Trump Edition: American Emperor?
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We're only going to win, win, win. We're going to win, win, win. I'm Roland Olyphant and this is Battlelines. It's Friday, the 24th of January 2025. This week, we hear from Deputy Foreign Editor Katie O'Neill about how Donald Trump has used his first week in the White House to redefine America's place in the world. The historian Robert Mary discusses Trump's infatuation with William McKinley, the 19th century president credited with turning America into a global empire.

And the former US soldier Chris Purdy tells us why many veterans are alarmed by Donald Trump's pick for Defense Secretary. On Monday this week, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States and he lost no time in implementing what can be fairly described as a radical agenda. American foreign policy, he declared, will from now on be unapologetic in putting America, Americans and their prosperity first.

Accordingly, all foreign aid programmes are going to be frozen until they can prove that they do that. If they don't, they'll be cut. He's also going to quit multinational organisations including the World Health Organisation.

raising serious questions about the future of international aid programs. And he has already laid the groundwork for the tariff barriers he's promised on the campaign trail. This is not business as usual. But nor is this isolationism and America turning its back on the world. Mr Trump, in his inauguration speech, also reaffirmed his intention to seize back control of the Panama Canal. He declared America would once again be a country that expands its borders

And singled out for praise, William McKinley, the president who annexed Hawaii, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. A weird turning point. It certainly feels like it, but so much has happened in the past few days, it has been difficult to keep up. To help me make sense of exactly what Mr Trump has said and done and its implications for both America's allies and enemies, I'm joined now by Katie O'Neill, The Telegraph's deputy foreign editor, who is in Washington.

Katie, I suppose before we get into the foreign policy stuff, just give us a sense of what has it been like in Washington this week watching all this? Washington has been a very different place this last week. The MAGA faithful descended.

the capital so just being around the weekend doing errands the crowds that were around were very different to the usual sort of cosmopolitan you know people working in politics and journalism and consultancy instead all of the bars and the train stations were filled with people wearing Make America Great Again hats and all different types of pro-Trump paraphernalia so definitely a very different

vibe to it. It was freezing cold, so much so, obviously, that the inauguration had to be moved indoors on Monday. But that doesn't stop the absolute deluge of Trump fans.

on Washington, D.C. to see him be inaugurated as the 47th president. It's died down now. It's kind of returned to normal where we're based here and the office is not too far from the White House. So we have heard many convoys ferrying different important figures, no doubt, back and forth towards the White House in the past couple of days. But yes, the Trump sort of caravan seems to have left D.C. now. Donald Trump was sworn in on March

Monday. I'm speaking to you on Thursday. I must say so much has happened in the intervening time. Could you walk us through what has he been doing? And specifically, in terms of American foreign policy, what do we understand about where he's guiding the great ship of American states and what it means for the rest of the world from these first few days?

Well, he told us before he was inaugurated that he was going to issue all of these decrees on day one. And it seemed far-fetched because there was so much that he was promising to do on his first day in office in terms of these executive orders that he was going to be passing. But yeah, when someone tells you who they are, believe them. He really has implemented so much. He is announcing...

policy, domestic and foreign policy at breakneck speed that it really is difficult to keep up with. And on any, you know, any one of these policies on a normal day would be massive news and hugely consequential news. The sheer breadth of the policy that he has announced since being inaugurated is rather stunning. In terms of the foreign policy measures that he's introduced,

The thread that runs through all of them is it's all part of his America for all's agenda. He wants to make America great again and that pulsates through all of the foreign policy announcements that he's made since he got into office. So on foreign aid, he's announced that he's going to suspend all new foreign aid initiatives for 90 days. It's not believed that that will affect a lot of the

funds that have already been passed by Congress and are in train, but he wants to suspend any fresh spending in foreign aid. Mark Rubio, who's his first confirmed member of Donald Trump's cabinet, said that there's going to be this review of all foreign aid policies, and again, all of that will be done through the America First lens. And that mission is to ensure that our foreign policy is centered on one thing, and that is the advancement of our national interest.

which they have clearly defined through his campaign as anything that makes us stronger or safer or more prosperous. The three questions that every foreign aid initiative needs to satisfy is does it make America safer, stronger and more prosperous, according to Mr. Rubio. So, yeah, they're going to use this 90 day period.

