White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered a very simple explanation for Friday’s change in Pentagon personnel.
Leavitt was asked during a Tuesday media briefing why President Donald Trump was “naming a replacement for [now-former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Charles] Brown” and appointing retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine to the role.
“He thinks he’s doing a bad job,” Leavitt answered.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt never holds back.
Q: Why did Trump fire General Brown?
A: He [Trump] thinks he’s doing a bad job. pic.twitter.com/7CoiNWUpXH
— Thomas Hern (@ThomasMHern) February 25, 2025
She provided some broader context on the challenges our military is facing, but that was about all the reporter needed to know.
“It’s time for a shakeup at the Pentagon,” Leavitt continued. “They’ve failed seven audits in a row. The trust in our United States military amongst the warfighters is low.”
“The president is shaking up the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, of course, with Secretary Hegseth leading,” Leavitt emphasized.
“He has the right to do that. It’s actually quite common from administration to administration to do such a thing.”
That answer from Leavitt was blunt but truthful.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been asked a similar question one day earlier in a much less charitable way, and he answered in a much more blunt fashion.
“Why did you select an underqualified, retired lieutenant general to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?” a reporter asked Hegseth.
“I’m going to choose to reject your unqualified question,” he shot back. “Who’s next?”
Far beyond the ways in which these two questions were answered, the decision to swap Brown for Caine shows a massive shift in the way Washington does business.
Trump, as a lifelong businessman, clearly understands that nobody is entitled to a job just because they have been in that job for a certain period of time.
In the business world, anyone who does not show tangible results is shown the door, and that is exactly what Trump has done.
Brown indeed helped to oversee a Pentagon which forced woke ideology down servicemembers’ throats and lost trust among the American warfighters and the American people.
Trump also knows that if a process or institution is broken enough, then a complete outsider may be needed to jar the system and bring that institution back on track.
Even though the legacy media and the Washington establishment like to criticize such outsiders, Trump has tapped several in his second administration.
Caine and Hegseth are great examples.
So are Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., just to name a few others.
Trump does not seem to care if his senior advisers and Cabinet members put in the appropriate number of years sitting in Pentagon conference rooms or cutting deals in the D.C. swamp.
He cares about results, and he does not care about making that known to his critics.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.