1.35 2 2 0 4.77-1.65 7.42-4.6.84-1 .21-1.64-.59-.93a28 28 0 01-3.12 2.4c-.88.54-1.52.12-1.22-.68.21-.59.84-1.94 1.26-2.91l2.91-6.58c.85-1.94 1.82-4 2-4.55.32-1.28-.31-1.99-1.32-1.99zm2.53-10.21a2.39 2.39 0 00-2.53 2.15 2.09 2.09 0 001.85 2.45 2.43 2.43 0 002.49-2.11 2.08 2.08 0 00-1.81-2.49zm11.68 10.84c-3.71-.17-7.68 4.13-9.62 10.46s.17 8.77 2.62 8.77c1.69 0 4.51-2 6.2-4.72.55-.89.13-1.82-.72-.89-1.05 1.14-2.4 2.19-3.79 2.11s-2.37-2-.76-6.62c2.36-6.66 4-7.42 4.72-7.47s2.19 1.86 3.08 2.07a1.36 1.36 0 001.64-.71c.38-.72.14-2.83-3.37-3zm-23.95.29h-3.42l1.64-4.38c.22-.59 0-.89-.33-.89h-1.78c-.46 0-.63.13-.84.72l-1.73 4.55h-2.74c-.38 0-.67-.08-.93 1.06-.08.55.05.76.55.76h2.41l-4.09 10.67a43.34 43.34 0 00-1.69 4.68c-.26 1.48.63 2.07 1.73 1.86 2.15-.38 5.23-2.62 8-6.12.76-1 .13-1.64-.64-.84a34.33 34.33 0 01-3.68 3.16c-1.1.72-1.65.21-1.27-.84l4.71-12.6h3.42c.76 0 1.14-.21 1.31-.76.29-.69.12-1.03-.63-1.03zm-63.6 11.9a40.24 40.24 0 01-3.8 3.33c-1.1.72-1.64.21-1.26-.84L128.17.97c.17-.42.08-1-.51-1a58.6 58.6 0 00-6 .68c-.34.08-.51.59-.13.71l2.28.85c.46.17.51.38.21 1.14l-8.84 22.97a43.34 43.34 0 00-1.69 4.68c-.25 1.48.63 2.07 1.73 1.86 2.28-.38 5.52-2.62 8.35-6.29.76-1.01.13-1.64-.63-.84zm43.39.08l2.49-5c1.35-2.74 1.61-4 1.61-4.93 0-1.81-.93-2.74-2.83-2.74-2.66 0-4.77 2.11-8 6.66-.89 1.22-1.48 2.15-2.66 3.67-.38.47-.67.42-.46-.13l1.64-4.09a17 17 0 001.35-4.47c0-1.09-.46-1.6-1.64-1.6-1.44 0-3.25.76-6.41 4.77-1.14 1.47 0 1.64.38 1.18.63-.64 2-2.07 2.91-2.87s1.72-.55 1.39.42a18.36 18.36 0 01-.8 2.24l-5 12.27c-.68 1.69 2.53 2.07 3.08.8 1.73-4 5.52-9 7.08-11.22 2.28-3.25 4.26-5.48 5.69-5.48.76 0 1.1.42 1.1 1.22a5.83 5.83 0 01-.59 2l-3.54 7.55c-1 2-1.94 4.13-2.11 4.68-.42 1.31.3 2 1.43 2 2 0 4.77-1.65 7.43-4.6.84-1 .21-1.64-.59-.93a29 29 0 01-3.12 2.41c-.92.59-1.56.12-1.26-.72.21-.6.97-2.16 1.43-3.09z"></path></svg></a></div><div class="Nav_rightContainer__CBCcP"><ul class="NavAccountLinks_root__8VKLM" data-event-element="account links"><li class="NavAccountLinks_navListItem__Lxooj"><a data-action="Sign In" href="https://accounts.theatlantic.com/login/" class="NavAccountLinks_navLink__ctd7M NavAccountLinks_hideOnMobile__Eokx4">Sign In</a></li><li class="NavAccountLinks_navListItem__Lxooj"><a data-action="Subscribe" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/subscribe/navbar/" class="NavAccountLinks_subscribe__2DNuJ">Subscribe</a></li></ul></div></div></div><div class="SecondaryNav_root__o_xEq" data-event-surface="article" data-event-module="magazine bar"><div class="SecondaryNav_inner__xReDM"><div class="SecondaryNav_collapsed__nQ25V ArticleMagazineIssueNav_collapsed__l4Yjd" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="secondary-nav-expanded" aria-label="Open Secondary Nav" data-action="Open Secondary Nav"><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNav_module__ai4M9" data-category="story page"><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNav_title__8Zv3c">November 2019<!-- --> Issue</div><button class="SecondaryNav_toggle__oWIw0" data-action="expand - magazine bar" data-event-element="explore" data-event-verb="toggled"><span class="SecondaryNav_toggleLabel__Uq8m_">Explore</span></button></div></div><div id="secondary-nav-expanded" class="SecondaryNav_expanded__lmnKp ArticleMagazineIssueNav_expanded__bEvy9" data-category="story page"><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNav_module__ai4M9"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2019/11/" class="ArticleMagazineIssueNav_issueCover__tpojk" data-action="click link - magazine bar - image" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2019/11/" data-event-element="image"><img alt="November 2019 Cover" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV ArticleMagazineIssueNav_issueCoverImage__1ruIB" srcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/K34tIpA4RZw2KMytRFINLWKxBWs=/0x2:2360x3148/96x128/media/img/issues/2019/10/10/1119_Cover/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/Lkm158gq6WDyh_rymI2J5ysPwxY=/0x2:2360x3148/192x256/media/img/issues/2019/10/10/1119_Cover/original.jpg 2x, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/lg9uUZzAT3PYxsik0kwTPyS5E7I=/0x2:2360x3148/288x384/media/img/issues/2019/10/10/1119_Cover/original.jpg 3x" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/K34tIpA4RZw2KMytRFINLWKxBWs=/0x2:2360x3148/96x128/media/img/issues/2019/10/10/1119_Cover/original.jpg" width="96" height="128"/></a><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNav_issueDek__afjri"><span>The Tech Issue: Jeff Bezos’s master plan, when GoFundMe gets ugly, and why the world is getting louder. Plus Mark Bowden on what military generals think of Trump, Jack Goldsmith’s family and government surveillance, Sandra Boynton, baseball cards, why you never see your friends, and more.</span> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2019/11/" class="ArticleMagazineIssueNav_magLink__LX9QG" data-action="click link - magazine bar - view magazine" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2019/11/" data-event-element="view magazine">View Magazine</a></div></div><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_root__Xy4wH"><ul class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_list__KUKKQ"><li class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoItem__ds_ww"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/what-jeff-bezos-wants/598363/" class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoLink__p8zB2" data-action="click link - magazine bar - item 1" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/what-jeff-bezos-wants/598363/" data-event-element="item" data-event-position="1" title="Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan"><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_title__CDox_">Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan</div><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_byline__mmvsn"><address><span>Franklin Foer</span></address></div></a></li><li class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoItem__ds_ww"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/" class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoLink__p8zB2" data-action="click link - magazine bar - item 2" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/" data-event-element="item" data-event-position="2" title="Top Military Officers Unload on Trump"><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_title__CDox_">Top Military Officers Unload on Trump</div><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_byline__mmvsn"><address><span>Mark Bowden</span></address></div></a></li><li class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoItem__ds_ww"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end-of-silence/598366/" class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoLink__p8zB2" data-action="click link - magazine bar - item 3" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end-of-silence/598366/" data-event-element="item" data-event-position="3" title="Why Everything Is Getting Louder"><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_title__CDox_">Why Everything Is Getting Louder</div><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_byline__mmvsn"><address><span>Bianca Bosker</span></address></div></a></li><li class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoItem__ds_ww"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/gofundme-nation/598369/" class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoLink__p8zB2" data-action="click link - magazine bar - item 4" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/gofundme-nation/598369/" data-event-element="item" data-event-position="4" title="When GoFundMe Gets Ugly"><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_title__CDox_">When GoFundMe Gets Ugly</div><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_byline__mmvsn"><address><span>Rachel Monroe</span></address></div></a></li><li class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoItem__ds_ww"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/jimmy-hoffa-my-stepfather-and-me/598372/" class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoLink__p8zB2" data-action="click link - magazine bar - item 5" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/jimmy-hoffa-my-stepfather-and-me/598372/" data-event-element="item" data-event-position="5" title="My Family Story of Love, the Mob, and Government Surveillance"><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_title__CDox_">My Family Story of Love, the Mob, and Government Surveillance</div><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_byline__mmvsn"><address><span>Jack Goldsmith</span></address></div></a></li><li class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoItem__ds_ww"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/why-dont-i-see-you-anymore/598336/" class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_promoLink__p8zB2" data-action="click link - magazine bar - item 6" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/why-dont-i-see-you-anymore/598336/" data-event-element="item" data-event-position="6" title="Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore"><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_title__CDox_">Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore</div><div class="ArticleMagazineIssueNavRecirc_byline__mmvsn"><address><span>Judith Shulevitz</span></address></div></a></li></ul></div></div></div></div></nav><div class="Nav_fixedPosPlaceholder__0nyHE"></div><div class="Nav_overlay__zlKnQ" data-testid="overlay"></div><div class="BreakingNewsBar_root__pmOIb"></div><main id="main-content" data-category="story page" data-event-surface="article" data-flatplan-layout="feature"><gpt-ad class="GptAd_root__pAvcS Leaderboard_root__gbBIq" format="leaderboard" sizes-at-0="" sizes-at-976="leaderboard"></gpt-ad><article class="ArticleLayout_article__RHFMN article-content-body"><header class="ArticleHero_root__3w7kV" data-event-module="hero"><div class=""><div class="ArticleLeadArt_root__nRSLU ArticleLeadArt_feature__DWkvD"><figure class="ArticleLeadFigure_root__Bj81R"><div class="ArticleLeadFigure_media__R1npW ArticleLeadFigure_featureBackground__TF2gc" data-flatplan-lead_figure_media="true"><picture><img alt="abstract illustration of Trump" class="Image_root__XxsOp ArticleLeadArt_image__HZS4B ArticleLeadArt_featureMedia__8tbMf" sizes="(min-width: 1920px) 1920px, 100vw" srcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/hBKw1FPwXcCEbArGE1dBFnfl_i8=/0x0:2000x1125/640x360/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 640w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/W72GiSytnb1oR0Y88tLwbtbeuJg=/0x0:2000x1125/750x422/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 750w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MptP3lmL4b6KMs62gmRpb7cB_LM=/0x0:2000x1125/850x478/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 850w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/CQifVYY66JLkUE-DphGvoQhHzpE=/0x0:2000x1125/1536x864/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/yw_4l8iO2j3zA-041NJvirRgx-I=/0x0:2000x1125/1920x1080/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 1920w" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/foPND8sZZf18ptMXaVoMfqlwLPc=/0x0:2000x1125/1440x810/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg" id="article-lead-image" width="1440" height="810"/></picture></div><figcaption class="ArticleLeadFigure_caption__Byu7W ArticleLeadFigure_featureCaption__hxjjB" data-flatplan-lead_figure_caption="true">Illustration: Paul Spella; Michael Heiman / Getty</figcaption></figure></div><div class="ArticleHero_defaultArticleLockup__vb8lz"><div class="ArticleHero_rubric__e4rjD ArticleHero_featureRubric__uzMOp"><div class="ArticleRubric_root__HNhbf" id="rubric" data-flatplan-rubric="true"><a class="ArticleRubric_link__nl9hy" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/" data-action="click link - section rubric" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/" data-event-element="rubric">Politics</a></div></div><div class="ArticleHero_title__PQ4pC"><h1 class="ArticleTitle_root__VrZaG ArticleTitle_featureOrTwoCol__TRUC3" data-flatplan-title="true">Top Military Officers Unload on Trump</h1></div><div class="ArticleHero_dek__EqdkK" data-flatplan-description="true"><p class="ArticleDek_root__P3leE ArticleDek_feature__lHYTl">The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?</p></div><div class="ArticleHero_byline__iFT6A ArticleHero_featureByline__G7kFq"><div class="ArticleBylines_root__IBR5V"><address id="byline">By <a class="ArticleBylines_link__kNP4C" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-bowden/" data-action="click author - byline" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-bowden/" data-event-element="author" data-flatplan-author-link="true">Mark Bowden</a></address></div></div></div></div><div class="ArticleHero_articleUtilityBar__JbQFj"><div class="ArticleHero_timestamp__bKhcB"><time class="ArticleTimestamp_root__b3bL6" dateTime="2019-10-07T16:00:00Z" data-flatplan-timestamp="true"><a class="ArticleTimestamp_link__5d7Qw" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2019/11/" data-action="click link - magazine issue" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2019/11/">November 2019<!-- --> Issue</a></time> </div><div class="ArticleHero_articleUtilityBarTools__ZHw8s"><div class="ArticleShare_root__Mq0RB"><button class="ArticleShare_text__oQKBy ArticleShare_shareButton__X0cIe" aria-haspopup="true" aria-controls=":R1i5ioomm:" aria-expanded="false" aria-label="Open Share Menu" data-action="click share - expand" data-event-verb="shared" data-event-element="share dropdown">Share<svg width="15" height="15" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="ArticleShare_shareIcon__G4iq1"><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M7.335.272a.25.25 0 01.337 0l4.623 4.204a.25.25 0 01.017.353l-.336.37a.25.25 0 01-.353.016L8.004 1.926v7.9a.25.25 0 01-.25.25h-.5a.25.25 0 01-.25-.25V1.924l-3.62 3.291a.25.25 0 01-.353-.016l-.336-.37a.25.25 0 01.016-.353L7.335.272zM.5 7.545a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v6.75c0 .138.112.25.25.25h14a.25.25 0 00.25-.25v-6.75a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25H14a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v6H1.25v-6a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25H.5z" fill="#000"></path></svg></button></div><button class="SaveButton_saveButton__7LYFZ" aria-label="Save"><span class="SaveButton_text__fiZgx">Save<!-- --> </span><svg width="12" height="16" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="SaveButton_icon__HFNiD SaveButton_unsaved__bP4MN"><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M6 10.828l5 3.31V1H1v13.139l5-3.31zM.776 15.486A.5.5 0 010 15.07V.5A.5.5 0 01.5 0h11a.5.5 0 01.5.5v14.57a.5.5 0 01-.776.416L6.138 12.12a.25.25 0 00-.276 0L.776 15.486z" fill="currentColor"></path><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M5.572 8.75c0 .138.111.25.25.25h.5a.25.25 0 00.25-.25V6.57H8.75A.25.25 0 009 6.32v-.5a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25H6.572V3.25a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25h-.5a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v2.32H3.25a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v.5c0 .138.112.25.25.25h2.322v2.18z" fill="currentColor"></path></svg></button></div></div><gpt-ad class="GptAd_root__pAvcS ArticleInjector_root__I7x9v LeadArticleAd_root__tdCqm s-native s-native--standard s-native--streamline" format="injector" sizes-at-0="mobile-wide" targeting-pos="injector-article-start" sizes-at-976="desktop-wide"></gpt-ad><div class="ArticleInjector_clsAvoider__dqIAm" style="--placeholderHeight:298px"></div></header><section class="ArticleBody_root__2gF81" data-event-module="article body" data-flatplan-body="true"><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW ArticleParagraph_dropcap__uIVzg" data-flatplan-paragraph="true" data-flatplan-dropcap="true">F<span class="smallcaps">or most of</span> the past two decades, American troops have been deployed all over the world—to about 150 countries. During that time, hundreds of thousands of young men and women have experienced combat, and a generation of officers have come of age dealing with the practical realities of war. They possess a deep well of knowledge and experience. For the past three years, these highly trained professionals have been commanded by Donald Trump.</p><div class="ArticleLegacyHtml_root__WFd2I ArticleLegacyHtml_paragraph__cY6a3 ArticleLegacyHtml_standard__kC_zi" style="background-color:#333;color:#fff;padding:12px 24px"><iframe class="lazyload" data-src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/692414353%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-vSZq6&inverse=true&auto_play=false&show_user=true" frameborder="no" height="20" scrolling="no" style="background-color: #333" title="embedded interactive content" width="100%"></iframe><i class="audm--download-cta">To hear more feature stories, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/audio-articles/?utm_source=audioarticleembed" style="color: #fff; text-decoration: underline;">see our full list</a> or <a href="https://www.audm.com/?