Trump is a "Rogue" President: Hypocrisy, Projection, or Both?

In a Guest Opinion in the February 24, 2025, New York Times, former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall accused Donald Trump of being a “rogue president” and urged the nation to “acknowledge that and respond.” Instead of establishing that we have a “rogue president and rogue administration,” Mr. Kendall’s essay exposed his own hypocrisy and projected his own attitudes onto President Trump.

So, what makes Trump a “rogue” in Mr. Kendall’s view? He fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and The Judge Advocate Generals (TJAGs) of the Army, and Air Force “without cause.” This, Mr. Kendall claims, threatens the “rule of law.” Interestingly, however, he never identifies the “rule of law” he thinks these firings violated.

Perhaps Mr. Kendall’s copy of the Constitution doesn’t have the part where the President is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Those senior officers he fired, and every other field grade officer, serve at the pleasure of the president. The law does not require “cause” to fire them.

However, since President Trump did not share his reasons, perhaps out of respect for the long years of service each of these officers provided, we are left to guess as to why he lost confidence in their abilities to lead and advise the new administration.

Mr. Kendall writes glowingly of the service of former Joint Chiefs Chairman General C. Q. Brown, noting that they worked together closely when General Brown was Chief of Staff of the Air Force and Mr. Kendall was Secretary of the Air Force under President Biden. It was during that period when General Brown implemented a policy to reduce the number of white pilots in the Air Force and increase the number of minority pilots. Apparently, Mr. Kendall believes this racially discriminatory policy was appropriate and did not run afoul of the “rule of law” that he now finds to be all important. He was silent when General Brown was denying equal protection of the law to some and granting racial preferences to others.

Similarly, as Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Brown, and Mr. Kendall as Secretary of the Air Force, presided over the execution of the Biden Administration’s COVID vaccine mandate. Under General Brown and Mr. Kendall, over 800 members of the Air Force were discharged for refusing to take a COVID vaccine that was distributed under an emergency use authorization (EUA). The “rule of law” applicable to vaccinating service members with an EUA vaccine required the informed consent of the service member. That was ignored by General Brown and Mr. Kendall and those who refused the vaccine were separated. It took an act of Congress and a presidential executive order to end the mandate and provide some relief to those who were discharged.

And don’t forget the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. General Brown and Mr. Kendall were part of the Biden Administration’s military leadership team that planned and executed that disaster that took the lives of thirteen brave Americans and over 150 civilians at Abbey Gate and turned billions of dollars of military hardware over to the Taliban. There may not be a “rule of law” that says senior military leaders must plan and execute military operations to a certain level of competency, but there is a law that punishes dereliction of duty. Neither General Brown nor Mr. Kendall seemed interested in applying that rule of law to anyone involved in the worst retreat from the battlefield in American history.

But what about the lawyers? Why cashier them? Maybe because they failed to give independent and accurate legal advice to their civilian and uniformed clients that the vaccine mandate violated 10 U.S.C. 1107a and that the services’ programs to consider and adjudicate applications for religious exemptions to the mandate were a sham. The “rule of law” that Mr. Kendall fears is “under attack” required applications for religious exemptions to be taken seriously and evaluated as required by law. Instead, Mr. Kendall’s and General Brown’s Air Force implemented a policy that routinely denied exemptions for sincerely held religious beliefs in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Maybe, too, the lawyers failed to point out that efforts to achieve racial balance in the service academies and the officer corps violated the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process clause. They, apparently, failed to inform their clients that the Constitution forbids racial discrimination.

There could be other reasons why President Trump fired these senior lawyers. As noted, I wish he had given his reasons. However, Mr. Kendall’s objections that the firings somehow violated the “rule of law” and put us in “unchartered territory” is demonstrably false. If the client does not have confidence in the lawyer’s advice and counsel the client is under no obligation to continue the relationship.

In expressing his concern over the firings of the TJAGs, Mr. Kendall cited his experience with JAG defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay and commended their professionalism in discharging their duty to defend their clients. He paraphrased the senior defense counsel at Guantanamo thusly, “Whoever set up this prosecution system assumed that there would be quick trials with no meaningful defense by the assigned JAG officers. Those people did not understand JAG lawyers. We will support the rule of law and defend our clients, whomever they are.” Mr. Kendall then noted that he has “never been prouder to be an American” and expressed hope that the new TJAGs will “live up to this standard.”

As a retired Army JAG officer, I appreciate Mr. Kendall’s comments concerning the professionalism of the JAG defense lawyers at Guantanamo Bay. In praising the willingness of JAG defense counsel to zealously represent their clients, Mr. Kendall overlooks that senior JAGs were, no doubt, involved in setting up the system that the defense counsel was criticizing.

Mr. Kendall does not seem to consider that the TJAGs fired by President Trump may not have lived up to the standards he saw in the Guantanamo defense counsel and the standard he expects the new TJGAGs to meet.

In the final analysis, it appears that in Mr. Kendall’s view, senior military leaders and senior military lawyers further the rule of law when they confirm his preferred policy preferences. His objection to the replacement of these senior officers exposes his own hypocrisy and the projection of his attitudes rather than being a credible indictment of Trump as a “rogue” president.

William A. Woodruff is professor of law emeritus at Campbell University School of Law, where he taught for over twenty-five years. Woodruff also served on active duty in the Army for twenty-two years. His last Army assignment was Chief, Litigation Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, where he was responsible for defending civil litigation challenging Army policies, programs, and operations.