Hegseth’s Army Purge, and Polling Chaos in the Midterms

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracey Mumford. Today's Wednesday, August 26th, here's what we're covering. At the Pentagon, my colleagues have learned that defense secretary Pete Hegses' months-long purge of senior leadership has left the army, the military's largest service, effectively rudderless. Here this year, Hegses abruptly fired General Randy George, the Army Chief of Staff, its top officer, in a 15-second phone call with no explanation, according to defense officials. George was responsible for training and equipping army units around the world, and four months after his firing, there are still no signs that his position is close to being filled. Instead, Hegses has forced out at least three other senior officers who had been seen as potential successors. At the same time, officials say that the army secretary, its top civilian leader, is barely on speaking terms with Hegses, and is expected to leave his post in the next few months. Army officials tell the times that Hegses arrived at the Pentagon with deep suspicions of its senior leadership, based on his own experience in the military. He deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, but was forced to leave the National Guard for tattoos that were deemed extremist, and he wrote in a recent book that, quote, "The military I loved, I fought for, I revered, spit me out." Overall, the army now has fewer four-star generals serving than it has in decades. They're some of the most combat-hardened, experienced leaders, and there are currently just five on active duty, down from ten when Hegses took office. The overwhelming theme with almost all of these dismissals is that there's no real clear reason given, and often the people who are fired don't know why they've been fired. Greg Jaffee covers the Pentagon for the times. He says that there is growing concern in the army that the wave of abrupt firings could send a message that there's no place for officers who don't align with the administration's ideology. Even though the military is supposed to be nonpartisan. At the same time, Greg says there are also concerns that the leadership vacuum could affect the army's readiness on the battlefield. The army's got a couple of really important jobs right now. One is to protect troops in the Middle East from Iranian missile strikes. Iranian missile strikes are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and so, you know, you want leadership focused, the top leadership focused on how do you adjust to the new Iranian tactics? You're using maneuverable missiles and things like that, then in some cases have been able to overwhelm U.S. air defense systems. So you want a full contingent of senior officers who are making sure that we're looking at every option there. The other concern is the longer term concern, which is you want to have a bench of good leaders going forward, and the worry is that that bench of leadership and experience, particularly combat experience, is really being thinned out. In a statement, a spokeswoman for the army downplayed the impact of the firings and said that, quote, "Our global readiness is never compromised." Last night, results came in for some of the final primaries of the season, walking in matchups for the midterms. One of the most notable was in South Carolina, where Darlene Graham, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, won her primary. She has no legislative experience, but President Trump pushed hard for her to officially take up her brother's seat, which she's been filling temporarily. Tonight is a great victory, but it's not the finish line. In fact, it is the starting line for an even bigger fight which lies ahead. As things now shift from primaries into a focus on election day, Democrats and Republicans are vying for control of Congress in what polls show could come down to a series of increasingly tight races. But one thing that's been clouding the picture this year is how messy and even chaotic some polling data has been. You know, we've seen some polling that is wildly off base and not close to what the result eventually turned out to be. We've seen polling memos for surveys that were entirely made up, someone's attempts to influence the discourse. And we've seen examples of polling where the pollsters changed the numbers because they didn't line up with what they're expected to read of the race would be. Read Epstein covers politics for the times. He says, especially bad data was shared and amplified this year, and closely watched Democratic races in Michigan, California, Nevada, and Wisconsin. In that state, one primary candidate for governor even dropped out, saying the numbers made it clear who the winner would be, even though the contender he was talking about later lost. The surge of inaccurate or wrong or made up polling makes everyone's job in politics harder. It makes it harder for voters to understand who is more electable. It makes it harder for donors who are trying to figure out which candidate to support with money. And probably most importantly, it makes it harder for the candidates who are seeing these polls to get a grip on where they are and what kind of message they need to be articulating and to which kind of voters. The important thing to remember is to be a little critical about what type of polling you view as reliable, typically polling from big media organizations tends to be more transparent in releasing the sort of underlying data behind the polling, but we don't necessarily see that from organizations that have a dog in the fighter, they have a candidate that they're backing in the race. And that's really the distinction to try to draw as people suss out which of these polls they should believe or not. Now, two quick updates on the Trump administration. First. Today I'm announcing that Canada will match the United States tariffs dollar for dollar, rate for rate. The Canadian government has followed through on