'Disaster': Former West Point prof rips MAGA for threatening the military's 'legitimacy'

Saturday, June 14, 2025 is the 79th birthday of President Donald Trump, and it will bring conflicting messages on his second presidency.

In Washington, DC, Trump is holding a military parade he is billing as a celebration of the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary. But the U.S. president's critics — including the No Kings movement — believe that parade isn't really about honoring the military, but is designed to promote Trump politically. And the No Kings organizers are holding large anti-Trump demonstrators all over the United States, from Seattle to Baltimore to Atlanta to Chicago.

In a scathing article published by The Atlantic on June 14, Graham Parsons — a former professor at West Point Military Academy — describes the parade as "a celebration of Trump himself" and warns that he is threatening "the military's legitimacy."

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"A mark of a free society is that its public institutions, especially its military, represent the body politic and the freedom-enabling equal rights that structure civic life," Parsons argues. "If service members and the public begin to believe that the military is not neutral, but is in fact the servant of MAGA, this will threaten the military's legitimacy and increase the likelihood of violent conflict between the military and the public. Today's events bring us one step closer to this disaster."

Parsons goes on to note that he left West Point because of Trumpism.

"I have seen the politicization of the military firsthand," Parsons explains. "Last month, I resigned my tenured position as a philosophy professor at West Point in protest of the dramatic changes the Trump Administration is making to academic programs at military-service academies. Following an executive order from January, the Department of Defense banned most discussions of race and gender in the classroom. West Point applied this standard to faculty scholarship as well."

Parsons adds, "As a result, my research agenda — I study the relationship between masculinity and war, among other things — was effectively off limits. I consider what the Trump Administration is doing to the military-service academies as a profound violation of the military's political neutrality. That destructive ethos is the same one apparent in the parade scheduled for today…. The organizers have made it abundantly clear that today's purpose is to directly laud Trump and his politics."

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Parsons describes Trump's "endgame" as "presidential orders that deploy the military for directly partisan ends."

"In just the past week," the former West Point professor observes, "the Trump Administration responded to protests against the enforcement of his immigration policies with military deployments. The likelihood that the administration will try to use the military against its political opponents is now very high. If that comes to pass, we will then learn just how successful Trump's efforts to politicize the military have been."

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Graham Parsons' full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).