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=atlantic&utm_content=general_chaos" style="color: #fff; text-decoration: underline;">get the Audm iPhone app.</a> </i></div><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">To get a sense of what serving Trump has been like, I interviewed officers up and down the ranks, as well as several present and former civilian Pentagon employees. Among the officers I spoke with were four of the highest ranks—three or four stars—all recently retired. All but one served Trump directly; the other left the service shortly before Trump was inaugurated. They come from different branches of the military, but I’ll simply refer to them as “the generals.” Some spoke only off the record, some allowed what they said to be quoted without attribution, and some talked on the record.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Military officers are sworn to serve whomever voters send to the White House. Cognizant of the special authority they hold, high-level officers epitomize respect for the chain of command, and are extremely reticent about criticizing their civilian overseers. That those I spoke with made an exception in Trump’s case is telling, and much of what they told me is deeply disturbing. In 20 years of writing about the military, I have never heard officers in high positions express such alarm about a president. Trump’s pronouncements and orders have already risked catastrophic and unnecessary wars in the Middle East and Asia, and have created severe problems for field commanders engaged in combat operations. Frequently caught unawares by Trump’s statements, senior military officers have scrambled, in their aftermath, to steer the country away from tragedy. How many times can they successfully do that before faltering?</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Amid threats spanning the globe, from nuclear proliferation to mined tankers in the Persian Gulf to terrorist attacks and cyberwarfare, those in command positions monitor the president’s Twitter feed like field officers scanning the horizon for enemy troop movements. A new front line in national defense has become the White House Situation Room, where the military struggles to accommodate a commander in chief who is both ignorant and capricious. <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/iran-could-hit-back-boltons-us-carrier-move/588826/">In May, after months of threatening Iran, Trump ordered</a> the carrier group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to shift from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. On June 20, after an American drone was downed there, he ordered a retaliatory attack—<a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/world/middleeast/iran-us-drone.html">and then called it off minutes before it was to be launched</a>. The next day <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.reuters.com/article/mideast-iran-usa-war/trump-says-hes-not-looking-for-war-with-iran-nbc-news-interview-idUSW1N22K027">he said he was “not looking for war”</a> and wanted to talk with Iran’s leaders, while also promising them “obliteration like you’ve never seen before” if they crossed him. He <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/08/trump-north-korea-fire-and-fury/536367/">threatened North Korea with “fire and fury”</a> and dispatched a three-aircraft-carrier flotilla to waters off the Korean peninsula—then he <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44435035">pivoted to friendly summits with Kim Jong Un</a>, with whom <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-45696420/trump-on-kim-jong-un-we-fell-in-love">he announced he was “in love”</a>; canceled long-standing U.S. military exercises with South Korea; and <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/world/asia/trump-troops-south-korea.html">dangled the possibility of withdrawing American forces from the country altogether</a>. While the lovefest continues for the cameras, the U.S. has quietly uncanceled the canceled military exercises, and dropped any mention of a troop withdrawal.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Such rudderless captaincy creates the headlines Trump craves. He revels when his tweets take off. (“Boom!” he says. “Like a rocket!”) Out in the field, where combat is more than wordplay, his tweets have consequences. He is not a president who thinks through consequences—and this, the generals stressed, is not the way serious nations behave.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">The generals I spoke with didn’t agree on everything, but they shared the following five characterizations of Trump’s military leadership.</p><h3 class="ArticleHeading_root__WKbPJ ArticleHeading_hed2__d_Ygi">I. HE DISDAINS EXPERTISE</h3><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Trump has little interest in the details of policy. He makes up his mind about a thing, and those who disagree with him—even those with manifestly more knowledge and experience—are stupid, or slow, or crazy.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">As a personal quality, this can be trying; in a president, it is dangerous. Trump rejects the careful process of decision making that has long guided commanders in chief. <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://time.com/5492636/donald-trump-generals/">Disdain for process</a> might be the defining trait of his leadership. Of course, no process can guarantee good decisions—history makes that clear—but eschewing the tools available to a president is choosing ignorance. What Trump’s supporters call “the deep state” is, in the world of national security—hardly a bastion of progressive politics—a vast reservoir of knowledge and global experience that presidents ignore at their peril. The generals spoke nostalgically of the process followed by previous presidents, who solicited advice from field commanders, foreign-service and intelligence officers, and in some cases key allies before reaching decisions about military action. As different as George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in temperament and policy preferences, one general told me, they were remarkably alike in the Situation Room: Both presidents asked hard questions, wanted prevailing views challenged, insisted on a variety of options to consider, and weighed potential outcomes against broader goals. Trump doesn’t do any of that. Despite commanding the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus in the world, this president prefers to be briefed by Fox News, and then arrives at decisions without input from others.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">One prominent example came on December 19, 2018, when Trump announced, via Twitter, that he was ordering all American forces in Syria home.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency,” he tweeted. Later that day he said, “Our boys, our young women, our men, they are all coming back, and they are coming back now.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">This satisfied one of Trump’s campaign promises, and it appealed to the isolationist convictions of his core supporters. Forget the experts, forget the chain of command—they were the people who, after all, had kept American forces engaged in that part of the world for 15 bloody years without noticeably improving things. Enough was enough.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">At that moment, however, American troops were in the final stages of crushing the Islamic State, which, contrary to Trump’s assertion, was collapsing but had not yet been defeated. Its brutal caliphate, which had briefly stretched from eastern Iraq to western Syria, had been painstakingly dismantled over the previous five years by an American-led global coalition, which was close to finishing the job. Now they were to stop and come home?</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Here, several of the generals felt, was a textbook example of ill-informed decision making. The downsides of a withdrawal were obvious: It would create a power vacuum that would effectively cede the fractured Syrian state to Russia and Iran; it would abandon America’s local allies to an uncertain fate; and it would encourage a diminished ISIS to keep fighting. The decision—which prompted the immediate resignations of the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, and the U.S. special envoy to the mission, Brett McGurk—blindsided not only Congress and America’s allies but the person charged with actually waging the war, General Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. Central Command. He had not been consulted.</p><aside class="ArticlePullquote_root__z11cW" data-flatplan-pullquote="true">Trump’s tweet put General Votel in the position of telling our allies, in effect, <i>We’re screwing you, but we need you now more than ever</i>.</aside><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Trump’s tweet put Votel in a difficult spot. Here was a sudden 180-degree turn in U.S. policy that severely undercut an ongoing effort. The American contingent of about 2,000 soldiers, most of them Special Forces, was coordinating with the Iraqi army; the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, consisting primarily of Kurdish militias and Syrians opposed to President Bashar al-Assad; and representatives of NATO, the Arab League, and dozens of countries. This alliance had reduced ISIS’s territory to small pockets of resistance inside Syria. America’s troops were deep in the Euphrates Valley, a long way from their original bases of operation. An estimated 10,000 hard-core Islamist soldiers were fighting to the death. Months of tough combat lay ahead.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Votel’s force in Syria was relatively small, but it required a steady supply of food, ammunition, parts, and medical supplies, and regular troop rotations. The avenue for these vital conveyances—through hundreds of miles of hazardous Iraqi desert—was truck convoys, protected almost exclusively by the SDF. To protect its troops during a retreat, America could have brought in its own troops or replaced those truck convoys with airlifts, but either step would have meant suddenly escalating an engagement that the president had just pronounced finished.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">For the American commander, this was a terrible logistical challenge. An orderly withdrawal of his forces would further stress supply lines, therefore necessitating the SDF’s help even more. Votel found himself in the position of having to tell his allies, in effect, <i>We’re screwing you, but we need you now more than ever</i>.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Field commanders are often given orders they don’t like. The military must bow to civilian rule. The generals accept and embrace that. But they also say that no careful decision-making process would have produced Trump’s abrupt about-face.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Votel decided to take an exceedingly rare step: He publicly contradicted his commander in chief. In an interview with CNN he said that no, ISIS was not yet defeated, and now was not the time to retreat. Given his responsibility to his troops and the mission, the general didn’t have much choice.</p><p id="injected-recirculation-link-0" class="ArticleRelatedContentLink_root__VYc9V" data-view-action="view link - injected link - item 1" data-event-element="injected link" data-event-position="1"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/10/danger-abandoning-our-partners/599632/">General Joseph Votel and Elizabeth Dent: The danger of abandoning our partners</a></p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Votel held everything together. He took advantage of the good relationship he had built with the SDF to buy enough time for Trump to be confronted with the consequences of his decision. A few days later, the president backed down—while predictably refusing to admit that he had done so. American forces would stay in smaller numbers (and France and the U.K. would eventually agree to commit more troops to the effort). The 180-degree turn was converted into something more like a 90-degree one. In the end, the main effects of Trump’s tweet were bruising the trust of allies and heartening both Assad and ISIS.</p><div class="ArticleInlineFigure_root__hYQJP ArticleInlineFigure_alignOverflow__07wv6" data-flatplan-inline_image="true"><figure class="ArticleInlineFigure_figure__qmYhH" style="--imageWidth:928px;max-width:928px"><picture class="ArticleInlineImagePicture_picture__SVXJ7" style="padding-bottom:122.84%"><img alt="Illustration featuring camo print" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV ArticleInlineImagePicture_image__I79fR" sizes="(min-width: 982px) 928px, (min-width: 786px) calc(100vw - 54px), 100vw" srcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ObKLpRMIlr3sasORYi2xGr0lshA=/0x0:2000x2456/640x786/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 640w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/RKSX7wuU68vfat0zPcHMWFPnWA0=/0x0:2000x2456/750x921/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 750w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/bMQhExjWHl6gJcViXy4SPYIOotg=/0x0:2000x2456/850x1044/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 850w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/DPvGVIIdm47EKgVPrKzpRyGmwBo=/0x0:2000x2456/928x1140/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 928w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ilVhrtInxpWU55QIcQVXLMncwOE=/0x0:2000x2456/1536x1887/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/Rkn3lAWoZy92mLDLfZR0bTCLklo=/0x0:2000x2456/1856x2280/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 1856w" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/DPvGVIIdm47EKgVPrKzpRyGmwBo=/0x0:2000x2456/928x1140/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg" width="928" height="1140"/></picture><figcaption class="ArticleInlineFigure_figcaption__kxSCW ArticleInlineFigure_credit__Y8jgs ArticleInlineFigure_alignOverflow__07wv6">Illustration: Paul Spella; Nicholas Kamm; Olivier Douliery / AFP / Getty; Erik S. Lesser / AP; Kevin LaMarque / Reuters</figcaption></figure></div><h3 class="ArticleHeading_root__WKbPJ ArticleHeading_hed2__d_Ygi"><span style="font-family: "Lyon Display", Georgia, Times, serif;">II. HE TRUSTS ONLY HIS OWN INSTINCTS</span></h3><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Trump believes that his gut feelings about things are excellent, if not genius. Those around him encourage that belief, or they are fired. Winning the White House against all odds may have made it unshakable.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Decisiveness is good, the generals agreed. But making decisions without considering facts is not.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Trump has, on at least one occasion, shown the swiftness and resolution commanders respect: On April 7, 2017, he responded to a chemical-warfare attack by Assad with a missile strike on Syria’s Shayrat Airbase. But this was not a hard call. It was a onetime proportional retaliation unlikely to stir international controversy or wider repercussions. Few international incidents can be cleanly resolved by an air strike.</p><aside class="ArticlePullquote_root__z11cW" data-flatplan-pullquote="true">“How did we even get to that point?” one general asked me in astonishment. What kind of commander in chief would risk war with Iran over a drone?</aside><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">A case in point is the flare-up with Iran in June. The generals said Trump’s handling of it was perilous, because it could have led to a shooting war. On June 20, Iran’s air defenses <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.defense.gov/explore/story/Article/1882497/iran-shoots-down-us-global-hawk-operating-in-international-airspace/">shot down an American RQ-4A Global Hawk</a>, a high-altitude surveillance drone the Iranians said had violated their airspace. The U.S. said the drone was in international airspace. (The disputed coordinates were about 12 miles apart—not a big difference for an aircraft moving hundreds of miles an hour.) In retaliation, <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/last-minute-trump-calls-off-strike-iran/592276/">Trump ordered a military strike on Iran—and then abruptly called it off after</a>, he claimed, he’d been informed that it would<a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-malaprop/trumps-half-cocked-and-loaded-tweet-draws-barrage-of-reaction-idUSKCN1TM2I0"> </a>kill<a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-malaprop/trumps-half-cocked-and-loaded-tweet-draws-barrage-of-reaction-idUSKCN1TM2I0"> </a>about 150 Iranians. One general told me this explanation is highly improbable—any careful discussion of the strike would have considered potential casualties at the outset. But whatever his reasoning, the president’s reversal occasioned such relief that it obscured the gravity of his original decision.