By all appearances, it was an unfortunate stunt. On Saturday an entertainer named Kid Rock, who had a few hit songs many years ago, shared videos via social media of Apache helicopters doing a flyby at his home in Nashville, Tennessee. The clips showed the entertainer, whose real name is Robert Ritchie, saluting and applauding the troops.
It obviously wasn’t an appropriate use of military resources, and the Army quickly did what everyone expected it to do: It suspended the crew members and temporarily barred them from flight duties pending a review of the incident.
Even Donald Trump conceded on Monday that the helicopter pilots “probably shouldn’t have been doing it” since “you’re not supposed to be playing games, right?”
The president’s defense secretary, however, came to a very different conclusion soon after. The New York Times reported:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday abruptly reversed the suspension of Army crews that piloted two Apache helicopters close to the musician Kid Rock’s residence in Nashville over the weekend. […]
Mr. Hegseth appeared to end both the suspensions and the investigation, with a social media post on Tuesday night declaring: ‘No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots.’
The Times added that the moves represented “a remarkable intervention from the highest level of the Pentagon,” adding that the decree “was another indication of his contempt for legal guardrails in the military.”
As far as the Army was concerned, the crews ignored the military’s strict standards for aviation safety, professionalism and adherence to established flight regulations. As far as the former Fox News host was concerned, aviation safety, professionalism and adherence to established flight regulations just weren’t all that important.
Kid Rock is aligned with Trump and MAGA, the helicopter crews used military assets to favor Kid Rock, and for Hegseth, apparently little else matters.
Complicating matters, however, is the larger context, which includes the president repeatedly taking steps to overtly politicize U.S. troops, while the Pentagon chief targets military leaders he deems “woke.”
An apolitical military is a foundational, bedrock principle of the United States. Partisan, ideological and electoral considerations must be utterly irrelevant to what the military is and how it functions. It is nevertheless a principle for which Trump and his team appear to have no use, creating an untenable dynamic: In a healthy democracy, the politicization of the military isn’t just misguided, it’s also genuinely dangerous. In October, The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols highlighted what he described as an ongoing “civil-military crisis,” arguing that “Trump and his valet at the Defense Department, Secretary of Physical Training Pete Hegseth, are now making a dedicated run at turning the men and women of the armed forces into Trump’s personal and partisan army.” Hegseth’s intervention in the Kid Rock flyby fiasco offered timely evidence that bolstered the underlying fears. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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