On September 30, 2025, the atmosphere at Quantico, Virginia, was charged with anticipation as Donald Trump addressed a room full of military leaders. In a moment that quickly ricocheted across the media landscape, Trump referred to nuclear weapons as the “n-word,” cautioning his audience, “There are two n-words and you can’t use either of them.” According to reporting from News, he continued, “People need to be careful about throwing around the word nuclear.” It was a characteristically unscripted moment—one that not only revealed Trump’s penchant for headline-grabbing rhetoric but also underscored the evolving relationship between America’s political leadership and its military establishment.
Trump’s remarks were made against the backdrop of heightened tensions with Russia. He discussed his decision to move nuclear submarines closer to Russian territory following a veiled threat from Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, in August. Trump boasted of America’s nuclear arsenal, declaring, “America has newer and better weapons than anybody else,” but added, with a note of caution, that he “hopes we never have to think about using them.”
While Trump’s statements drew immediate attention, they also reflected a deeper transformation underway in the American military and political culture—one that has been years in the making. The story of Mathew Golsteyn, a former Special Forces officer, offers a window into this broader shift. In December 2018, after years of legal uncertainty, Golsteyn was recalled to active service at Fort Bragg. His case had become a cause célèbre on the right: Golsteyn had shot and killed a man in southern Afghanistan, believing him to be a Taliban bombmaker. He refused to quietly resign after being reprimanded and stripped of his Special Forces qualification and Silver Star, instead mounting a public campaign to pressure the military to reconsider his punishment.
Golsteyn’s campaign included a televised admission on Fox News, where he defended his actions. This move, however, backfired. The Army reopened his case and prepared to court-martial him for murder, alleging that the man he killed might have been an innocent farmer wrongfully accused by tribal rivals. Golsteyn, facing the possibility of years in prison or even the death penalty, refused a plea deal and turned to the court of public opinion as his last hope. “I warned them,” Golsteyn told The New York Times. “Last time I pulled a lot of punches. This time around, I’m gonna hurt you.”
Golsteyn’s wife, Julie, became a tireless advocate for her husband, appearing on Fox News with Pete Hegseth, a former infantry officer and rising conservative media personality. On December 16, 2018, Julie described their family’s ordeal: “We have a brand-new baby,” she said, emphasizing that her husband “was lucky enough to survive war and has come home to be ripped apart by his own government.” Hegseth, sympathetic to their plight, commented, “The rules of war get twisted in certain ways. War heroes are being prosecuted like criminals.” He pressed Julie for a message to Army leadership. Her response was pointed: “We are waiting for someone to do the right thing.”
Unbeknownst to the Golsteyns, Trump was watching. Just three minutes after the segment ended, Trump posted online that he would review Golsteyn’s case, setting in motion a chain of events that would draw national attention to the issue of presidential pardons for accused war criminals. For Golsteyn, the prospect of a pardon seemed almost unthinkable. “No president would have done that,” he reflected. “The last one was Abraham Lincoln, and it was mostly over deserters.”
The controversy soon expanded to include Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL charged with killing a wounded prisoner in Iraq. While Golsteyn’s supporters argued his actions were motivated by a desire to protect informants, Gallagher’s case was marred by allegations of gratuitous violence and internal strife among his own team. Gallagher himself later admitted on the podcast “The Line,” “We killed that guy. Our intention was to kill him.” The cases became entwined in the public imagination, emblematic of a broader debate over the conduct of America’s wars and the limits of military justice.
Prominent figures weighed in. Gen. Charles Krulak, former commandant of the Marine Corps, wrote on behalf of more than 170 retired admirals and generals, warning that such pardons would “betray these ideals and undermine decades of precedent in American military justice that has contributed to making our country’s fighting forces the envy of the world.” Even within the Republican Party, the issue proved divisive; Senator John McCain, himself a decorated veteran, reportedly opposed a pardon for Golsteyn, objecting to the burning of the victim’s body.
Despite opposition, Trump pressed ahead. On November 15, he announced the restoration of Gallagher’s rank and the pardons of Golsteyn and another soldier, Clint Lorance. Yet, for Golsteyn, the outcome was bittersweet. “I wasn’t relieved,” he admitted. “It felt hollow.” The ordeal had left him alienated from his comrades: “I’d been alienated from my tribe. No pardon could restore that.”
These high-profile cases were just the tip of the iceberg. As The New York Times documented, a culture of rule-breaking and aggressive behavior, cultivated during years of war, had begun to bleed into domestic life. Around Fort Bragg, home to the Special Forces, a spate of crimes—including drug trafficking, violent assaults, and even murder—raised alarms about the long-term consequences of America’s longest wars. Some officers blamed a culture that tolerated misbehavior in the name of mission success. “You can’t accept that type of behavior in one environment and then be shocked when it carries over,” said retired lieutenant colonel Anthony Aguilar.
Congress took notice. In 2023, Senator Ted Budd questioned Gen. Bryan Fenton, head of Special Operations Command, about the “series of concerning incidents—suicides, murders, overdoses, drug-trafficking arrests—surrounding the Special Operations community at Fort Bragg.” Fenton insisted that the majority of Special Operations soldiers served honorably, but acknowledged the importance of accountability. “The people that have done these things have come and gone,” Aguilar added. “But the problems still remain.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s second presidency saw a dramatic reordering of the military’s senior ranks. He nominated Hegseth as secretary of defense, a move that barely passed Senate confirmation. Hegseth, a vocal critic of “woke” military policies, quickly set about purging top lawyers from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, swearing in his and Gallagher’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a reserve commander and special adviser. “If they are the conscience of the military, maybe you need a new conscience,” Parlatore told The New York Times, dismissing critics as “partisan agitators.”
Trump also achieved what he could not in his first term: deploying active-duty troops to American cities in response to protests, a move later ruled illegal by a federal judge. He established a standing National Guard task force for domestic deployment, sent troops to Washington, D.C., and threatened to send them to Chicago. In September, more than 800 military leaders gathered in Virginia to hear Hegseth rail against “stupid rules of engagement” and Trump defend the use of domestic troops. “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” Trump declared.
Through all this, the line between foreign and domestic uses of military force has grown increasingly blurred. Trump has invoked the language of the war on terror to justify domestic deployments and authorized lethal force against suspected narco-terrorists. Hegseth, speaking on Fox News after a strike on a drug boat, boasted, “We smoked a drug boat, and there’s 11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean—and when other people try to do that, they’re gonna meet the same fate.”
As America continues to grapple with the legacy of two decades of war, the echoes of those conflicts reverberate at home. The culture of the vigilante operator, once forged in distant battlefields, now shapes the very heart of American power and policy.