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“How did we even get to that point?” the general asked me in astonishment. Given what a tinderbox that part of the world is, what kind of commander in chief would risk war with Iran over a drone?</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Not only would a retaliatory strike have failed the litmus test of proportionality, this general said, but it would have accomplished little, escalated the dispute with Iran, and risked instigating a broad conflict. In an all-out war, the U.S. would defeat Iran’s armed forces, but not without enormous bloodshed, and not just in Iran. Iran and its proxies would launch terrorist strikes on American and allied targets throughout the Middle East and beyond. If the regime were to fall, what would come next? Who would step in to govern a Shiite Muslim nation of 82 million steeped for generations in hatred of America? The mullahs owe their power to the American overthrow of Iran’s elected government in 1953, an event widely regarded in Iran (and elsewhere) as an outrage. Conquering Americans would not be greeted by happy Persian crowds. The generals observed that those who predicted such parades in Baghdad following the ouster of Saddam Hussein instead got a decade-long bloodbath. Iran has more than twice Iraq’s population, and is a far more developed nation. The Iraq War inspired the creation of ISIS and gave renewed momentum to al‑Qaeda; imagine how war with Iran might mobilize Hezbollah, the richest and best-trained terrorist organization in the world.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Sometimes, of course, war is necessary. That’s why we maintain the most expensive and professional military in the world. But a fundamental reason to own such power is to <i>avoid</i> wars—especially wars that are likely to create worse problems than they solve.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">General Votel, who commanded American forces in the region until he retired in March, told me that if the U.S. had carried out a retaliatory strike, “the trick for the military in this case would be to orchestrate some type of operation that would very quickly try and get us to an off-ramp—give them an off-ramp or provide us with an off-ramp—so we can get to some kind of discussion to resolve the situation.” Trump’s attack might have targeted some of the Iranian navy’s vessels and systems that threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Votel said, or it might have leveled a measured strike against the air defenses that struck the drone. Ideally it would have been followed by a pause, so diplomatic processes could kick in. The strike would have demonstrated to Iran that we have the capability and willingness to strike back if provoked, and made clear that in a serious fight, it could not prevail. But all of this presumes a sequence that would unfold in an orderly, rational way—a preposterous notion.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“This is all completely unpredictable,” Votel said. “It’s hard for me to see how it would play out. We would be compelled to leave large numbers of forces in the region as a deterrent. If you don’t have an off-ramp, you’re going to find yourself in some kind of protracted conflict.” Which is precisely the kind of scenario Trump has derided in the past. His eagerness to free the U.S. from long-term military conflicts overseas was why he made his abrupt announcement about pulling out of Syria. Evidently he didn’t fully consider where a military strike against Iran was likely to lead.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">The real reason Trump reversed himself on the retaliatory strike, one general said, was not because he suddenly learned of potential casualties, but because someone, most likely General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, aggressively confronted him with the extended implications of an attack.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“I know the chairman very well,” the general said. “He’s about as fine an officer as I have ever spent time around. I think if he felt the president was really heading in the wrong direction, he would let the president know.” He added that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo may have counseled against an attack as well. “Pompeo’s a really bright guy. I’m sure he would intervene and give the president his best advice.”</p><h3 class="ArticleHeading_root__WKbPJ ArticleHeading_hed2__d_Ygi">III. HE RESISTS COHERENT STRATEGY</h3><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">If there is any broad logic to Trump’s behavior, it’s <i>Keep ’em confused</i>. He believes that unpredictability itself is a virtue.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Keeping an enemy off-balance can be a good thing, the generals agreed, so long as you are not off-balance yourself. And it’s a tactic, not a strategy. Consider Trump’s rhetorical dance with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. No president in modern times has made progress with North Korea. Capable of destroying Seoul within minutes of an outbreak of hostilities, Pyongyang has ignored every effort by the U.S. and its allies to deter it from building a nuclear arsenal.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Trump has gone back and forth dramatically on Kim. As a candidate in 2016, he said he would get China to make the North Korean dictator “disappear in one form or another very quickly.” Once in office, he taunted Kim, calling him “Little Rocket Man,” and suggested that the U.S. might immolate Pyongyang. Then he switched directions and orchestrated three personal meetings with Kim.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“That stuff is just crazy enough to work,” one of the generals told me with a <i>what-the-hell?</i> chuckle. “We’ll see what happens. If they can get back to some kind of discussion, if it can avert something, it will have been worth it. The unconventional aspect of that does have the opportunity to shake some things up.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">In the long run, however, unpredictability is a problem. Without a coherent underlying strategy, uncertainty creates confusion and increases the chance of miscalculation—and miscalculation, the generals pointed out, is what starts most wars. John F. Kennedy famously installed a direct hotline to the Kremlin in order to lower the odds of blundering into a nuclear exchange. Invading Kuwait, Saddam Hussein stumbled into a humiliating defeat in the first Gulf War—a conflict that killed more than 100,000 people—after a cascading series of miscommunications and miscalculations led to a crushing international response.</p><p id="injected-recirculation-link-1" class="ArticleRelatedContentLink_root__VYc9V" data-view-action="view link - injected link - item 2" data-event-element="injected link" data-event-position="2"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst-problem-on-earth/528717/">From July/August 2017: Mark Bowden on how to deal with North Korea</a></p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Unpredictability becomes an impediment to success when it interferes with orderly process. “Say you’re going to have an engagement with North Korea,” a general who served under multiple presidents told me. “At some point you should have developed a strategy that says, <i>Here’s what we want the outcome to be</i>. And then somebody is developing talking points. Those talking points are shared with the military, with the State Department, with the ambassador. Whatever the issue might be, before the president ever says <i>anything</i>, everybody should know what the talking points are going to be.” To avoid confusion and a sense of aimlessness, “everybody should have at least a general understanding of what the strategy is and what direction we’re heading in.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Which is frequently not the case now.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“If the president says ‘Fire and brimstone’ and then two weeks later says ‘This is my best friend,’ that’s not necessarily bad—but it’s bad if the rest of the relevant people in the government responsible for executing the strategy aren’t aware that that’s the strategy,” the general said. Having a process to figure out the sequences of steps is essential. “The process tells the president what he should say. When I was working with Obama and Bush,” he continued, “before we took action, we would understand what that action was going to be, we’d have done a Q&A on how we think the international community is going to respond to that action, and we would have discussed how we’d deal with that response.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">To operate outside of an organized process, as Trump tends to, is to reel from crisis to rapprochement to crisis, generating little more than noise. This haphazard approach could lead somewhere good—but it could just as easily start a very big fire.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">If the president eschews the process, this general told me, then when a challenging national-security issue arises, he won’t have information at hand about what the cascading effects of pursuing different options might be. “He’s kind of shooting blind.” Military commanders find that disconcerting.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“The process is not a panacea—Bush and Obama sometimes made bad decisions even with all the options in front of them—but it does help.”</p><div class="ArticleInlineFigure_root__hYQJP ArticleInlineFigure_alignOverflow__07wv6" data-flatplan-inline_image="true"><figure class="ArticleInlineFigure_figure__qmYhH" style="--imageWidth:928px;max-width:928px"><picture class="ArticleInlineImagePicture_picture__SVXJ7" style="padding-bottom:81.79%"><img alt="Illustration of Trump in a blindfold" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV ArticleInlineImagePicture_image__I79fR" sizes="(min-width: 982px) 928px, (min-width: 786px) calc(100vw - 54px), 100vw" srcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/5uGallLLZ-xIz6hc6Q1M53G_x-c=/0x0:2037x1667/640x523/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 640w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/xZLAJxRLcqAZwfZ1YJL_vSbtypU=/0x0:2037x1667/750x613/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 750w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/m6FvIc1KTV99CPTvU-Q2JEDqLz8=/0x0:2037x1667/850x695/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 850w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/7Ml1Qfw4uuZUrl-rVXQ9XkxoOZE=/0x0:2037x1667/928x759/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 928w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/rAjLeYgKx2gCDJgZU49JKbKtFX4=/0x0:2037x1667/1536x1256/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/jY3qN3r7O5t0L2weJz_fiFztfKk=/0x0:2037x1667/1856x1518/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 1856w" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/7Ml1Qfw4uuZUrl-rVXQ9XkxoOZE=/0x0:2037x1667/928x759/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg" width="928" height="759"/></picture><figcaption class="ArticleInlineFigure_figcaption__kxSCW ArticleInlineFigure_credit__Y8jgs ArticleInlineFigure_alignOverflow__07wv6">Illustration: Paul Spella; Eric Thayer / Reuters</figcaption></figure></div><h3 class="ArticleHeading_root__WKbPJ ArticleHeading_hed2__d_Ygi">IV. “HE IS REFLEXIVELY CONTRARY”</h3><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">General H. R. McMaster, who left the White House on reasonably good terms in April 2018 after only 14 months as national security adviser, is about as can-do a professional as you will find. He appeared to take Trump seriously, and tailored his briefings to accommodate the president’s famous impatience, in order to equip him for the weighty decisions the office demands. But Trump resents advice and instruction. He likes to be agreed with. Efforts to broaden his understanding irritate him. McMaster’s tenure was bound to be short. Weeks before accepting his resignation, the president let it be known that he found McMaster’s briefings tedious and the man himself “gruff and condescending.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Distrusting expertise, Trump has contradicted and disparaged the intelligence community and presided over a dismantling of the State Department. This has meant leaving open ambassadorships around the world, including in countries vital to American interests such as Brazil, Canada, Honduras, Japan, Jordan, Pakistan, Russia, and Ukraine. High-level foreign officers, seeing no opportunities for advancement, have been leaving.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“When you lose these diplomats and ambassadors that have all this experience, this language capability, this cultural understanding, that makes things very, very difficult for us,” one of the generals said. “And it leads to poor decisions down the line.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Trump so resists being led that his instinct is nearly always to upend prevailing opinion.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“He is reflexively contrary,” another of the generals told me.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">According to those who worked with him, McMaster avoided giving the president a single consensus option, even when one existed. He has said that he always tried to give the president room to choose. After leaving the White House, he criticized others in the national-security community for taking a different approach, accusing them of withholding information in hopes of steering Trump in the direction they preferred. McMaster has not named names, but he was most likely talking about Mattis and General John Kelly, who, after serving as Trump’s homeland-security secretary, became the president’s second chief of staff. McMaster has said that he considered such an approach tantamount to subverting the Constitution—but if his allegation is true, it shows how poorly equipped those people felt Trump was for the job. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report records numerous instances of civilian advisers trying to manage the president, or simply ignoring presidential directives they deemed ill-advised or illegal.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">During his brief tenure on Trump’s staff, McMaster oversaw the production of a broad national-security strategy that sought to codify Trump’s “America first” worldview, placing immigration at the head of national-security concerns, right alongside nuclear proliferation and terrorist attacks. The idea was to build a coherent structure around the president’s scattershot diplomacy. Trump rhapsodized about the document at its unveiling, according to someone who was there, saying, “I love it! I love it! I want to use this all the time.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">He hasn’t. Like its author, the document has been dismissed. Those who were involved in writing it remain convinced, somewhat hopefully, that it is still helping guide policy, but John Bolton, McMaster’s successor, said scornfully—a few months before he, too, was ousted by Trump—that it is filed away somewhere, consulted by no one.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Trump is no more likely to have read the thing than he is to have written his own books. (Years ago, after he published <i>The Art of the Deal</i>, he asked me if I was interested in writing his next book. I declined.) Trying to shape this president’s approach to the world into a cogent philosophy is a fool’s errand. For those commanding America’s armed forces, it’s best to keep binoculars trained on his Twitter feed.