Donald Trump is known to muse about how the military men he interacts with as president are straight out of “central casting.” He doesn’t seem to want his movie to include any Black women, according to a report released Friday by The New York Times.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently blocked the promotion of four Army officers to become single-star generals, the Times reports. Two of the officers Hegseth took off the list are Black, and the other two are women. Hegseth has been on a crusade to eradicate “woke” diversity initiatives from the military, and since taking over the Pentagon has made a series of unusual moves targeting people of color and women. Hegseth had reportedly been pressuring Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll to remove the four names from the promotion list, but Driscoll refused, defending the officers as qualified.
The Times highlights another incident last summer, in which Hegseth’s chief of staff, Ricky Buria, was upset that Driscoll tapped Maj. Gen. Antoinette Gant, a Black woman, to lead the Military District of Washington. The promotion meant Grant would stand near Trump during ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery. Buria reportedly told Driscoll that Trump wouldn’t want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events, with the Times citing three current and former officials familiar with the exchange.
Driscoll was taken aback, and raised the issue with a senior White House official, who agreed that Trump wouldn’t want to stand next to a Black woman.
Buria denied the exchange took place, calling the allegation “fake Washington gossip” in a text to the Times.
Hegseth nixing the promotion of Black and female officers isn’t surprising given how he has long railed against DEI in the military, and in the past said that women should not serve in combat roles. Shortly after Trump was elected, Hegseth called for the firing of then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Charles Brown, who is Black, saying that anyone “involved in any of that DEI woke shit has got to go.” Trump fired Brown shortly after taking office a few months later.
Hegseth’s Pentagon has since ordered a “passive approach” to Juneteenth messaging; deleted Black, Latino, and female webpage memorials from the Arlington National Cemetery website; deleted (and then restored) content related to Jackie Robinson’s military service and the Tuskegee Airmen; and canceled an assessment program aimed at ensuring all officers had a chance to land leadership roles, regardless of race or gender.
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Hegseth has also railed against having to look at “fat troops,” sharing Trump’s heightened concern with optics. The reporting that the president doesn’t want to be seen next to a Black female officer isn’t the first time he’s been accused of only wanting to appear alongside certain types of service members. The Atlantic reported in 2020 that he didn’t want disabled veterans to participate in a military parade he asked generals to throw for him in 2018. Trump Peter Baker of the Times and Susan Glaser of The New Yorker detailed the exchanged in their 2024 book The Divider, writing that Trump told then-Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired general, that he didn’t “want any wounded guys in the parade,” adding that it “doesn’t look good for me.”
From Rolling Stone US
