Sometimes it is tempting to delve into Donald Trump’s cultural references, for what they reveal about who he is—his complaint that this year’s Oscars, rather than honoring “Parasite,” a foreign film, would have done better to “get like ‘Gone with the Wind’ back,” comes to mind. (The ceremony was just two months and an eon ago.) But his literary put-down, in a press briefing on Tuesday, of Captain Brett Crozier, the former commander of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt—“He didn’t have to be Ernest Hemingway”—is less a puzzle than an index of emptiness. Crozier was fired last week after he wrote a letter asking the Navy for help in handling a coronavirus epidemic on his ship. Trump’s invocation of Hemingway doesn’t tell you whether he was bothered by Crozier’s prose style, which was both urgent, as it raised an alarm—“We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die”—and judicious, as it laid out a plan for evacuating most of the ship’s five thousand or so crew members, among whom, he wrote, “The spread of the disease is ongoing and accelerating.” (The T.R., as it is known, now has more than two hundred confirmed cases; social distancing is impossible in its close quarters.) Trump, after all, may not even have read the full letter.
Trump’s basic problem seems to be that Crozier wrote words that others could read. On March 30th, Crozier e-mailed his letter to more than twenty people, both in his chain of command and beyond it in the military bureaucracy, apparently because he felt that the crisis was not being addressed. Someone passed the letter on to the San Francisco Chronicle. Perhaps, in Trump’s mixed-up reading, “to be Ernest Hemingway” means to be someone who embarrasses people who are more important than you are. Or perhaps being Hemingway means being admired by men and women who fight, and Trump’s narcissism turned that into a negative—why is Crozier, and not Trump, getting praise? At least some members of the Trump Administration seem to have resented the fact that the crew of the T.R. gathered on deck and cheered Captain Crozier, chanting his name, as he walked off the ship. Those sailors believed that he’d chosen to jettison his career for their safety. The crew members are now being evacuated; the captain has since tested positive for COVID-19. He’d blown up his own bridge to get them ashore.
And yet the story has taken a turn, providing an example of how the spread of COVID-19 has pushed at least some people to examine their values. Retired defense officials and military officers, including Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who called the firing “a really bad decision,” have rallied around Crozier. They appear to have regarded the crew’s reaction as more instructive than the near-slanders coming from the Pentagon about the kind of leader Crozier is. The acting Secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, said that he had fired Crozier because the captain had allowed a complicated situation to “overwhelm his ability to act professionally,” suggesting that he had cracked under pressure. Trump endorsed the dismissal, saying of Crozier, “I thought it was terrible what he did.” Modly has now resigned, but not before he took the time and the resources to fly eight thousand miles to Guam, where the T.R. is docked, to personally whine to and badger the crew about how “what your captain did was very, very wrong.”
Modly’s remarks were broadcast on the ship’s public-address system and recorded by some crew members. One passage, in which Modly characterizes Crozier, particular provoked controversy, and is worth looking at in full:
Many of the stories about the remarks focussed on Modly’s suggestion that Crozier might be stupid. (In one audio recording, posted by Task & Purpose, which focusses on military affairs, someone, presumably a crew member, can be heard shouting, “What the fuck?”) But, in context, what Modly said was worse than that. The Uniform Code of Military Justice is what is used to court-martial service members. In effect, he told the crew that Crozier was either an idiot or a criminal. Was he also hinting that the sailors, by cheering him on, might be abetting a crime? Modly at first defended his remarks and then, reportedly under pressure from Mike Esper, the Secretary of Defense, said that he didn’t really think that Crozier was naïve or stupid and, precisely for that reason, felt “that he sent his alarming e-mail with the intention of getting it into the public domain, in an effort to draw public attention to the situation on his ship.” Apparently, in a Trump-dominated defense establishment, raising an alarm is in itself an offense; Trump has made that point by demanding that he be congratulated for doing a great job, and calling questions that raise concerns “horrid.” Modly apologized “for any confusion this choice of words may have caused.” The only confusion is how people such as Modly could have come to be trusted with the defense of the United States—and with the safety of those doing the defending. But the simple answer to that is Trump, and the Administration he has created. (Modly, who attended the Naval Academy and worked at the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, became acting Secretary after Trump clashed with his predecessor over the case of a SEAL accused of war crimes, whom Trump championed.)
Modly’s remarks repeatedly echoed Trumpian language. “It was a betrayal of trust with me, with his chain of command, with you,” Modly said—confusing, as the President often does, himself with those he serves. He added, “Because he did that, he put it in the public’s forum, and it’s now become a big controversy in Washington, D.C., and across the country.” (At this point, CNN’s transcript notes “LOW BACKGROUND YELLING: HE WAS ONLY TRYING TO HELP US.”) He derided the notion that Crozier was “a martyr” and stressed the need for the crew to “keep their shit together” and “not to complain.” And, like the President, he cast around for foreigners to blame. One of the things that bothered him most about Crozier’s letter, Modly said,