</p><h3 class="ArticleHeading_root__WKbPJ ArticleHeading_hed2__d_Ygi">V. HE HAS A SIMPLISTIC AND ANTIQUATED NOTION OF SOLDIERING</h3><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Though he disdains expert advice, Trump reveres—perhaps fetishizes—the military. He began his presidency by stacking his administration with generals: Mattis, McMaster, Kelly, and, briefly, Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser. Appointing them so soon after their retirement from the military was a mistake, according to Don Bolduc, a retired brigadier general who is currently running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. Early on, the biggest difference Bolduc saw between the Trump administration and its predecessors, and one he felt was “going to be disruptive in the long term,” was “the significant reliance, in the Pentagon at least, on senior military leadership overriding and making less relevant our civilian oversight. That was going to be a huge problem. The secretary of defense pretty much surrounded himself with his former Marine comrades, and there was, at least from that group, a distrust of civilians that really negatively affected the Pentagon in terms of policy and strategy in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, by following the same old failed operational approaches.” Trump’s reliance on military solutions is problematic because “there are limits to what the military can solve. I think initially the Trump administration held this idea that general officers somehow have all the answers to everything. I think the president discovered in short order that that’s really not the case.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Bolduc also pointed out an unusual leadership challenge caused by having a general of McMaster’s rank serve as national security adviser—he did not retire when he assumed the post. “McMaster, for whom I have tremendous respect, came in as a three-star general. Leaving him a three-star forces him on a daily basis to have to engage with four-star generals who see his rank as beneath theirs, even though his position is much more than that.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">The problems posed by Trump’s skewed understanding of the military extend beyond bad decision making to the very culture of our armed forces: He apparently doesn’t think American soldiers accused of war crimes should be prosecuted and punished. In early May, he pardoned former Army Lieutenant Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of murdering an Iraqi prisoner. Two weeks later, he asked the Justice Department to prepare pardon materials for a number of American servicemen and contractors who were charged with murder and desecration of corpses, including Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who stood accused by his own team members of fatally stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner and shooting unarmed civilians. (He was ultimately acquitted of the murders but convicted of posing for photos with the boy’s body.) Trump subsequently chastised the military attorneys who had prosecuted Gallagher, and directed that medals awarded to them be rescinded. All of the generals agreed that interfering with the military’s efforts to police itself badly undermines command and control. When thousands of young Americans are deployed overseas with heavy weaponry, crimes and atrocities will sometimes occur. Failing to prosecute those who commit them invites behavior that shames everyone in uniform and the nation they serve.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“He doesn’t understand the warrior ethos,” one general said of the president. “The warrior ethos is important because it’s sort of a sacred covenant not just among members of the military profession, but between the profession and the society in whose name we fight and serve. The warrior ethos transcends the laws of war; it governs your behavior. The warrior ethos makes units effective because of the values of trust and self-sacrifice associated with it—but the warrior ethos also makes wars less inhumane and allows our profession to maintain our self-respect and to be respected by others. Man, if the warrior ethos gets misconstrued into ‘Kill them all …’ ” he said, trailing off. Teaching soldiers about ethical conduct in war is not just about morality: “If you treat civilians disrespectfully, <i>you’re working for the enemy! </i>Trump doesn’t understand.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Having never served or been near a battlefield, several of the generals said, Trump exhibits a simplistic, badly outdated notion of soldiers as supremely “tough”—hard men asked to perform hard and sometimes ugly jobs. He also buys into a severely outdated concept of leadership. The generals, all of whom have led troops in combat, know better than most that war is hard and ugly, but their understanding of “toughness” goes well beyond the gruff stoicism of a John Wayne movie. Good judgment counts more than toughness.</p><div class="ArticleRelatedContentModule_root__nT4KN" data-flatplan-ignore="true"><div class="ArticleRelatedContentModule_notchedModule__ZRNgF"><section data-event-module="recirc" class="ArticleRelatedContentList_root__IjCAr"><h2 class="ArticleRelatedContentList_heading__EWCWq">Recommended Reading</h2><ul class="ArticleRelatedContentList_list__a_h1_"><li class="ArticleRelatedContentList_listItem__q_YvF"><div class="ArticleRelatedContentList_content__bmXvS" data-view-action="view link - recommended reading 1 - item 1" data-view-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/james-mattis-trump/596665/" data-event-position="1"><figure class="ArticleRelatedContentList_figure__7Oqmc"><a class="ArticleRelatedContentList_link__xwbss" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/james-mattis-trump/596665/" title="Read More: The Man Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore" data-action="click link - recommended reading - image 1" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/james-mattis-trump/596665/" data-event-element="image"><picture class="ArticleRelatedContentList_picture__SWkeN"><source media="(prefers-reduced-motion)" srcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/QEAr1WduJB_2071DR7mR2OOegTY=/528x0:1653x1125/80x80/media/img/2019/08/WEL_Goldberg_MattisOpener/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ML7SZF1xiRVVgzNbkZrB0OvTKX8=/528x0:1653x1125/160x160/media/img/2019/08/WEL_Goldberg_MattisOpener/original.jpg 2x"/><img alt="General James Mattis, photographed in his office at Stanford University, June 10, 2019" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV ArticleRelatedContentList_image__jTtYO" srcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/QEAr1WduJB_2071DR7mR2OOegTY=/528x0:1653x1125/80x80/media/img/2019/08/WEL_Goldberg_MattisOpener/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ML7SZF1xiRVVgzNbkZrB0OvTKX8=/528x0:1653x1125/160x160/media/img/2019/08/WEL_Goldberg_MattisOpener/original.jpg 2x" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/QEAr1WduJB_2071DR7mR2OOegTY=/528x0:1653x1125/80x80/media/img/2019/08/WEL_Goldberg_MattisOpener/original.jpg" width="80" height="80"/></picture></a></figure><div class="ArticleRelatedContentList_textWrapper__F_AL7"><h3 class="ArticleRelatedContentList_title__w7x7i"><a class="ArticleRelatedContentList_link__xwbss" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/james-mattis-trump/596665/" data-action="click link - recommended reading - title 1" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/james-mattis-trump/596665/" data-event-element="title">The Man Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore</a></h3><address class="ArticleRelatedContentList_byline__WPqCc"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jeffrey-goldberg/" data-action="click link - recommended reading - author 1" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jeffrey-goldberg/" data-event-element="author"><span>Jeffrey Goldberg</span></a></address></div><div class="ArticleRelatedContentList_saveButtonWrapper__epZT3"><button class="SaveButton_saveButton__7LYFZ" aria-label="Save"><svg width="12" height="16" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="SaveButton_icon__HFNiD SaveButton_unsaved__bP4MN"><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M6 10.828l5 3.31V1H1v13.139l5-3.31zM.776 15.486A.5.5 0 010 15.07V.5A.5.5 0 01.5 0h11a.5.5 0 01.5.5v14.57a.5.5 0 01-.776.416L6.138 12.12a.25.25 0 00-.276 0L.776 15.486z" fill="currentColor"></path><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M5.572 8.75c0 .138.111.25.25.25h.5a.25.25 0 00.25-.25V6.57H8.75A.25.25 0 009 6.32v-.5a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25H6.572V3.25a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25h-.5a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v2.32H3.25a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v.5c0 .138.112.25.25.25h2.322v2.18z" fill="currentColor"></path></svg></button></div></div></li><li class="ArticleRelatedContentList_listItem__q_YvF"><div class="ArticleRelatedContentList_content__bmXvS" data-view-action="view link - recommended reading 1 - item 2" data-view-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst-problem-on-earth/528717/" data-event-position="2"><figure class="ArticleRelatedContentList_figure__7Oqmc"><a class="ArticleRelatedContentList_link__xwbss" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst-problem-on-earth/528717/" title="Read More: How to Deal With North Korea" data-action="click link - recommended reading - image 2" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst-problem-on-earth/528717/" data-event-element="image"><picture class="ArticleRelatedContentList_picture__SWkeN"><source media="(prefers-reduced-motion)" srcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/dLKa_m0mJq6EcK1xRv7HB-GG0_s=/0x741:2834x3575/80x80/media/img/2017/06/Cover/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/QwkqEBqdmh9TfvoNrIEEuDSZWGY=/0x741:2834x3575/160x160/media/img/2017/06/Cover/original.jpg 2x"/><img alt="" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV ArticleRelatedContentList_image__jTtYO" srcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/dLKa_m0mJq6EcK1xRv7HB-GG0_s=/0x741:2834x3575/80x80/media/img/2017/06/Cover/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/QwkqEBqdmh9TfvoNrIEEuDSZWGY=/0x741:2834x3575/160x160/media/img/2017/06/Cover/original.jpg 2x" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/dLKa_m0mJq6EcK1xRv7HB-GG0_s=/0x741:2834x3575/80x80/media/img/2017/06/Cover/original.jpg" width="80" height="80"/></picture></a></figure><div class="ArticleRelatedContentList_textWrapper__F_AL7"><h3 class="ArticleRelatedContentList_title__w7x7i"><a class="ArticleRelatedContentList_link__xwbss" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst-problem-on-earth/528717/" data-action="click link - recommended reading - title 2" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst-problem-on-earth/528717/" data-event-element="title">How to Deal With North Korea</a></h3><address class="ArticleRelatedContentList_byline__WPqCc"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-bowden/" data-action="click link - recommended reading - author 2" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-bowden/" data-event-element="author"><span>Mark Bowden</span></a></address></div><div class="ArticleRelatedContentList_saveButtonWrapper__epZT3"><button class="SaveButton_saveButton__7LYFZ" aria-label="Save"><svg width="12" height="16" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="SaveButton_icon__HFNiD SaveButton_unsaved__bP4MN"><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M6 10.828l5 3.31V1H1v13.139l5-3.31zM.776 15.486A.5.5 0 010 15.07V.5A.5.5 0 01.5 0h11a.5.5 0 01.5.5v14.57a.5.5 0 01-.776.416L6.138 12.12a.25.25 0 00-.276 0L.776 15.486z" fill="currentColor"></path><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M5.572 8.75c0 .138.111.25.25.25h.5a.25.25 0 00.25-.25V6.57H8.75A.25.25 0 009 6.32v-.5a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25H6.572V3.25a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25h-.5a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v2.32H3.25a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v.5c0 .138.112.25.25.25h2.322v2.18z" fill="currentColor"></path></svg></button></div></div></li><li class="ArticleRelatedContentList_listItem__q_YvF"><gpt-ad class="GptAd_root__pAvcS s-native s-native--short-title s-native--standard s-native--small s-native--streamline" lazy-load="3" format="native" sizes-at-0="native" targeting-pos="native-article-related" targeting-native="native"></gpt-ad><div class="ArticleRelatedContentList_content__bmXvS" data-view-action="view link - recommended reading 1 - item 3" data-view-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/" data-event-position="3"><figure class="ArticleRelatedContentList_figure__7Oqmc"><a class="ArticleRelatedContentList_link__xwbss" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/" title="Read More: The Tragedy of the American Military" data-action="click link - recommended reading - image 3" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/" data-event-element="image"><picture class="ArticleRelatedContentList_picture__SWkeN"><source media="(prefers-reduced-motion)" srcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/Y8DiDqLElbV9GM92gZiGwDbSRNI=/290x0:1090x800/80x80/media/img/2014/12/WEL_Fallows_Opener_v1_WEBCrop/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/3cY28azwbwgLgPPWKbOvWyphdlk=/290x0:1090x800/160x160/media/img/2014/12/WEL_Fallows_Opener_v1_WEBCrop/original.jpg 2x"/><img alt="" loading="lazy" class="Image_root__XxsOp Image_lazy__hYWHV ArticleRelatedContentList_image__jTtYO" srcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/Y8DiDqLElbV9GM92gZiGwDbSRNI=/290x0:1090x800/80x80/media/img/2014/12/WEL_Fallows_Opener_v1_WEBCrop/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/3cY28azwbwgLgPPWKbOvWyphdlk=/290x0:1090x800/160x160/media/img/2014/12/WEL_Fallows_Opener_v1_WEBCrop/original.jpg 2x" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/Y8DiDqLElbV9GM92gZiGwDbSRNI=/290x0:1090x800/80x80/media/img/2014/12/WEL_Fallows_Opener_v1_WEBCrop/original.jpg" width="80" height="80"/></picture></a></figure><div class="ArticleRelatedContentList_textWrapper__F_AL7"><h3 class="ArticleRelatedContentList_title__w7x7i"><a class="ArticleRelatedContentList_link__xwbss" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/" data-action="click link - recommended reading - title 3" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/" data-event-element="title">The Tragedy of the American Military</a></h3><address class="ArticleRelatedContentList_byline__WPqCc"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/james-fallows/" data-action="click link - recommended reading - author 3" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/james-fallows/" data-event-element="author"><span>James Fallows</span></a></address></div><div class="ArticleRelatedContentList_saveButtonWrapper__epZT3"><button class="SaveButton_saveButton__7LYFZ" aria-label="Save"><svg width="12" height="16" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="SaveButton_icon__HFNiD SaveButton_unsaved__bP4MN"><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M6 10.828l5 3.31V1H1v13.139l5-3.31zM.776 15.486A.5.5 0 010 15.07V.5A.5.5 0 01.5 0h11a.5.5 0 01.5.5v14.57a.5.5 0 01-.776.416L6.138 12.12a.25.25 0 00-.276 0L.776 15.486z" fill="currentColor"></path><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M5.572 8.75c0 .138.111.25.25.25h.5a.25.25 0 00.25-.25V6.57H8.75A.25.25 0 009 6.32v-.5a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25H6.572V3.25a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25h-.5a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v2.32H3.25a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v.5c0 .138.112.25.25.25h2.322v2.18z" fill="currentColor"></path></svg></button></div></div></li></ul></section></div></div><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Bolduc said he came up in a military where it was accepted practice for senior leaders to blame their subordinates, lose their temper, pound on desks, and threaten to throw things, and the response to that behavior was “<i>He’s a hard-ass</i>. Right? <i>He’s tough.</i> That is not leadership. You don’t get optimal performance being that way. You get optimal performance by being completely opposite of that.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Bolduc worries that, under Trump’s command, a return to these antiquated notions of “toughness” will worsen the epidemic of PTSD plaguing soldiers who have served repeated combat tours. Senior military officers have learned much from decades of war—lessons Bolduc said are being discarded by a president whose closest brush with combat has been a movie screen.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">The military is hard to change. This is bad, because it can be maddeningly slow to adapt, but also good, because it can withstand poor leadership at the top. In the most crucial areas, the generals said, the military’s experienced leaders have steered Trump away from disaster. So far.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“The hard part,” one general said, “is that he may be president for another five years.”</p><hr class="ArticleLegacyHtml_root__WFd2I ArticleLegacyHtml_standard__kC_zi"/><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true"><small>This article appears in the November 2019 print edition with the headline “General Chaos.”