Trump's Cabinet purge isn't even the most alarming within his own admin: analysis

Donald Trump fired his attorney general Thursday, but one analyst said Friday the most significant purge happening inside his administration isn't in the Cabinet, it's at the Pentagon.

While the media focused on Pam Bondi's ouster, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quietly fired three generals the same day, including General Randy George, the Army's top-ranking commander, National Affairs Correspondent Jeet Heer wrote for The Nation. Military.com called it "one of the most significant wartime leadership shakeups during active U.S. combat operations in recent years."

"These moves take place against the backdrop of a flailing military campaign in Iran. Both Trump and Hegseth appeared to think the war would be a cakewalk that would take just a few days to wrap up. In fact, the war has lasted more than a month, and in a speech on Wednesday night that was alarmingly detached from reality, Trump offered no plausible account of how it could end, although he predicted another two or three weeks of fighting," wrote Heer.

Time magazine reported that Hegseth was caught "off guard" by Iran's sweeping retaliation across the region. "Whoa, we're really in this now," one source quoted him as saying.

"Leaks of this sort should unnerve Hegseth," Heer said, warning that if the war goes south or tanks the economy further, "he would be an easy scapegoat for Trump to blame."

"Hegseth would be following in the footsteps of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who fell on his sword in 2006 when the Iraq War turned into a political catastrophe," said Heer. "Aside from his long-running vendetta against the career military, Hegseth is intensifying his purge as a pre-emptive attack. He wants to undermine his possible replacements and scapegoat them, before he becomes the scapegoat."