in which to review whether these spends are serving America's interests and presumably they will begin cutting ones that they don't deem to be making America more prosperous. I believe America Funds contributes roughly something like 14% of the budget of the World Health Organization. So this is potentially really big

knock-on effects for aid and health programs across the planet. Yeah, and he's announced on day one that he's going to pull America out of the World Health Organization, which again is just one of those announcements that in and of itself is absolutely huge, but it sort of gets lost in the sheer breadth of the policies that he's announced on day one. But yes, America donates a lot to economies all over the world, and it remains to be seen the effect of

that this is going to have, but I imagine it will be quite stark and quite instantaneous in some of these cases. He signed an executive order about America first foreign policy. That's what all foreign policy is going to be about from now on.

Very, very quickly, what does that mean for the rest of us? I mean, starting with Britain and Europe, America's allies on the other side of the Atlantic. Well, one of the things that he has been toasting since before he got into office, he's been talking about his favorite word, which is tariffs. And he's going to start leveling those on some countries that were traditionally allies of America, including Canada. They're facing a 25% tariff from February 1st.

as is Mexico. He said he was going to do it on day one. He has delayed it slightly. This is sort of a revenge tactic of his. He deems that both Canada and Mexico allow migrants and drugs to flow over into America over their borders. So it's a retaliatory tactic.

Justin Trudeau, the outgoing Prime Minister of Canada, has already signalled that Canada will also retaliate in some form. He hasn't said that there will be tariffs that will be issued from the Canadian side, but there are hints that that is something that the Canadian government is considering.

So yeah, it's not just America's perceived enemies that Donald Trump is beginning to look at in terms of his foreign policy and issuing sort of things that maybe aren't deemed that way really abroad. And on that note, what do you think America's adversaries, and I'm thinking particularly of Russia and China, the real big players, what are they going to take away from this week?

Well, it's been quite interesting with Russia because we've seen quite a...

a change in Donald Trump's language towards Russia. He's obviously been accused of having ties closer to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, closer ties than a lot of the Western superpowers would like him to have. But we've seen a change in his language already. So when he was signing those executive orders at the Oval Office on his first day in office on Monday, he talked about how... He should make a deal. I think he's destroying Russia.

by not making a deal. Which is sort of a new tone coming from the US president. And then Wednesday, he threatened to issue new tariffs on Russia if Vladimir Putin fails to end what he called his ridiculous war in Ukraine. One of Trump's

promises before he got into office was that he would end the war in Ukraine on day one. So that is obviously something that he has failed to achieve. But yeah, it's interesting that tonal shift on how he's speaking about Russia in his early days in office.

And is there anything on Beijing President Xi would be taking away from this week? Yeah, obviously we had the TikTok for the start of the week and that has now been resolved. Donald Trump is still trying to find a US owner for that app, but he overturned the ban and it's been allowed to continue to appear in the Google and Apple stores.

Obviously, tariffs are a remaining favored threat of Donald Trump, and he's continuing to insist that China has some big tariffs coming from the U.S. side. What are the next milestones in Trumpian foreign policy that we should be looking out for? Well, I think seeing what he does on Russia and Ukraine is going to be very keenly watched. As I say, he

said that he would end the war on day one, but he's never given specifics as to how exactly he is going to intervene to end the war in Ukraine. So the eyes of the world will be on him as to how he will achieve that, if he'll be able to bring Vladimir Zelensky and Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table to broker a ceasefire there remains to be seen. But with his traditional bombastic Trump spirit, he has decreed it can be done. I think

I think that's something that we'll be watching keenly in the next couple of days and weeks. Katie O'Neill, thank you very much. In his inaugural speech on Monday, Donald Trump didn't have many nice things to say about his predecessors. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, even George W. Bush all came in for barely veiled insults relating to their legacies and the state they've left the country in.

However, Donald Trump did have praise for one other predecessor in the White House. President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.

He was a natural businessman and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal. If you're not a student of late 19th century American history, you may be forgiven for wondering exactly who William McKinley is.