</small></p><div class="ArticleBody_divider__GpNxD" id="article-end"></div></section><div data-event-module="footer"><div class="ArticleWell_root__fueCa"><div data-event-module="author footer" class="ArticleFooter_authorFooter__5NsdY"><div class="SectionHeading_root__3GnqT"><h3 class="SectionHeading_heading__iNkek">About the Author</h3></div><div><div class="ArticleBio_root__ua8zj"><address id="article-writer-0" class="ArticleBio_author__6pDyl" data-event-element="author" data-event-position="1" data-flatplan-bio="true"><div class="ArticleBio_content__O0ZVF ArticleBio_noHeadshotContent__RrLmd"><div class="ArticleBio_bioSection__Hef4P"><div data-flatplan-bio="true"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-bowden/" class="author-link" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-bowden/" data-action="click author - name" >Mark Bowden</a> is a contributing writer at <em>The Atlantic</em>. His many books include <em><a href="https://tertulia.com/book/black-hawk-down-a-story-of-modern-war-mark-bowden/9780802144737?affiliate_id=atl-347">Black Hawk Down</a></em>, <em><a href="https://tertulia.com/book/hue-1968-a-turning-point-of-the-american-war-in-vietnam-mark-bowden/9780802127907?affiliate_id=atl-347">Huế 1968</a></em>, and <em><a href="https://tertulia.com/book/the-finish-the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden-mark-bowden/9780802121523?affiliate_id=atl-347">The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden</a></em>.</div><div class="ArticleBio_moreStories__LKpwT"><p class="ArticleBio_contentHeading__cmbmT">More Stories</p><a class="ArticleBio_storyLink__xuRiU" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/communism-vietnam-cold-war/680346/" data-event-element="more stories" data-event-position="1"><p>‘Okay, I Will Join the Marines’</p></a><a class="ArticleBio_storyLink__xuRiU" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/12/nord-stream-pipeline-attack-theories-suspects-investigation/676320/" data-event-element="more stories" data-event-position="2"><p>The Most Consequential Act of Sabotage in Modern Times</p></a></div></div></div></address></div></div></div></div><div></div></div><gpt-ad class="GptAd_root__pAvcS ArticleInjector_root__I7x9v s-native s-native--standard s-native--streamline" format="injector" sizes-at-0="mobile-wide,native,house" targeting-pos="injector-most-popular" sizes-at-976="desktop-wide,native,house"></gpt-ad><div class="ArticleInjector_clsAvoider__dqIAm"></div></article><div></div></main><div></div><div></div></div></div><script id="__NEXT_DATA__" type="application/json">{"props":{"isLoggedIn":false,"hasPaywallAccess":false,"hasAdFree":false,"pageProps":{"id":"MagazineArticle:598360","isTnfCompatible":true,"layout":"feature","hasMeter":true,"url":"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/","dateModified":"2019-11-06T19:28:34Z","__typename":"MagazineArticle","notFound":false,"urqlState":{"1822009238":{"data":"{\"article\":{\"pdfUrl\":\"\",\"issue\":{\"issueName\":\"November 2019\",\"slug\":\"201911\",\"dek\":\"The Tech Issue: Jeff Bezos’s master plan, when GoFundMe gets ugly, and why the world is getting louder. Plus Mark Bowden on what military generals think of Trump, Jack Goldsmith’s family and government surveillance, Sandra Boynton, baseball cards, why you never see your friends, and more.\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2019/11/\",\"toc\":{\"id\":\"MagazineToc:268\",\"__typename\":\"MagazineToc\"},\"cover\":{\"id\":\"Image:1441282:96x128:1x,2x,3x\",\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/K34tIpA4RZw2KMytRFINLWKxBWs=/0x2:2360x3148/96x128/media/img/issues/2019/10/10/1119_Cover/original.jpg\",\"srcSet\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/K34tIpA4RZw2KMytRFINLWKxBWs=/0x2:2360x3148/96x128/media/img/issues/2019/10/10/1119_Cover/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/Lkm158gq6WDyh_rymI2J5ysPwxY=/0x2:2360x3148/192x256/media/img/issues/2019/10/10/1119_Cover/original.jpg 2x, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/lg9uUZzAT3PYxsik0kwTPyS5E7I=/0x2:2360x3148/288x384/media/img/issues/2019/10/10/1119_Cover/original.jpg 3x\",\"width\":96,\"height\":128,\"__typename\":\"BasicCrop\"},\"river\":{\"edges\":[{\"node\":{\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:598363\",\"title\":\"Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/what-jeff-bezos-wants/598363/\",\"authors\":[{\"id\":\"Author:36\",\"displayName\":\"Franklin Foer\",\"__typename\":\"Author\"}],\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"},{\"node\":{\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:598360\",\"title\":\"Top Military Officers Unload on Trump\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/\",\"authors\":[{\"id\":\"Author:157\",\"displayName\":\"Mark Bowden\",\"__typename\":\"Author\"}],\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"},{\"node\":{\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:598366\",\"title\":\"Why Everything Is Getting Louder\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end-of-silence/598366/\",\"authors\":[{\"id\":\"Author:7961\",\"displayName\":\"Bianca Bosker\",\"__typename\":\"Author\"}],\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"},{\"node\":{\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:598369\",\"title\":\"When GoFundMe Gets Ugly\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/gofundme-nation/598369/\",\"authors\":[{\"id\":\"Author:18042\",\"displayName\":\"Rachel Monroe\",\"__typename\":\"Author\"}],\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"},{\"node\":{\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:598372\",\"title\":\"My Family Story of Love, the Mob, and Government Surveillance\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/jimmy-hoffa-my-stepfather-and-me/598372/\",\"authors\":[{\"id\":\"Author:18600\",\"displayName\":\"Jack Goldsmith\",\"__typename\":\"Author\"}],\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"},{\"node\":{\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:598336\",\"title\":\"Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/why-dont-i-see-you-anymore/598336/\",\"authors\":[{\"id\":\"Author:8769\",\"displayName\":\"Judith Shulevitz\",\"__typename\":\"Author\"}],\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"}],\"__typename\":\"RiverConnection\"},\"__typename\":\"MagazineIssue\"},\"primaryCategory\":{\"__typename\":\"Channel\"},\"editorialProject\":null,\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"}}"},"1835025727":{"data":"{\"article\":{\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:598360\",\"isTnfCompatible\":true,\"layout\":\"feature\",\"hasMeter\":true,\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-11-06T19:28:34Z\",\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"}}"},"2021745665":{"data":"{\"breakingNews\":null}"},"2491863809":{"data":"{\"recircRecommendation\":{\"displayName\":\"Recommended Reading\",\"serviceUsed\":\"datascience-control.other\",\"river\":{\"edges\":[{\"node\":{\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:596665\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/james-mattis-trump/596665/\",\"title\":\"The Man Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore\",\"authors\":[{\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jeffrey-goldberg/\",\"displayName\":\"Jeffrey Goldberg\",\"id\":\"Author:692\",\"slug\":\"jeffrey-goldberg\",\"__typename\":\"Author\"}],\"riverImage\":{\"id\":\"Image:1427563:80x80:1x,2x\",\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/QEAr1WduJB_2071DR7mR2OOegTY=/528x0:1653x1125/80x80/media/img/2019/08/WEL_Goldberg_MattisOpener/original.jpg\",\"srcSet\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/QEAr1WduJB_2071DR7mR2OOegTY=/528x0:1653x1125/80x80/media/img/2019/08/WEL_Goldberg_MattisOpener/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ML7SZF1xiRVVgzNbkZrB0OvTKX8=/528x0:1653x1125/160x160/media/img/2019/08/WEL_Goldberg_MattisOpener/original.jpg 2x\",\"reducedMotionSrcSet\":null,\"width\":80,\"height\":80,\"altText\":\"General James Mattis, photographed in his office at Stanford University, June 10, 2019\",\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"},{\"node\":{\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:528717\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst-problem-on-earth/528717/\",\"title\":\"How to Deal With North Korea\",\"authors\":[{\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-bowden/\",\"displayName\":\"Mark Bowden\",\"id\":\"Author:157\",\"slug\":\"mark-bowden\",\"__typename\":\"Author\"}],\"riverImage\":{\"id\":\"Image:1086420:80x80:1x,2x\",\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/dLKa_m0mJq6EcK1xRv7HB-GG0_s=/0x741:2834x3575/80x80/media/img/2017/06/Cover/original.jpg\",\"srcSet\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/dLKa_m0mJq6EcK1xRv7HB-GG0_s=/0x741:2834x3575/80x80/media/img/2017/06/Cover/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/QwkqEBqdmh9TfvoNrIEEuDSZWGY=/0x741:2834x3575/160x160/media/img/2017/06/Cover/original.jpg 2x\",\"reducedMotionSrcSet\":null,\"width\":80,\"height\":80,\"altText\":\"\",\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"},{\"node\":{\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:383516\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/\",\"title\":\"The Tragedy of the American Military\",\"authors\":[{\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/author/james-fallows/\",\"displayName\":\"James Fallows\",\"id\":\"Author:316\",\"slug\":\"james-fallows\",\"__typename\":\"Author\"}],\"riverImage\":{\"id\":\"Image:112764:80x80:1x,2x\",\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/Y8DiDqLElbV9GM92gZiGwDbSRNI=/290x0:1090x800/80x80/media/img/2014/12/WEL_Fallows_Opener_v1_WEBCrop/original.jpg\",\"srcSet\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/Y8DiDqLElbV9GM92gZiGwDbSRNI=/290x0:1090x800/80x80/media/img/2014/12/WEL_Fallows_Opener_v1_WEBCrop/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/3cY28azwbwgLgPPWKbOvWyphdlk=/290x0:1090x800/160x160/media/img/2014/12/WEL_Fallows_Opener_v1_WEBCrop/original.jpg 2x\",\"reducedMotionSrcSet\":null,\"width\":80,\"height\":80,\"altText\":\"\",\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"}],\"__typename\":\"RiverConnection\"},\"__typename\":\"RecircRecommendation\"}}"},"3926666192":{"data":"{\"article\":{\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\",\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:598360\",\"authors\":[{\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-bowden/\",\"displayName\":\"Mark Bowden\",\"__typename\":\"Author\",\"id\":\"Author:157\",\"biography\":{\"default\":\"\u003ca href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-bowden/\\\" class=\\\"author-link\\\" data-label=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-bowden/\\\" data-action=\\\"click author - name\\\" \u003eMark Bowden\u003c/a\u003e is a contributing writer at \u003cem\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c/em\u003e. His many books include \u003cem\u003e\u003ca href=\\\"https://tertulia.com/book/black-hawk-down-a-story-of-modern-war-mark-bowden/9780802144737?affiliate_id=atl-347\\\"\u003eBlack Hawk Down\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e\u003ca href=\\\"https://tertulia.com/book/hue-1968-a-turning-point-of-the-american-war-in-vietnam-mark-bowden/9780802127907?affiliate_id=atl-347\\\"\u003eHuế 1968\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003e\u003ca href=\\\"https://tertulia.com/book/the-finish-the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden-mark-bowden/9780802121523?affiliate_id=atl-347\\\"\u003eThe Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/em\u003e.\",\"__typename\":\"Biography\"},\"headshot\":null,\"river\":{\"edges\":[{\"cursor\":\"MjAyNC0xMC0yNSAwOTowMDowMHw2ODAzNDY=\",\"node\":{\"id\":\"BlogArticle:680346\",\"title\":\"‘Okay, I Will Join the Marines’\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/communism-vietnam-cold-war/680346/\",\"__typename\":\"BlogArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"},{\"cursor\":\"MjAyMy0xMi0xMyAxMDowMDowMHw2NzYzMjA=\",\"node\":{\"id\":\"BlogArticle:676320\",\"title\":\"The Most Consequential Act of Sabotage in Modern Times\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/12/nord-stream-pipeline-attack-theories-suspects-investigation/676320/\",\"__typename\":\"BlogArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"},{\"cursor\":\"MjAyMi0xMS0yMiAxNToyNjoxMHw2NzIyNDE=\",\"node\":{\"id\":\"BlogArticle:672241\",\"title\":\"The Tiny and Nightmarishly Efficient Future of Drone Warfare\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/russia-ukraine-war-drones-future-of-warfare/672241/\",\"__typename\":\"BlogArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"}],\"__typename\":\"RiverConnection\"},\"slug\":\"mark-bowden\",\"socialMedia\":[]}],\"authorContext\":null,\"pdfUrl\":\"\",\"categories\":[{\"slug\":\"features\",\"__typename\":\"Category\"}],\"content\":[{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":\"DROPCAP\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"F\u003cspan class=\\\"smallcaps\\\"\u003eor most of\u003c/span\u003e the past two decades, American troops have been deployed all over the world—to about 150 countries. During that time, hundreds of thousands of young men and women have experienced combat, and a generation of officers have come of age dealing with the practical realities of war. They possess a deep well of knowledge and experience. For the past three years, these highly trained professionals have been commanded by Donald Trump.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleLegacyHtml\",\"tagName\":\"P\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"className\":\"\",\"style\":\"background-color: #333; color: #fff; padding: 12px 24px;\",\"innerHtml\":\"\u003ciframe class=\\\"lazyload\\\" data-src=\\\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/692414353%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-vSZq6\u0026amp;inverse=true\u0026amp;auto_play=false\u0026amp;show_user=true\\\" frameborder=\\\"no\\\" height=\\\"20\\\" scrolling=\\\"no\\\" style=\\\"background-color: #333\\\" title=\\\"embedded interactive content\\\" width=\\\"100%\\\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\u003ci class=\\\"audm--download-cta\\\"\u003eTo hear more feature stories, \u003ca href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/audio-articles/?utm_source=audioarticleembed\\\" style=\\\"color: #fff; text-decoration: underline;\\\"\u003esee our full list\u003c/a\u003e or \u003ca href=\\\"https://www.audm.com/?utm_source=soundcloud\u0026amp;utm_medium=embed\u0026amp;utm_campaign=atlantic\u0026amp;utm_content=general_chaos\\\" style=\\\"color: #fff; text-decoration: underline;\\\"\u003eget the Audm iPhone app.\u003c/a\u003e \u003c/i\u003e\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"To get a sense of what serving Trump has been like, I interviewed officers up and down the ranks, as well as several present and former civilian Pentagon employees. Among the officers I spoke with were four of the highest ranks—three or four stars—all recently retired. All but one served Trump directly; the other left the service shortly before Trump was inaugurated. They come from different branches of the military, but I’ll simply refer to them as “the generals.” Some spoke only off the record, some allowed what they said to be quoted without attribution, and some talked on the record.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Military officers are sworn to serve whomever voters send to the White House. Cognizant of the special authority they hold, high-level officers epitomize respect for the chain of command, and are extremely reticent about criticizing their civilian overseers. That those I spoke with made an exception in Trump’s case is telling, and much of what they told me is deeply disturbing. In 20 years of writing about the military, I have never heard officers in high positions express such alarm about a president. Trump’s pronouncements and orders have already risked catastrophic and unnecessary wars in the Middle East and Asia, and have created severe problems for field commanders engaged in combat operations. Frequently caught unawares by Trump’s statements, senior military officers have scrambled, in their aftermath, to steer the country away from tragedy. How many times can they successfully do that before faltering?