Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is enabling Trump’s immorality

In a demented alternate reality, a 100-foot-tall gold statue of Donald Trump stands on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., as a reminder that America has been Trumpified. Its plaque reads: “President Donald J. Trump, conqueror and destroyer of worlds.” 

This reality is closer than most people imagine. 

On Tuesday, the president threatened to destroy Iran, a country with a population of 93 million. His words: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Trump’s threats were born of frustration and rage. With 90 minutes left before his deadline expired, he announced a two-week ceasefire that appears to be hanging by a thread. Trump has dispatched Vice President JD Vance, along with Middle East envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, to join high-stakes peace negotiations with Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The U.S., in partnership with Israel, has been winning the war tactically. But it is losing strategically. While history will render its verdict, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of choice against Iran may have already qualified as what experts have termed “superpower suicide,” which happens when a dominant nation makes poor decisions, inflicts self-inflicted injuries and ultimately loses its power and retreats to being a regional power.

But no president acts alone, not even Donald Trump. He needs military leaders, diplomats and senior officials to carry out his orders — orders that, in this case, were grossly immoral. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is one such man.

Instead of opposing Trump’s threats to engage in potential crimes against humanity, Caine gave tacit consent for them, according to a report in the New York Times. It is an old story: Demagogues corrupt the people around them.

At a Pentagon press conference last week, it took the chairman two attempts to answer whether Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s power infrastructure, oil wells and desalination plants would constitute a war crime. A reporter asked him directly whether there was any way to do these things without seriously hurting the civilian population. Caine answered that the military was “always thinking about those considerations” and had processes in place to mitigate the risks. Ten minutes later, he admitted he hadn’t really answered the question. So he tried again, this time describing his force as the “most professional in the world” and vowing it would “always strike lawful targets.” 

But this was not a substantive answer either. Caine evaded any discussion of morality and war crimes, and he knew it.

Other reporting from the Times revealed that Caine had serious doubts about the war but believed it was not his place to voice those to the president. In White House meetings leading up to the U.S. and Israel’s Feb. 28 attack on Iran, the chairman warned that the conflict would be far more difficult than recent operations — the strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025 and the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January — but he declined to weigh in on whether Trump should launch it at all.

In fairness to Caine, his position is genuinely constrained. The military is subordinate to its civilian commander in chief, and as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he has no direct command of battlefield forces. But as the Times noted, he does have great power and the responsibility to defend “the military’s professional, nonpartisan ethos and safeguarding the honor of the more than two million active duty, National Guard and reserve troops who serve under him.”

There are professional duties. But what of the moral responsibilities of senior leadership when a president threatens to commit a war crime by destroying an entire “civilization”? 

Then there is Caine’s obligation to serve as a moral example for American service members.

Retired Rear Adm. John Kirby, a former senior Pentagon aide, was more direct. “The chairman is not just a military adviser,” he told the Times. “He’s the personification of the U.S. military, the human representative of everyone who wears the uniform and their families.”

Donald Trump and his agents have systematically transformed the Pentagon and the national security state — and the American government more broadly — into an extension of his MAGA authoritarian project. Expertise has been replaced by loyalty in his personality cult. The Constitution has been replaced by Trump’s moods and whims. As Trump’s apparently pathological mind and behavior becomes the institutional norm, this environment is serving to nurture moral corruption and normalize deviance.

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The individuals who survive and flourish in such a system are sycophants and mediocrities, and those who have learned to navigate the Great Leader’s moods are far from the most qualified, talented or honorable.

This was underscored on April 2 when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George, the Army Chief of Staff — an unusual move, given that America is at war with Iran. According to multiple reports, George was sacked in part because he opposed the Trump administration’s purge of non-white senior officers and women.

When proximity to whiteness and being considered the right type of white person are traits that are elevated above accomplishments and talent, America’s military is made less capable — and strategic failures like the war in Iran become more likely. A man of principle performing his job in service to the nation — like George — is a threat to this administration.

In a farewell email posted on Reddit’s Army page that was later confirmed by an Army official, the general wrote, “It has been the greatest privilege to serve beside you and lead Soldiers in support of our country… Our Soldiers are truly the best in the world — they deserve tough training and courageous leaders of character.”

Without saying their names, George indicted Trump, Hegseth and all the others who chose power over principle.

General George made a choice. So did General Caine. Other public officials and civil servants have made their choices as well. And the American people are going to have to make a choice too –– and soon. 

Donald Trump is losing public support, which has been accelerated by his failed war in Iran. He is lashing out at MAGA boosters who, before condemning the war, have been among his biggest champions. As he clings even more tightly to power, he will become much more dangerous. 

Trump has few restraints — and morality is most certainly not among them. Most people do the right thing when it costs them nothing. Very few do the right thing when it may cost them everything. We are now in the latter territory. General Caine has already shown us which kind of man he is. The question is what the rest of us will do.

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