Luckily, I'm very pleased to say we are being joined by the man who literally wrote the book. Robert Murray is a historian and writer. He had a long career in Washington as a journalist. He's written six books on American journalism.

history and foreign policy. The book in question is called President McKinley, Architect of the American Century. It came out in 2017. It has 4.6 stars on Amazon. I'm assuming, Robert, it's probably not been as much interest in your book for a long time as there is right now this week after President Trump's inauguration speech. Well, the fact that I'm here, Roland, would indicate that there's some interest in

And yes, indeed, there is interest and people are trying to understand what's the connection between McKinley and who he was and what he accomplished and Trump, who seems to have adopted him as his model for presidential leadership.

It's a fascinating question. There's a lot to get into. Could you begin, Robert, maybe by just for our listeners, just laying out the basics of who William McKinley was, what he did, where he stands in American history? Because I don't think many of our British listeners will be familiar with him. In fact, in my conversations with a lot of my American acquaintances, they've said to me, to be honest, I'd forgotten about McKinley until Donald Trump mentioned him. Well, that's very understandable. He's a

somewhat in eclipse, but I will say this about McKinley. He was a very consequential president, and he did an awful lot that he doesn't really get credit for. There's a lot of interesting reasons for that, but nevertheless, he kind of languishes in the middle range in terms of the surveys and the polls of academics in terms of presidential performance. And that's probably a

close to being right, but maybe he deserves to be a little bit higher than that because a lot of things happen. We can talk about that. A lot of things happened when he was president. I will say he was an Ohioan. He was a war hero in the Civil War as a young man. He rose from being a private to being a brevet major. He became a lawyer, went to Canton, Ohio, became a member of Congress,

He was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which was fitting because he was, as everyone knows now, a protectionist. And he believed in high tariffs. And those high tariffs he brought to America through a very high tariff piece of legislation in 1890.

It didn't really go over very well with the American people because prices got raised, whether because of the tariffs or because of the prospect of the tariffs is an open question. But nevertheless, the result was that he lost his seat in Congress, that he didn't give up. He ran for governor of Ohio, served two terms, and then ran for president in 1896, and pretty much blew away the opposition in the Republican Party.

Let me just say a little bit about his temperament. He was not a visionary. The great visionaries of that period were Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge and Admiral Mayen. Those were people who saw and really wanted to push for America to become a very significant global player on the scene. And McKinley wasn't like that, but he had an uncanny ability to

to size up events as they were occurring around him and seize opportunities that were presented by those events. And we can talk about some of the examples, but he took America into the Spanish-American War, destroyed Spain's Asian fleet, Pacific fleet, and then the Atlantic fleet. He brought Hawaii into the United States.

He was a high tariff man, but he began to change his views dramatically at the end of his life just before he was assassinated five months into his second term. He presided over America's overtaking Britain as the leader of the world's leading industrial power. A lot happened on his watch. There's a reason why Trump has selected McKinley as his model. You've touched on

The two things that I think seem to attract Donald Trump to him, one is his reputation as a tariffs man and as a protectionist. And the second one seems to do with the Spanish-American War and particularly the acquisitions, the way that he acquired the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, I think. And are we right in thinking that this is, in fact, I think it's on the blurb of your book,

In a way, that's what set the stage for the 20th century becoming the American century. That's what propelled America into the status of kind of a 19th century global empire. Well, that's the thesis of my book. Generally, American historians have attributed the grand role of pushing America into the world to Teddy Roosevelt.

My thesis, based on my research, indicates that no, all those things were set in train, some of them even before McKinley, but all those were pushed further or set in train by McKinley.

And he didn't do it with any kind of braggadocio or fanfare. That wasn't the nature of his leadership style. He was a man of sort of prudence, slow decision-making, but decisive decision-making along the way. Could you just tell us about the Spanish-American War, what it was and what happened very quickly? Because it is...

It is a war that was probably much more important than it is remembered, because it's not very well remembered at all, really. Spain was a declining empire. America was a rising nation with some ambitions of becoming an empire. And Spain had Cuba. It was the jewel in the crown of the Spanish Empire. But it was a tremendous empire.

insurgency against Spanish rule in Cuba, and Spain was putting it down very, very brutally. America was, a lot of people in America were outraged by that, number one. And number two, some people thought that we should just go in there and take Cuba away from Spain, not necessarily to bring it into U.S. auspices, but to give the Cubans their freedom.

from Spanish rule. There was a lot of agitation for military action. McKinley became president and he was not exactly fiery in his rhetoric or his pronouncements. He was much more measured than that. But here's what he did behind the scenes.