\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Amid threats spanning the globe, from nuclear proliferation to mined tankers in the Persian Gulf to terrorist attacks and cyberwarfare, those in command positions monitor the president’s Twitter feed like field officers scanning the horizon for enemy troop movements. A new front line in national defense has become the White House Situation Room, where the military struggles to accommodate a commander in chief who is both ignorant and capricious. \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/iran-could-hit-back-boltons-us-carrier-move/588826/\\\"\u003eIn May, after months of threatening Iran, Trump ordered\u003c/a\u003e the carrier group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to shift from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. On June 20, after an American drone was downed there, he ordered a retaliatory attack—\u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/world/middleeast/iran-us-drone.html\\\"\u003eand then called it off minutes before it was to be launched\u003c/a\u003e. The next day \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.reuters.com/article/mideast-iran-usa-war/trump-says-hes-not-looking-for-war-with-iran-nbc-news-interview-idUSW1N22K027\\\"\u003ehe said he was “not looking for war”\u003c/a\u003e and wanted to talk with Iran’s leaders, while also promising them “obliteration like you’ve never seen before” if they crossed him. He \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/08/trump-north-korea-fire-and-fury/536367/\\\"\u003ethreatened North Korea with “fire and fury”\u003c/a\u003e and dispatched a three-aircraft-carrier flotilla to waters off the Korean peninsula—then he \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44435035\\\"\u003epivoted to friendly summits with Kim Jong Un\u003c/a\u003e, with whom \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-45696420/trump-on-kim-jong-un-we-fell-in-love\\\"\u003ehe announced he was “in love”\u003c/a\u003e; canceled long-standing U.S. military exercises with South Korea; and \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/world/asia/trump-troops-south-korea.html\\\"\u003edangled the possibility of withdrawing American forces from the country altogether\u003c/a\u003e. While the lovefest continues for the cameras, the U.S. has quietly uncanceled the canceled military exercises, and dropped any mention of a troop withdrawal.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Such rudderless captaincy creates the headlines Trump craves. He revels when his tweets take off. (“Boom!” he says. “Like a rocket!”) Out in the field, where combat is more than wordplay, his tweets have consequences. He is not a president who thinks through consequences—and this, the generals stressed, is not the way serious nations behave.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"The generals I spoke with didn’t agree on everything, but they shared the following five characterizations of Trump’s military leadership.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleHeading\",\"headingSubtype\":\"HED2\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"I. HE DISDAINS EXPERTISE\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Trump has little interest in the details of policy. He makes up his mind about a thing, and those who disagree with him—even those with manifestly more knowledge and experience—are stupid, or slow, or crazy.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"As a personal quality, this can be trying; in a president, it is dangerous. Trump rejects the careful process of decision making that has long guided commanders in chief. \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://time.com/5492636/donald-trump-generals/\\\"\u003eDisdain for process\u003c/a\u003e might be the defining trait of his leadership. Of course, no process can guarantee good decisions—history makes that clear—but eschewing the tools available to a president is choosing ignorance. What Trump’s supporters call “the deep state” is, in the world of national security—hardly a bastion of progressive politics—a vast reservoir of knowledge and global experience that presidents ignore at their peril. The generals spoke nostalgically of the process followed by previous presidents, who solicited advice from field commanders, foreign-service and intelligence officers, and in some cases key allies before reaching decisions about military action. As different as George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in temperament and policy preferences, one general told me, they were remarkably alike in the Situation Room: Both presidents asked hard questions, wanted prevailing views challenged, insisted on a variety of options to consider, and weighed potential outcomes against broader goals. Trump doesn’t do any of that. Despite commanding the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus in the world, this president prefers to be briefed by Fox News, and then arrives at decisions without input from others.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"One prominent example came on December 19, 2018, when Trump announced, via Twitter, that he was ordering all American forces in Syria home.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency,” he tweeted. Later that day he said, “Our boys, our young women, our men, they are all coming back, and they are coming back now.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"This satisfied one of Trump’s campaign promises, and it appealed to the isolationist convictions of his core supporters. Forget the experts, forget the chain of command—they were the people who, after all, had kept American forces engaged in that part of the world for 15 bloody years without noticeably improving things. Enough was enough.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"At that moment, however, American troops were in the final stages of crushing the Islamic State, which, contrary to Trump’s assertion, was collapsing but had not yet been defeated. Its brutal caliphate, which had briefly stretched from eastern Iraq to western Syria, had been painstakingly dismantled over the previous five years by an American-led global coalition, which was close to finishing the job. Now they were to stop and come home?\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Here, several of the generals felt, was a textbook example of ill-informed decision making. The downsides of a withdrawal were obvious: It would create a power vacuum that would effectively cede the fractured Syrian state to Russia and Iran; it would abandon America’s local allies to an uncertain fate; and it would encourage a diminished ISIS to keep fighting. The decision—which prompted the immediate resignations of the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, and the U.S. special envoy to the mission, Brett McGurk—blindsided not only Congress and America’s allies but the person charged with actually waging the war, General Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. Central Command. He had not been consulted.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticlePullquote\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Trump’s tweet put General Votel in the position of telling our allies, in effect, \u003ci\u003eWe’re screwing you, but we need you now more than ever\u003c/i\u003e.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Trump’s tweet put Votel in a difficult spot. Here was a sudden 180-degree turn in U.S. policy that severely undercut an ongoing effort. The American contingent of about 2,000 soldiers, most of them Special Forces, was coordinating with the Iraqi army; the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, consisting primarily of Kurdish militias and Syrians opposed to President Bashar al-Assad; and representatives of NATO, the Arab League, and dozens of countries. This alliance had reduced ISIS’s territory to small pockets of resistance inside Syria. America’s troops were deep in the Euphrates Valley, a long way from their original bases of operation. An estimated 10,000 hard-core Islamist soldiers were fighting to the death. Months of tough combat lay ahead.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Votel’s force in Syria was relatively small, but it required a steady supply of food, ammunition, parts, and medical supplies, and regular troop rotations. The avenue for these vital conveyances—through hundreds of miles of hazardous Iraqi desert—was truck convoys, protected almost exclusively by the SDF. To protect its troops during a retreat, America could have brought in its own troops or replaced those truck convoys with airlifts, but either step would have meant suddenly escalating an engagement that the president had just pronounced finished.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"For the American commander, this was a terrible logistical challenge. An orderly withdrawal of his forces would further stress supply lines, therefore necessitating the SDF’s help even more. Votel found himself in the position of having to tell his allies, in effect, \u003ci\u003eWe’re screwing you, but we need you now more than ever\u003c/i\u003e.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Field commanders are often given orders they don’t like. The military must bow to civilian rule. The generals accept and embrace that. But they also say that no careful decision-making process would have produced Trump’s abrupt about-face.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Votel decided to take an exceedingly rare step: He publicly contradicted his commander in chief. In an interview with CNN he said that no, ISIS was not yet defeated, and now was not the time to retreat. Given his responsibility to his troops and the mission, the general didn’t have much choice.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleRelatedContentLink\",\"idAttr\":\"injected-recirculation-link-0\",\"innerHtml\":\"\u003ca href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/10/danger-abandoning-our-partners/599632/\\\"\u003eGeneral Joseph Votel and Elizabeth Dent: The danger of abandoning our partners\u003c/a\u003e\",\"index\":0},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Votel held everything together. He took advantage of the good relationship he had built with the SDF to buy enough time for Trump to be confronted with the consequences of his decision. A few days later, the president backed down—while predictably refusing to admit that he had done so. American forces would stay in smaller numbers (and France and the U.K. would eventually agree to commit more troops to the effort). The 180-degree turn was converted into something more like a 90-degree one. In the end, the main effects of Trump’s tweet were bruising the trust of allies and heartening both Assad and ISIS.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleOverflowInlineImage\",\"width\":960,\"height\":1179,\"attributionText\":\"Illustration: Paul Spella; Nicholas Kamm; Olivier Douliery / AFP / Getty; Erik S. Lesser / AP; Kevin LaMarque / Reuters\",\"captionText\":\"\",\"alignment\":\"OVERFLOW\",\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/I2O0a8zgJ2KNqoCzuqmutVmAIVc=/960x1179/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg\",\"srcSet\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/I2O0a8zgJ2KNqoCzuqmutVmAIVc=/960x1179/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/mUrMUVKGFbF1jkLpWYEEDd08ABo=/1920x2358/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 2x\",\"altText\":\"Illustration featuring camo print\",\"crop\":{\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/DPvGVIIdm47EKgVPrKzpRyGmwBo=/0x0:2000x2456/928x1140/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg\",\"width\":928,\"height\":1140,\"srcSet\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ObKLpRMIlr3sasORYi2xGr0lshA=/0x0:2000x2456/640x786/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 640w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/RKSX7wuU68vfat0zPcHMWFPnWA0=/0x0:2000x2456/750x921/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 750w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/bMQhExjWHl6gJcViXy4SPYIOotg=/0x0:2000x2456/850x1044/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 850w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/DPvGVIIdm47EKgVPrKzpRyGmwBo=/0x0:2000x2456/928x1140/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 928w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ilVhrtInxpWU55QIcQVXLMncwOE=/0x0:2000x2456/1536x1887/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/Rkn3lAWoZy92mLDLfZR0bTCLklo=/0x0:2000x2456/1856x2280/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot1/original.jpg 1856w\",\"reducedMotionSrcSet\":null,\"__typename\":\"BasicCrop\"},\"clickthroughUrl\":\"\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleHeading\",\"headingSubtype\":\"HED2\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"\u003cspan style=\\\"font-family: \u0026quot;Lyon Display\u0026quot;, Georgia, Times, serif;\\\"\u003eII. HE TRUSTS ONLY HIS OWN INSTINCTS\u003c/span\u003e\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Trump believes that his gut feelings about things are excellent, if not genius. Those around him encourage that belief, or they are fired. Winning the White House against all odds may have made it unshakable.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Decisiveness is good, the generals agreed. But making decisions without considering facts is not.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Trump has, on at least one occasion, shown the swiftness and resolution commanders respect: On April 7, 2017, he responded to a chemical-warfare attack by Assad with a missile strike on Syria’s Shayrat Airbase. But this was not a hard call. It was a onetime proportional retaliation unlikely to stir international controversy or wider repercussions. Few international incidents can be cleanly resolved by an air strike.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticlePullquote\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“How did we even get to that point?” one general asked me in astonishment. What kind of commander in chief would risk war with Iran over a drone?\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"A case in point is the flare-up with Iran in June. The generals said Trump’s handling of it was perilous, because it could have led to a shooting war. On June 20, Iran’s air defenses \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.defense.gov/explore/story/Article/1882497/iran-shoots-down-us-global-hawk-operating-in-international-airspace/\\\"\u003eshot down an American RQ-4A Global Hawk\u003c/a\u003e, a high-altitude surveillance drone the Iranians said had violated their airspace. The U.S. said the drone was in international airspace. (The disputed coordinates were about 12 miles apart—not a big difference for an aircraft moving hundreds of miles an hour.) In retaliation, \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/last-minute-trump-calls-off-strike-iran/592276/\\\"\u003eTrump ordered a military strike on Iran—and then abruptly called it off after\u003c/a\u003e, he claimed, he’d been informed that it would\u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-malaprop/trumps-half-cocked-and-loaded-tweet-draws-barrage-of-reaction-idUSKCN1TM2I0\\\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003ekill\u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-malaprop/trumps-half-cocked-and-loaded-tweet-draws-barrage-of-reaction-idUSKCN1TM2I0\\\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003eabout 150 Iranians. One general told me this explanation is highly improbable—any careful discussion of the strike would have considered potential casualties at the outset. But whatever his reasoning, the president’s reversal occasioned such relief that it obscured the gravity of his original decision.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“How did we even get to that point?” the general asked me in astonishment. Given what a tinderbox that part of the world is, what kind of commander in chief would risk war with Iran over a drone?\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Not only would a retaliatory strike have failed the litmus test of proportionality, this general said, but it would have accomplished little, escalated the dispute with Iran, and risked instigating a broad conflict. In an all-out war, the U.S. would defeat Iran’s armed forces, but not without enormous bloodshed, and not just in Iran. Iran and its proxies would launch terrorist strikes on American and allied targets throughout the Middle East and beyond. If the regime were to fall, what would come next? Who would step in to govern a Shiite Muslim nation of 82 million steeped for generations in hatred of America? The mullahs owe their power to the American overthrow of Iran’s elected government in 1953, an event widely regarded in Iran (and elsewhere) as an outrage. Conquering Americans would not be greeted by happy Persian crowds. The generals observed that those who predicted such parades in Baghdad following the ouster of Saddam Hussein instead got a decade-long bloodbath. Iran has more than twice Iraq’s population, and is a far more developed nation. The Iraq War inspired the creation of ISIS and gave renewed momentum to al‑Qaeda; imagine how war with Iran might mobilize Hezbollah, the richest and best-trained terrorist organization in the world.