Bria Suggs
Appearances
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
And C.Q. Brown had a video that, you know, was very impassioned about his experience as an African-American.
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
Yeah, and you would know this better than us with covering Congress. But, yeah, I mean, this is what we've basically seen, that Republicans have essentially said that they are going to approve – Nearly everybody who Trump has put forward, in fact, they've approved everybody.
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
The one person who wound up not, you know, going forward was Matt Gaetz for attorney general, but he withdrew beforehand seeing the writing on the wall. But yeah, I mean, even if there's a couple of Republicans who say that they don't want to vote for someone, they're still able to get 51 votes for a lot of them.
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
And that's actually one of the things that I thought was really fascinating during the last presidential administration with Biden and how many Democrats complained about having Joe Manchin in there and how he was taking out Biden's agenda and making it not progressive enough. And it's exactly things like this, though, that are reasons why you would want to have another
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
You risk taker, you.
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
person in there on your side because these margins are so narrow.
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
I have to tell you, I was walking in from the parking lot today and felt a little twinge in my heel. And I was like, this better not be some ACL thing. I'm over 40.
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
Well, the real risk is going to come or the real political consequences will come when There's an actual crisis and it's not handled well. It's not that you can't find majorities of people who say that they don't think that there should be preferential hiring, for example. But I understand the military – you can find polls that will show military members or veterans being in favor of Trump.
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
But some 40 percent or more of the military is non-white. And I think that this eventually will run into itself when you have enough people who feel like they're outside of the norm of what is acceptable within society and within the military.
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
Yeah, it's really fascinating that they're going to take aim at the Pentagon, considering the fact that Republicans for decades have not been ones who want to cut anything from the Pentagon. They want to increase defense spending. It's more of a sort of lefty thing to say that there's way too much spending by the Pentagon.
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
I mean, a lot of Democrats would say that they think that there's too much money that goes to defense contractors, for example. But the way that I wonder how they're going to go about these firings or layoffs and the chaos that that could bring That we've seen in some of the other agencies and what that would mean to the sort of order that the Pentagon wants to be able to work under.
The NPR Politics Podcast
Trump Administration Fires Top Pentagon Officials, Military Lawyers
If you're getting emails at the Pentagon saying, you know, you got to send five bullets on what you did this week. And then you have someone say, no, don't do that. And then they say, yeah, you should do that. I mean, that's going to create all kinds of chaos.