He let the Spanish leaders, the queen regent, a woman who was sort of running Spain until her son would gain enough years of experience so he could take over, essentially lay down an ultimatum. You've got to end this insurgency. You can do it by winning or you can do it by negotiating a settlement, which would probably mean much more autonomy for the people of Cuba.

And when the queen regent pushed back, he just didn't yield. Meanwhile, he wasn't making a lot of strong statements about how terrible this was and how America was going to take care of this problem. But nevertheless, behind the scenes, he was pushing events in the direction he wanted, which was that Spain was going to have to give up Cuba and Puerto Rico while we were at it.

So once the war occurred, our navy was ready in both the Philippines and in Cuba. It basically destroyed two Spanish fleets and destroyed Spain as a major global empire. And you emerged from 1898 then, having acquired the Philippines and Gaumona Pacific, Puerto Rico.

and Cuba essentially, I suppose, independent but essentially an American protectorate in a sense.

When we put this together with what Donald Trump said in his inauguration speech, where he talked about taking back control of the Panama Canal, and he also talked about America once again being a nation that expands its borders. What does that leave you thinking? Does it sound to you like President Trump wants to refight the Spanish-American War or wants to annex America's neighbors? Well, 2025 is not 1898 anymore.

Even in 1898, the United States was moving towards empire, but was doing it with a certain amount of caution. And McKinley represented that. He didn't really want to take all of the Philippines.

But he wanted a coaling station because we were building a global navy. We had to have a coaling station. So how could we support the, how could we make sure that we could protect our interests in terms of a coaling station? Well, we'd have to get the main Philippine island. And how are we going to protect that island? Well, we're going to have to have the whole Philippines protected.

He wasn't necessarily hungry for it, but he felt that it was necessary if we were going to continue to grow and build that Navy and become a global power, which we were just doing inexorably. So I can see...

how Donald Trump, if his ambition is to take Greenland, for example, or retake the Panama Canal, would look at McKinley, who really began the process of grabbing, taking, accumulating, annexing strategic points on the globe that are helpful to us in terms of being a global power. And we have been a global power throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries.

And so I think it's sort of natural for Trump, who doesn't care at all about humanitarian interests in terms of getting into global situations, but cares very much about geostrategic interests of the United States. Whether that's pertinent to today's world is an open question.

But I think it's sort of natural for him to hark back, given sort of his global outlook. It's not an inappropriate analogy to make in terms of what he wants to do and what McKinley actually did. Let's talk about the tariffs then. Donald Trump...

has talked about how McKinley made America very prosperous by having enormous tariffs. You've explained a little bit about how, you know, he experimented with very sharp tariffs while he was still in the House of Representatives. What was his approach like during his presidency to protectionism? And did it actually work? Are there actually applicable lessons for today's America in what he did then?

Well, let's put it into some historical context. There's a part of the American history that was the high tariff sensibility. Alexander Hamilton was a protectionist. Abraham Lincoln was a protectionist. Henry Clay, the founder really of the Quig Party, was a protectionist. And protectionism was a significant part of the American political landscape through much of our history.

The Republican Party throughout the 19th century after the Civil War, with all that tremendous growth and industrial explosion of development, was essentially a high-tariff party. And McKinley ingested that.

But what McKinley saw as he became president, and he raised tariffs, but now he's getting into his second term and he's seeing something that's very dramatic. And it is that America's productive capacity in both the agricultural and industrial realms was so tremendous, so huge, that we were outproducing our ability to sell within the domestic market.

And that meant that we had to sell overseas. And if you want to sell goods overseas, you have to buy goods from overseas. And he saw that. And he used language that was almost like free trade language, but he was trying to apply it to a new concept. And I think that Trump is in a position to try to fashion something along these lines, but I don't think he's done it. And that is what he called, what McKinley called reciprocity.

And reciprocity was essentially, that was a high tariff era, a high tariff regimen. So it was easier than what we're facing today. But nevertheless, in a high tariff regimen, you can go around the world and enter into bilateral PACs and agreements with other countries saying essentially, we'll reduce ours if you reduce yours. And that was what reciprocity was all about.

