Reposted by NY Times Pitchbot
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On the one hand, a patriot with decades of experience defending America. On the other hand, a conspiracy theorist who hates Americans and American institutions. Presented here as "two visions of America under Trump"
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...
— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum.bsky.social) 2025-08-04T08:50:02.892Z
A Fight Over a West Point Job Reveals Two Visions of America Under Trump
Jen Easterly, who had served in Republican and Democratic administrations, was headed to the academy. Then a right-wing activist stepped in.
The Army secretary announced that Ms. Easterly would no longer serve as the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in the department of social sciences at West Point. Ben Curtis/Associated Press
By Greg Jaffe
Reporting from Washington
Aug. 3, 2025
Hours after West Point pulled its offer to have her teach cadets, Jen Easterly posted a short essay in which she laid out what happened to her and what it meant for the country. … “This isn’t about me,” she wrote last week. “This is about something larger.”
Over three decades, Ms. Easterly, 57, had compiled an impeccable résumé as a West Point graduate, a Rhodes Scholar and an Afghanistan war veteran. She had served as a key aide on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council and led a critical cybersecurity agency under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Now she was
blackballed — in her own words, “a casualty of casually manufactured outrage that drowned out the quiet labor of truth and the steady pulse of integrity.”
The source of the casual outrage arrayed against her was Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator and self-described “Islamophobe,” who has become a
powerful and largely unaccountable enforcer in President Trump’s Washington.
{snip}
Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 4, 2025, Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: West Point Rescinds Offer After Trump Confidant Casts Doubt on Loyalty. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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