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Sometimes, of course, war is necessary. That’s why we maintain the most expensive and professional military in the world. But a fundamental reason to own such power is to \u003ci\u003eavoid\u003c/i\u003e wars—especially wars that are likely to create worse problems than they solve.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"General Votel, who commanded American forces in the region until he retired in March, told me that if the U.S. had carried out a retaliatory strike, “the trick for the military in this case would be to orchestrate some type of operation that would very quickly try and get us to an off-ramp—give them an off-ramp or provide us with an off-ramp—so we can get to some kind of discussion to resolve the situation.” Trump’s attack might have targeted some of the Iranian navy’s vessels and systems that threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Votel said, or it might have leveled a measured strike against the air defenses that struck the drone. Ideally it would have been followed by a pause, so diplomatic processes could kick in. The strike would have demonstrated to Iran that we have the capability and willingness to strike back if provoked, and made clear that in a serious fight, it could not prevail. But all of this presumes a sequence that would unfold in an orderly, rational way—a preposterous notion.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“This is all completely unpredictable,” Votel said. “It’s hard for me to see how it would play out. We would be compelled to leave large numbers of forces in the region as a deterrent. If you don’t have an off-ramp, you’re going to find yourself in some kind of protracted conflict.” Which is precisely the kind of scenario Trump has derided in the past. His eagerness to free the U.S. from long-term military conflicts overseas was why he made his abrupt announcement about pulling out of Syria. Evidently he didn’t fully consider where a military strike against Iran was likely to lead.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"The real reason Trump reversed himself on the retaliatory strike, one general said, was not because he suddenly learned of potential casualties, but because someone, most likely General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, aggressively confronted him with the extended implications of an attack.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“I know the chairman very well,” the general said. “He’s about as fine an officer as I have ever spent time around. I think if he felt the president was really heading in the wrong direction, he would let the president know.” He added that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo may have counseled against an attack as well. “Pompeo’s a really bright guy. I’m sure he would intervene and give the president his best advice.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleHeading\",\"headingSubtype\":\"HED2\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"III. HE RESISTS COHERENT STRATEGY\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"If there is any broad logic to Trump’s behavior, it’s \u003ci\u003eKeep ’em confused\u003c/i\u003e. He believes that unpredictability itself is a virtue.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Keeping an enemy off-balance can be a good thing, the generals agreed, so long as you are not off-balance yourself. And it’s a tactic, not a strategy. Consider Trump’s rhetorical dance with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. No president in modern times has made progress with North Korea. Capable of destroying Seoul within minutes of an outbreak of hostilities, Pyongyang has ignored every effort by the U.S. and its allies to deter it from building a nuclear arsenal.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Trump has gone back and forth dramatically on Kim. As a candidate in 2016, he said he would get China to make the North Korean dictator “disappear in one form or another very quickly.” Once in office, he taunted Kim, calling him “Little Rocket Man,” and suggested that the U.S. might immolate Pyongyang. Then he switched directions and orchestrated three personal meetings with Kim.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“That stuff is just crazy enough to work,” one of the generals told me with a \u003ci\u003ewhat-the-hell?\u003c/i\u003e chuckle. “We’ll see what happens. If they can get back to some kind of discussion, if it can avert something, it will have been worth it. The unconventional aspect of that does have the opportunity to shake some things up.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"In the long run, however, unpredictability is a problem. Without a coherent underlying strategy, uncertainty creates confusion and increases the chance of miscalculation—and miscalculation, the generals pointed out, is what starts most wars. John F. Kennedy famously installed a direct hotline to the Kremlin in order to lower the odds of blundering into a nuclear exchange. Invading Kuwait, Saddam Hussein stumbled into a humiliating defeat in the first Gulf War—a conflict that killed more than 100,000 people—after a cascading series of miscommunications and miscalculations led to a crushing international response.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleRelatedContentLink\",\"idAttr\":\"injected-recirculation-link-1\",\"innerHtml\":\"\u003ca href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst-problem-on-earth/528717/\\\"\u003eFrom July/August 2017: Mark Bowden on how to deal with North Korea\u003c/a\u003e\",\"index\":1},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Unpredictability becomes an impediment to success when it interferes with orderly process. “Say you’re going to have an engagement with North Korea,” a general who served under multiple presidents told me. “At some point you should have developed a strategy that says, \u003ci\u003eHere’s what we want the outcome to be\u003c/i\u003e. And then somebody is developing talking points. Those talking points are shared with the military, with the State Department, with the ambassador. Whatever the issue might be, before the president ever says \u003ci\u003eanything\u003c/i\u003e, everybody should know what the talking points are going to be.” To avoid confusion and a sense of aimlessness, “everybody should have at least a general understanding of what the strategy is and what direction we’re heading in.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Which is frequently not the case now.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“If the president says ‘Fire and brimstone’ and then two weeks later says ‘This is my best friend,’ that’s not necessarily bad—but it’s bad if the rest of the relevant people in the government responsible for executing the strategy aren’t aware that that’s the strategy,” the general said. Having a process to figure out the sequences of steps is essential. “The process tells the president what he should say. When I was working with Obama and Bush,” he continued, “before we took action, we would understand what that action was going to be, we’d have done a Q\u0026amp;A on how we think the international community is going to respond to that action, and we would have discussed how we’d deal with that response.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"To operate outside of an organized process, as Trump tends to, is to reel from crisis to rapprochement to crisis, generating little more than noise. This haphazard approach could lead somewhere good—but it could just as easily start a very big fire.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"If the president eschews the process, this general told me, then when a challenging national-security issue arises, he won’t have information at hand about what the cascading effects of pursuing different options might be. “He’s kind of shooting blind.” Military commanders find that disconcerting.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“The process is not a panacea—Bush and Obama sometimes made bad decisions even with all the options in front of them—but it does help.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleOverflowInlineImage\",\"width\":960,\"height\":786,\"attributionText\":\"Illustration: Paul Spella; Eric Thayer / Reuters\",\"captionText\":\"\",\"alignment\":\"OVERFLOW\",\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/-PXzVrNwkp4kOOadmoSX-MSQ_Ho=/960x786/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg\",\"srcSet\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/-PXzVrNwkp4kOOadmoSX-MSQ_Ho=/960x786/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/xocYPmSMbDxIGc600lFYW2HG_gU=/1920x1572/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 2x\",\"altText\":\"Illustration of Trump in a blindfold\",\"crop\":{\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/7Ml1Qfw4uuZUrl-rVXQ9XkxoOZE=/0x0:2037x1667/928x759/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg\",\"width\":928,\"height\":759,\"srcSet\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/5uGallLLZ-xIz6hc6Q1M53G_x-c=/0x0:2037x1667/640x523/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 640w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/xZLAJxRLcqAZwfZ1YJL_vSbtypU=/0x0:2037x1667/750x613/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 750w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/m6FvIc1KTV99CPTvU-Q2JEDqLz8=/0x0:2037x1667/850x695/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 850w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/7Ml1Qfw4uuZUrl-rVXQ9XkxoOZE=/0x0:2037x1667/928x759/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 928w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/rAjLeYgKx2gCDJgZU49JKbKtFX4=/0x0:2037x1667/1536x1256/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/jY3qN3r7O5t0L2weJz_fiFztfKk=/0x0:2037x1667/1856x1518/media/img/posts/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsSpot2/original.jpg 1856w\",\"reducedMotionSrcSet\":null,\"__typename\":\"BasicCrop\"},\"clickthroughUrl\":\"\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleHeading\",\"headingSubtype\":\"HED2\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"IV. “HE IS REFLEXIVELY CONTRARY”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"General H. R. McMaster, who left the White House on reasonably good terms in April 2018 after only 14 months as national security adviser, is about as can-do a professional as you will find. He appeared to take Trump seriously, and tailored his briefings to accommodate the president’s famous impatience, in order to equip him for the weighty decisions the office demands. But Trump resents advice and instruction. He likes to be agreed with. Efforts to broaden his understanding irritate him. McMaster’s tenure was bound to be short. Weeks before accepting his resignation, the president let it be known that he found McMaster’s briefings tedious and the man himself “gruff and condescending.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Distrusting expertise, Trump has contradicted and disparaged the intelligence community and presided over a dismantling of the State Department. This has meant leaving open ambassadorships around the world, including in countries vital to American interests such as Brazil, Canada, Honduras, Japan, Jordan, Pakistan, Russia, and Ukraine. High-level foreign officers, seeing no opportunities for advancement, have been leaving.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“When you lose these diplomats and ambassadors that have all this experience, this language capability, this cultural understanding, that makes things very, very difficult for us,” one of the generals said. “And it leads to poor decisions down the line.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Trump so resists being led that his instinct is nearly always to upend prevailing opinion.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“He is reflexively contrary,” another of the generals told me.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"According to those who worked with him, McMaster avoided giving the president a single consensus option, even when one existed. He has said that he always tried to give the president room to choose. After leaving the White House, he criticized others in the national-security community for taking a different approach, accusing them of withholding information in hopes of steering Trump in the direction they preferred. McMaster has not named names, but he was most likely talking about Mattis and General John Kelly, who, after serving as Trump’s homeland-security secretary, became the president’s second chief of staff. McMaster has said that he considered such an approach tantamount to subverting the Constitution—but if his allegation is true, it shows how poorly equipped those people felt Trump was for the job. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report records numerous instances of civilian advisers trying to manage the president, or simply ignoring presidential directives they deemed ill-advised or illegal.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"During his brief tenure on Trump’s staff, McMaster oversaw the production of a broad national-security strategy that sought to codify Trump’s “America first” worldview, placing immigration at the head of national-security concerns, right alongside nuclear proliferation and terrorist attacks. The idea was to build a coherent structure around the president’s scattershot diplomacy. Trump rhapsodized about the document at its unveiling, according to someone who was there, saying, “I love it! I love it! I want to use this all the time.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"He hasn’t. Like its author, the document has been dismissed. Those who were involved in writing it remain convinced, somewhat hopefully, that it is still helping guide policy, but John Bolton, McMaster’s successor, said scornfully—a few months before he, too, was ousted by Trump—that it is filed away somewhere, consulted by no one.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Trump is no more likely to have read the thing than he is to have written his own books. (Years ago, after he published \u003ci\u003eThe Art of the Deal\u003c/i\u003e, he asked me if I was interested in writing his next book. I declined.) Trying to shape this president’s approach to the world into a cogent philosophy is a fool’s errand. For those commanding America’s armed forces, it’s best to keep binoculars trained on his Twitter feed.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleHeading\",\"headingSubtype\":\"HED2\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"V. HE HAS A SIMPLISTIC AND ANTIQUATED NOTION OF SOLDIERING\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Though he disdains expert advice, Trump reveres—perhaps fetishizes—the military. He began his presidency by stacking his administration with generals: Mattis, McMaster, Kelly, and, briefly, Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser. Appointing them so soon after their retirement from the military was a mistake, according to Don Bolduc, a retired brigadier general who is currently running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. Early on, the biggest difference Bolduc saw between the Trump administration and its predecessors, and one he felt was “going to be disruptive in the long term,” was “the significant reliance, in the Pentagon at least, on senior military leadership overriding and making less relevant our civilian oversight. That was going to be a huge problem. The secretary of defense pretty much surrounded himself with his former Marine comrades, and there was, at least from that group, a distrust of civilians that really negatively affected the Pentagon in terms of policy and strategy in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, by following the same old failed operational approaches.” Trump’s reliance on military solutions is problematic because “there are limits to what the military can solve. I think initially the Trump administration held this idea that general officers somehow have all the answers to everything. I think the president discovered in short order that that’s really not the case.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Bolduc also pointed out an unusual leadership challenge caused by having a general of McMaster’s rank serve as national security adviser—he did not retire when he assumed the post. “McMaster, for whom I have tremendous respect, came in as a three-star general. Leaving him a three-star forces him on a daily basis to have to engage with four-star generals who see his rank as beneath theirs, even though his position is much more than that.