And I had this sense watching Trump in the first term with Robert Lighthizer, his trade guy, that they were sort of moving in that direction. But I'm not so sure that I see that now. It seems to be more of a retaliatory on things that have nothing to do with trade and high tariffs with an idea of generating significant revenues.

But you have to remember that in McKinley's day, there was no income tax. So our revenue came from pretty much from tariffs. And that was a whole different situation from what we have today. I wanted to finish by asking you about how appropriate is it for Trump to, I don't know, to claim McKinley as a role model? I suppose he can claim anyone he likes as a role model because it's what he sees and what he remembers. But I remember in his first term,

A lot of people were actually comparing him not to William McKinley, but to McKinley's great democratic rival, William Jennings Bryan. You know, even people like Steve Bannon, who at one point back then was, you know, one of Donald Trump's close lieutenants, was talking about he's the greatest speaker since William Jennings Bryan. I believe he was credited with leading the first kind of

populist wave, introducing populism to American politics. And therefore, people were saying, in a sense, that's the guy who is kind of the ancestor of Trump, in a way. Do you think William McKinley and Trump really are similar kind of presidents? Would William McKinley be a Trump supporter if he was alive today?

Well, I would say that in terms of temperament and political image and in terms of how he projects himself, Trump is not at all like McKinley. McKinley was methodical, measured,

slow of decision-making, but decisive once he decided, once he saw the avenue that he wanted to pursue. He was very, very good at getting there and getting the people around him that could make it work for him. And he also engendered a huge amount of loyalty from the people around him. None of that is similar to Trump whatsoever because he's bombastic and moves fast and instinctive.

rather than methodical. So in terms of temperament or political persona, no, they're not at all alike. And McKinley certainly was not a populist.

But you can sort of see with a president like Trump who wants to hark back to another time of American greatness. And so therefore, I look at McKinley as the guy who sort of initiated a lot of the things that led to America being the global power that it became. In your kind of final analysis, when you look at America today and where we are in the world today and you compare those two things,

We could say that in Donald Trump, we now have a president who kind of embodies two things from those eras. He definitely kind of embodies the populism of William Jennings Bryan, but also that American imperialism personified by McKinley. Given how much the world has changed and where we are now, is there really a place for that? Let me say that the way I would look at it, I would bring it to

sort of the more modern period and look at it from the standpoint of the post-Cold War era. The post-Cold War era is characterized by something that we don't like to acknowledge and don't want to talk about, which is that America has lost and is continuing to lose the primacy that it had when it won the Cold War.

And it's not a unipolar world anymore. It's a multipolar world. What McKinley set in motion, and he was not alone, America was going to move in that direction in any event, certainly with TR and Henry Cavill Lodge and many, many others, Franklin Roosevelt, who basically transformed American politics and then

transform the world and put America at the center of the world. All that was happening, it was tremendous time for America. But we've got to sort of look at different ways of proceeding in a time when there's a multipolar world and these other nations are not going to step back and say that we're not going to play the game. They are going to play the game.

What we need as a nation, in my view, and I've written a lot about this, is sort of a different approach, not the kind of approach where we can be as dominant as we have been in the past, but we've got to play the very deft diplomatic game in a multipolar world. And we're not doing that. And I don't think that Trump is the man that's going to take us there. Robert, Mary, thank you very much.

After the break, why has Donald Trump's pick for defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, an Iraq war veteran, drawn the ire of his fellow ex-soldiers?

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To learn more and take your gift giving to the next level, visit 1-800-Flowers.com slash ACAST. That's 1-800-Flowers.com slash ACAST. Welcome back. Under the leadership of our next Secretary of Defense, who I just saw, Pete Hegseth, who's fantastic. Thank you.

Pete Hegseth is a former US Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, winning the Bronze Star and achieving the rank of Major. In civilian life, he made a virtue of his military service, becoming director of two groups with close links to the Republican Party, Veterans for America and Vets for Freedom.

and became a political commentator on Fox News. Donald Trump has picked him to be his defence secretary. Now, you might think other ex-soldiers would be pleased at the idea of one of their own running the Pentagon.