its threat to retaliate against the Trump administration's latest round of tariffs. It's all about fairness, it's all about supporting Canadian workers and Canadian businesses. Starting next month, Canada will put new or increased surcharges on all kinds of American goods being shipped north. That includes everything from clothing and dishwashers to steal and aluminum. Officials in Canada acknowledge this will likely raise prices for Canadians. An economist say that in this escalating trade war, Canada is at a clear disadvantage. Its economy is about one-twelfth the size of America's. So these tariffs are like bringing a pea shooter to a gunfight. For President Trump's part, he's been ramping up his rhetoric against Canada. He's now threatened to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. And second update. The Trump administration is taking steps to make it harder for Americans to weigh in on proposed data centers. A new plan from the EPA would scrap a federal rule that requires states to get public input on the impact of new industrial facilities, including data centers. The move could prevent people who live near proposed projects from weighing in or even learning about the plans at all. Nearly 200 advocacy groups and more than a dozen states have come out to oppose the change with one attorney from the Southern Environmental Law Center telling the Times, quote, "People need to have a chance to have a say before they see bulldozers." In response to questions from the Times, a spokeswoman for the EPA said the proposed plan was intended to responsibly speed up permitting and give state and local officials more say over how to engage with the public. The head of the EPA has previously said that under the Trump administration, one of the agency's top goals is to, quote, "make the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world," even as there's growing backlash to the data center boom with hundreds of new facilities under development. And finally, "Dolly called me and said she wants to rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton because after a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable and have some rest. Rest in peace, Aunt Dolly." The family of country music superstar Dolly Parton announced yesterday that the boo-fonted legend has died at 80 years old. He'd recently been admitted to a cancer center at a hospital in Nashville. Over her 60-year career, she ruled country music and became one of American pop culture's most beloved icons. Parton lived a true rags-to-riches story. Born in 1946 in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, her family was so poor, her father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal. "I know we had no money, but I was rich as I could be in my coat of many colors. My mother made for me." Like a lot of her life experience, she turned her no electricity, no running water childhood into song. "Here's a little gal that I know you're going to really learn to love, her big early breakthrough came in the '60s on the Porter Wagner show. She was hired as the quote "girls singer" on the program, but quickly became a lot more. "She sings a song that she had a big hit on called "Dumb Blond." She ain't no dumb blonde though. "Her name is Dolly Parton." Together, she and Wagner released over 20 hit duets. Then, she went solo. Her massive hit "I Will Always Love You" was her tender goodbye to Wagner, as her star outgrew his. In a story that has reached mythic status at this point, Parton sat down and wrote both that song and Jolene in one day. When it came to songwriting, she was an unstoppable force. The musician Emilio Harris once described Parton writing one song while singing another, and something as simple as just sitting around and tapping her long acrylic nails on the table, supposedly gave her the clickity-clack rhythm of nine to five. Over the decades, she released album after album all the way into her late 70s, while also pouring energy into philanthropy, too. Her imagination library project has distributed more than 200 million kids' books, and during the pandemic, she gave a million-dollar donation that helped fund the development of the Moderna vaccine. On the business side, she had her own theme park, of course, Dollywood, and just this summer, she was at the opening of a Dolly branded truck stop in Tennessee, where you can get a cup of ambition coffee. Throughout her career, where she topped the charts, was nominated for more than 50 Grammys, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Songwriters Hall of Fame, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Parton knew there was a lot of focus on her looks, the blonde bombshell persona that she created. But she told the Times once, "This isn't all I am," adding, "Hopefully people can see beneath the hair to know there's a brain, beneath the boobs to know there's a heart, and behind all the other stuff to know there's some talent." I think you see in the response to her death just how universally beloved Dolly Parton was. It still feels weird to talk about her in the past tense and say what? She was so alive and such a presence in not only popular culture, but just American culture itself. Lindsay Zooletz is a music critic at the Times. I think she was someone who's appeal transcended political divisions. She transcended generational divisions for sure, but she's someone who really, yeah, a rare figure in our divisive times who really had a spirit of unity about her and had the ability to unite people in a kind of shared humanity. How many people can you say about that anymore? It's, you know, Dolly Dolly was very unique. Those are the headlines. Today on the daily, how democratic socialists are working to reshape the Democratic Party? You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are not a time subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to everything we publish when you download the Times app now. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.