Podbit · The Bulwark Podcast

Clint Smith: Make America What It Set Out to Be

Explore episode Jul 3, 2026

History

General Chappie James: The Portrait That Meant Everything

Clint Smith: Make America What It Set Out to Be · Jul 3, 2026 History

Chappie James was a Tuskegee trainer, Korean and Vietnam fighter pilot, Reagan's model soldier, and the first Black 4-star general in U.S. history. He once pulled a gun on a young Muammar Gaddafi and made him back down. When the Trump administration removed his portrait from the Pentagon's Air Force Gallery, Black officers didn't just see a picture disappear — they saw their own futures erased.

Where this was said

The Brazenness of Hegseth and the Blank Check for Racism

At 21:35 · chapter starts 19:20

Tim Miller and Clint Smith discuss the particularly bitter irony that the person dismantling Black military careers is not a decorated general who rose through the ranks but a media personality with no comparable service record. Smith recounts the widespread animus on background: officers who never imagined they would have to tolerate this level of institutional hostility from the head of the Pentagon itself, as opposed to a one-off racist commander at the unit level. The most alarming element Smith describes is the removal of accountability from the top: where once the threat of consequences from senior leadership deterred overt racism, Hegseth's implicit 'blank check' — the signal that you can do whatever you want without consequence — has removed that check. One officer summarized the despair: 'Was everything I fought for in vain?' Smith also speculates, with characteristic generosity, that Hegseth's particular intensity might stem from his own experience of feeling passed over for promotion in favor of a less-qualified candidate who happened not to be a white man.

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