But a group of fellow veterans, men and women of the same age who served in the same wars, have written a letter raising deep concerns about his suitability to run the Defense Department. So what is it about Pete Hegseth that worries them? How divided is the so-called veteran community? And what is the role of that generation of soldiers, the men and women, mostly now in their 40s, who fought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in today's deeply divided America?

To answer these questions, I spoke to Chris Purdy, himself an Iraq veteran and the CEO and founder of the Chamberlain Network, an association of veterans. I started by asking him about his group, the Chamberlain Network, and what they do.

We're a network of veterans across the country who are concerned about democracy. Our job as an organization is to train veterans to be pro-democracy advocates in their community. So how do we rebuild trust and faith in Atlanta and Boise and New England, wherever it is across the United States? There is this severe shaking of the pillars of our trust and faith in our institutions. And veterans are great messengers. And we believe in this country because we swore an oath to defend it.

And so our job really is to empower veterans to be democracy protectors in their community. Which brings us neatly onto why we're talking to you today. You are one of a great number of veterans who've co-signed a letter collectively expressing concern about the suitability of Donald Trump's pick for defense secretary. That's Pete Hegseth, who is himself a veteran, I believe, and makes quite a big deal of this. Tell us about this letter, who you wrote to, and again,

And what is the nature of your concern? So I, along with a number of other different groups, we signed on to a letter where a diverse group of Americans advocating to the Senate to really uphold this constitutional duty that they have to advise and consent to nominees. We saw Peg Seth, a mid-level field grade officer with ties to white nationalism as a real threat

to the apolitical nature of the military. His public persona over the past decade or so has been one of division. Our perspective is that this is a guy that's not going to put troops first. He's not going to be the responsible civilian leader of the military. That's another thing that I don't think many people understand in the United States. We have a civilian leader of the military. There's not this great tradition of having military officers lead the Department of Defense.

So should we see events like we saw in the first Trump administration where troops are being used for traditional civilian roles, we would expect a senior DOD official to push back on the president or his advisors and say, no, that's not the appropriate role of the military. We don't have confidence that Pete Hegsass is going to do that. Your letter requests a formal review, I think, of his suitability.

I think at this point, it's worth me pointing out where we are in the process. So first, his application is considered by the Armed Services Committee. He appeared in front of the Armed Services Committee at a hearing earlier this month.

His nomination was voted out of committee in a 14-13 party line vote, which I think means that Republican members of the committee had the majority and they voted to basically approve it and move it on to the Senate for final approval. I also want to add here that there was some reporting earlier this week. So on Tuesday this week, it was revealed in American media that the committee had received an affidavit from his ex-sister-in-law,

claiming that basically she'd been subjected to volatile and threatening conduct, fear for her safety, that she'd once hidden a closet from him, that she developed escape plans to use if she needed to get away from him, and so on. Basically allegations that he's a fairly unstable character. I should add that Samantha Hegseth, the ex-wife in question, denied that in an email to NBC.com.

Do you really think that your intervention will make a difference? Is he going to get through or is this a bit of a bit of a Hail Mary? There are members of the Senate on the Republican side of the aisle who I think are appalled at Hegseth nomination. And they need to see a bipartisan coalition of civil society veteran groups.

basically come to their defense and give them some cover to really vote their conscience. I know for a fact there are senators that don't want to vote for him, but they feel like they have to. They're being bullied by this incoming, well, the now administration. And I think what you brought up earlier about these threats against women in his life show a real disdain for women in general.

He has made multiple comments on air publicly in written texts about his views on women in the military and how...

women should not be in combat roles. And that is really detrimental to the morale of the people that he's going to be leading. How can the women who are in combat roles right now, in the military right now, look to their secretary of defense as someone who's going to have their back if he doesn't think they should be there? And I'll just tell a story. When I was in Iraq, my driver, we were in a

You know, 120 pounds. She was an Ethiopian refugee. She she was not who you would expect to be in a combat zone fighting for her country in Iraq. But she was there and she did her job equally as well as anybody else in that truck. And I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her skill and professionalism in some really difficult times.

And so when I hear comments about women need to be out of combat roles or just kind of the general nature degrading women in service, it's not just offensive. It impacts the military's ability to be ready for combat because those women are going to hear that in the back of their heads when they go out downrange, when they're out on patrol, and they're going to say, man, my leaders don't support me. That's dangerous.