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"The problems posed by Trump’s skewed understanding of the military extend beyond bad decision making to the very culture of our armed forces: He apparently doesn’t think American soldiers accused of war crimes should be prosecuted and punished. In early May, he pardoned former Army Lieutenant Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of murdering an Iraqi prisoner. Two weeks later, he asked the Justice Department to prepare pardon materials for a number of American servicemen and contractors who were charged with murder and desecration of corpses, including Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who stood accused by his own team members of fatally stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner and shooting unarmed civilians. (He was ultimately acquitted of the murders but convicted of posing for photos with the boy’s body.) Trump subsequently chastised the military attorneys who had prosecuted Gallagher, and directed that medals awarded to them be rescinded. All of the generals agreed that interfering with the military’s efforts to police itself badly undermines command and control. When thousands of young Americans are deployed overseas with heavy weaponry, crimes and atrocities will sometimes occur. Failing to prosecute those who commit them invites behavior that shames everyone in uniform and the nation they serve.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“He doesn’t understand the warrior ethos,” one general said of the president. “The warrior ethos is important because it’s sort of a sacred covenant not just among members of the military profession, but between the profession and the society in whose name we fight and serve. The warrior ethos transcends the laws of war; it governs your behavior. The warrior ethos makes units effective because of the values of trust and self-sacrifice associated with it—but the warrior ethos also makes wars less inhumane and allows our profession to maintain our self-respect and to be respected by others. Man, if the warrior ethos gets misconstrued into ‘Kill them all …’ ” he said, trailing off. Teaching soldiers about ethical conduct in war is not just about morality: “If you treat civilians disrespectfully, \u003ci\u003eyou’re working for the enemy! \u003c/i\u003eTrump doesn’t understand.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Having never served or been near a battlefield, several of the generals said, Trump exhibits a simplistic, badly outdated notion of soldiers as supremely “tough”—hard men asked to perform hard and sometimes ugly jobs. He also buys into a severely outdated concept of leadership. The generals, all of whom have led troops in combat, know better than most that war is hard and ugly, but their understanding of “toughness” goes well beyond the gruff stoicism of a John Wayne movie. Good judgment counts more than toughness.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleRelatedContentModule\",\"contentType\":\"CURATED\",\"index\":0},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Bolduc said he came up in a military where it was accepted practice for senior leaders to blame their subordinates, lose their temper, pound on desks, and threaten to throw things, and the response to that behavior was “\u003ci\u003eHe’s a hard-ass\u003c/i\u003e. Right? \u003ci\u003eHe’s tough.\u003c/i\u003e That is not leadership. You don’t get optimal performance being that way. You get optimal performance by being completely opposite of that.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Bolduc worries that, under Trump’s command, a return to these antiquated notions of “toughness” will worsen the epidemic of PTSD plaguing soldiers who have served repeated combat tours. Senior military officers have learned much from decades of war—lessons Bolduc said are being discarded by a president whose closest brush with combat has been a movie screen.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"The military is hard to change. This is bad, because it can be maddeningly slow to adapt, but also good, because it can withstand poor leadership at the top. In the most crucial areas, the generals said, the military’s experienced leaders have steered Trump away from disaster. So far.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“The hard part,” one general said, “is that he may be president for another five years.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleLegacyHtml\",\"tagName\":\"HR\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"className\":\"\",\"style\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"\u003csmall\u003eThis article appears in the November 2019 print edition with the headline “General Chaos.”\u003c/small\u003e\"}],\"editorialProject\":null,\"primaryCategory\":{\"__typename\":\"Channel\",\"displayName\":\"Politics\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/\",\"slug\":\"politics\"},\"reviews\":[],\"embeds\":[{\"type\":\"iframe\",\"src\":\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/692414353%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-vSZq6\u0026inverse=true\u0026auto_play=false\u0026show_user=true\",\"__typename\":\"Embed\"}],\"preview\":null,\"tags\":[],\"layout\":\"feature\",\"secondaryByline\":\"\",\"dek\":\"The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/\",\"shareText\":\"The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines? Mark Bowden interviewed officers up and down the ranks to find out.\",\"shareTitle\":\"Top Military Officers Unload on Trump\",\"title\":\"Top Military Officers Unload on Trump\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-10-07T16:00:00Z\",\"issue\":{\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2019/11/\",\"issueName\":\"November 2019\",\"__typename\":\"MagazineIssue\",\"slug\":\"201911\"},\"editorsNote\":null,\"leadArt\":{\"__typename\":\"LeadArtImageLarge\",\"image\":{\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/foPND8sZZf18ptMXaVoMfqlwLPc=/0x0:2000x1125/1440x810/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg\",\"width\":1440,\"height\":810,\"srcSet\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/hBKw1FPwXcCEbArGE1dBFnfl_i8=/0x0:2000x1125/640x360/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 640w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/W72GiSytnb1oR0Y88tLwbtbeuJg=/0x0:2000x1125/750x422/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 750w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MptP3lmL4b6KMs62gmRpb7cB_LM=/0x0:2000x1125/850x478/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 850w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/CQifVYY66JLkUE-DphGvoQhHzpE=/0x0:2000x1125/1536x864/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/yw_4l8iO2j3zA-041NJvirRgx-I=/0x0:2000x1125/1920x1080/media/img/2019/10/01/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 1920w\",\"reducedMotionSrcSet\":null,\"altText\":\"abstract illustration of Trump\",\"captionText\":\"\",\"attributionText\":\"Illustration: Paul Spella; Michael Heiman / Getty\",\"attributionUrl\":\"\",\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"}},\"audio\":null,\"hasAudioRights\":null,\"narratedAudioImage\":{\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/kHnisci5PG9gLRjQvhsm7CsxVH4=/438x0:1563x1125/80x80/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg\",\"srcSet\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/kHnisci5PG9gLRjQvhsm7CsxVH4=/438x0:1563x1125/80x80/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 80w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/cTpgsok5K8u1VvC9TZovdDl4b1I=/438x0:1563x1125/96x96/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 96w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/U7re0ZNfgmHu0h3CqYHtnjnjUvQ=/438x0:1563x1125/128x128/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 128w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/1ehmfg-V1l8fwKfXdQMbOnsGGLE=/438x0:1563x1125/160x160/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 160w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/dYv5rkzGCd8b7ewkTMXmAVJ2evA=/438x0:1563x1125/192x192/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 192w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/YCxVOtNEXUU3mraD9CgF-zl4j_8=/438x0:1563x1125/256x256/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 256w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/hxZvdp0a-ftIzkQwhT0tV6NX_qw=/438x0:1563x1125/384x384/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 384w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/7V9u04kQb_JiyfavDpDjf42pnDs=/438x0:1563x1125/512x512/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg 512w\",\"width\":80,\"height\":80,\"altText\":\"abstract illustration of Trump\",\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"seoTitle\":\"What Top Military Officers Really Think About Trump\",\"hasMeter\":true,\"channels\":[{\"slug\":\"politics\",\"__typename\":\"Channel\"},{\"slug\":\"international\",\"__typename\":\"Channel\"}],\"primaryChannel\":{\"slug\":\"politics\",\"__typename\":\"Channel\",\"displayName\":\"Politics\"},\"shareDek\":\"The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?\",\"fbiaUrl\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/facebook-instant/article/598360/\",\"canonicalUrl\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-11-06T19:28:34Z\",\"syndication\":\"ALL\",\"shareImage2x1\":{\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/RCPMk_PyviJiFTuIttnynrc8SU0=/0x43:2000x1085/1200x625/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg\",\"height\":625,\"width\":1200,\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"shareImageGift2x1\":{\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/wXlwhQp7LlB8MZYGAQV_jyP4T6Q=/0x43:2000x1085/1200x625/filters:watermark(https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/badge_2x.png,-20,20,0,33)/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg\",\"height\":625,\"width\":1200,\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"shareImageGiftSmall\":{\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/A9OD8TlJsXZcZgPvsIlqjS_Rhv4=/4x41:1996x1087/960x504/filters:watermark(https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/badge_2x.png,-20,20,0,33)/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg\",\"height\":504,\"width\":960,\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"shareImageSmall\":{\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/uJ5DtCN4vnSsaqsXZPG3_X0ZIaQ=/4x41:1996x1087/960x504/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg\",\"height\":504,\"width\":960,\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"watsonInfo\":{\"keywords\":[\"different branches of the military\",\"American troops\",\"careful process of decision making\",\"practical realities of war\",\"American forces\",\"good decisions\",\"warrior ethos\",\"much choice.General Joseph Votel\",\"Trump’s case\",\"General H. R. McMaster\",\"president’s Twitter feed\",\"national defense\",\"Trump\",\"missile strike\",\"generation of officers\",\"senior military officers\",\"long-standing U.S.\",\"generals\",\"world of national security\",\"Trump’s pronouncements\",\"field commanders\",\"American drone\",\"General James Mattis\",\"chain of command\",\"General Joseph Votel\",\"John F. Kennedy\",\"rank serve\",\"unnecessary wars\",\"Iran’s leaders\",\"Trump’s statements\",\"key allies\",\"North Korea\",\"America’s local allies\",\"White House\",\"Don Bolduc\",\"self-sacrifice\",\"deep state\",\"military exercises\",\"special authority\",\"terrorist attacks\",\"advantage of the good relationship\",\"command positions\",\"immediate resignations of the secretary of defense\",\"military leadership\",\"president\",\"worse problems\",\"trust of allies\",\"McMaster’s tenure\",\"highest ranks\",\"Barack Obama\"],\"__typename\":\"WatsonInfo\"},\"shareImage1x1\":{\"width\":1080,\"height\":1080,\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/uWGeft6Z7eS5gbVYszpX8TSZ_qc=/438x0:1563x1125/1080x1080/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg\",\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"shareImage16x9\":{\"width\":1600,\"height\":900,\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/8ZQnWt4MrQ7mwL_1MENRl71km2w=/0x0:2000x1125/1600x900/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg\",\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"shareImage4x3\":{\"width\":1200,\"height\":900,\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/eVrbHiGUCXcMilpQaCn8f6ArEwc=/249x0:1749x1125/1200x900/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg\",\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"shareImageDefault\":{\"width\":960,\"height\":540,\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/5NaBGbAvnUlhPmwQzQym3a_S66o=/0x0:2000x1125/960x540/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg\",\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"shareImageSquareDefault\":{\"width\":540,\"height\":540,\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/KzI80wZNkPsosAFgbaa7WVoxVyQ=/438x0:1563x1125/540x540/media/img/2019/10/WEL_Bowden_TrumpGeneralsOpener/original.jpg\",\"__typename\":\"BasicImage\"},\"shareImageLeadArt\":{\"__typename\":\"LeadArtImageLarge\"},\"slug\":\"military-officers-trump\",\"grapeshot\":{\"segments\":[\"shadow9hu7_pos_lexus_fy23\",\"shadow9hu7_pos_israel_conflict\",\"politics_tbs_anyrisk\",\"shadow9hu7_pos_bofa-kwlist\",\"shadow9hu7_pos_goldman_sachs\",\"shadow9hu7_pos_safe_strict\",\"tbs_anyrisk\",\"pos_gucci\",\"pos_mastercard\",\"pos_oceangate\",\"pos_safety_delta\",\"gs_politics\",\"shadow9hu7_pos_safe_core\",\"shadow9hu7_pos_jpmc\",\"shadow9hu7_pos_customtopics\",\"gt_negative\",\"gb_death_injury_news-ent\",\"gs_science\",\"gv_military\",\"gs_science_geography\",\"ukraineinvasion_excl\",\"gs_politics_american\",\"gs_politics_misc\",\"gs_politics_issues_policy\",\"gs_busfin\",\"gs_war_conflict\"],\"__typename\":\"Grapeshot\"},\"isArchive\":false}}"}},"urqlClient":null},"isSocialBot":false},"page":"/[channel]/archive/[year]/[month]/[slug]/[id]","query":{"channel":"magazine","year":"2019","month":"11","slug":"military-officers-trump","id":"598360"},"buildId":"e3b8da5810","assetPrefix":"https://cdn.theatlantic.com","runtimeConfig":{"GTM_CONTAINER_ID":"GTM-NTQTB9V","GTM_CONTAINER_ID_NONCONSENTED":"GTM-5839GV7","GRAPHQL_API_URL":"https://graphql.theatlantic.com","GRAPHQL_API_KEY":"JakhyMEXwa9odtB8gBxFI63ITyKqDGkn7ciGVIJf","ADS_LIB_URL":"https://www.theatlantic.com/packages/hummingbirdjs/hummingbird.min.js","ACCOUNTS_FRONTEND_URL":"https://accounts.theatlantic.com","ENABLE_FEATURE_ARTICLE_RENDER":"false","RECAPTCHA_SITE_KEY":"6Lc9Z7AUAAAAAEYS1dgAG2_6tT3KLqZQ1z4kbDRc","BETA_ENV":false},"isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[9587,50649],"gip":true,"appGip":true,"scriptLoader":[]}</script><script nomodule="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/polyfills-c67a75d1b6f99dc8.js"></script><script async="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/9587.e62a84643012a04f.js"></script><script async="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/649.81412a92c899897e.js"></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/webpack-2462136f7fddc57d.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/framework-ca706bf673a13738.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/main-7cf71189bb4b30b4.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/pages/_app-ff1d27643a500c40.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/6729-7978443139836095.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/5303-a81934d6e8e761ae.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/9843-3905ec2636af2c3c.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/899-30da5ef51c1b6fdb.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/2912-ebf029ed4116b01f.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/4747-71d47472f5c4beea.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/6392-1397c4f8500d73b6.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/4947-02b1b9c56798b167.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/3297-031e2fc5be155f31.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/365-e835216503d223da.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/1124-b1cf3a9d4ae92dcb.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/9310-d0d5baafd7a7f3b8.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/5169-3adfae2cce1eb773.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/6346-ef3edb895c92109b.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/663-0fc7e1b7a52e2587.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/2544-aaa838d354b1cbbb.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/chunks/pages/%5Bchannel%5D/archive/%5Byear%5D/%5Bmonth%5D/%5Bslug%5D/%5Bid%5D-0fee4688858b18b9.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/e3b8da5810/_buildManifest.js" async=""></script><script src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/e3b8da5810/_ssgManifest.js" async=""></script></body></html>