Can I talk about the veteran community? You're part of the veteran community. It seems to me you're taking the great amount of credibility that lends you in American society. I think it's fair to say American veterans get a kind of credibility that certainly more than they get in this country, for example. And you seem to be using that for what you believe are righteous political ends, you're preserving democracy, all of this, all the things you swore to upheld. Then you have people like Pete Hagseth who...

are also the veteran community, but kind of see things a very, very different way. Is there a big division amongst what we call the veteran community? And I was wondering if you could reflect on how that is bleeding into the America we know today, because it seems to me that in the aftermath of the

you know, the great war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on. There's a huge number of people like you, right? There's a huge number of people of your age who went through all this, who are then finding their voice on whatever side of the political divide they happen to be. I was wondering if I could get you to reflect on those issues. Yeah. I mean, you see partisan veteran groups, you know, stand up on either side of the aisle using the credibility of veterans for their partisan political purposes.

That's not what we're doing. We're focused on an idea on representative democracy, building trust and faith in that system, which is why we had engaged veterans on election work. We put veterans out as poll workers. We're doing this work now talking about how dangerous some nominees are to the actual democratic institutions of this country. So from my perspective, other people, and I've been accused of this, right, of being a partisan, but I'm not a wing of the

But there is a problem in this country, in the United States, on how America treats its veterans. And it's not what people think. I can't tell you how many times I go to cocktail parties or have conversations with people and say, oh, we don't do enough for veterans. Actually, you do. There is so much help that is given to veterans. And obviously, things can be done better.

and should be done better, but we have elevated the veteran community up to a caste that is just unreachable, unattainable. It feels like we are often otherized by broader American society. And that's dangerous for a republic. When you have a warrior class, quote unquote, that is seen as separate and apart from the civilian population, that is a real threat to democracy.

There's a reason why I think there's a term for American soldiers. We're citizen soldiers. We serve in the military and then we become citizens. We are not perpetually soldiers. We're not in this just for the military purposes. And so, you know, I appreciate all of the love and respect that I get for being a veteran, especially during the global war on terror. Well, I think this British audience might not get it, but there's a home goods store called Lowe's that gives us 10% off on all of our goods.

Great. Love it. But like, I don't care. I, what I would like to do is get to a point where like the post-World War II veteran community, they came home, they rebuilt a better society. They use the credibility that they had overseas to come home and build something and, and, and, and make life better for people. That's, that's what I'm hoping to do. Did you see that film Civil War? I did. I thought it was very powerful. I suppose I'm interested in like, it felt quite zeitgeisty. People were like thinking, you know, does,

Donald Trump going to plunge America into a second civil war and so on. I'm just wondering if you do feel that zeitgeist, given everything you've just said about the kind of dangers the Republic is in about this moment in history. I feel we are in for a rough road. If you'd asked me eight years ago, did I think that if you asked me five years ago, did I think that there would be a attempted coup on January 6th? I would say no. If you asked me today, do I think that the military will

be turned on its own people, I would say no. But these past 10 years have proven me wrong more times than I would care to admit. So I think it's on us as a community, as a veteran community, to use that credibility we were just talking about and really draw these lines. Because if no one is out there speaking out and trying to call attention to what is right, forget the politics of it all. This is how backsliding into authoritarianism happens. Do you think that the culture of

political non-involvement in the United States military is still there and still strong enough. You could look at the number of senior, retired senior military leaders who are getting involved in politics very, very outspokenly. I understand why they're really leaning into their military credentials. I think that is dangerous if left unchecked. But there have been up until

the last 20 years, this tradition of officers not voting. Officers in the military were very proud to not vote. And that has gone away. I think partisan politics is becoming a real danger to the military, which is why Peg Hegseth's nomination will likely supercharge that. I think I'm kind of chunking at your question here a little bit. If you're asking, do I think that the military is going to get involved in elections and install leaders?

I can't imagine a world where that would happen. But if it does, we would be in for a very, very difficult period in American history. Thank you, Chris Purdy. That's it for this week. I'll be back with my colleague, Venetia Rainey, on Monday. For now, that was Battle Lines. Goodbye.

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