Quote · The Bulwark Podcast
Clint Smith: Make America What It Set Out to Be
Where this was said
Chappie James: The Portrait That Meant Everything
At 25:52 · chapter starts 22:53
Neither Tim Miller nor Clint Smith knew who General Chappie James was before this reporting, which makes the story Smith tells all the more striking. James trained Tuskegee Airmen, flew combat missions in Korea and Vietnam, and had a famous showdown with a young Muammar Gaddafi at the gates of a U.S. base in Libya — a confrontation so dramatic it became military mythology [1] — Clint Smith "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. …" 21:35 . Ronald Reagan called him a model soldier. Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill naming a Florida bridge in his honor. He was considered as a potential Republican vice-presidential running mate before his death. Yet in the early days of Trump's second term, his portrait was quietly removed from the Air Force Gallery in the Pentagon. For the Black officers Smith interviewed, this was not a bureaucratic footnote — it was a symbolic obliteration of the possibility of their own careers. If even a Reagan Republican 4-star general can be erased, Smith recounts them thinking, there is no path forward for any of them. The despair this generated, he notes, was arguably more devastating than the promotion blockages, because it attacked the imagination of what was possible.
The portrait of General Chappie James — the first Black 4-star general in U.S. military history — was taken down from the Air Force Gallery in the Pentagon early in Trump's second term.
Lonnie Bunch is the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the first Black Secretary of the Smithsonian. Trump has repeatedly attacked the institution, but has never directly named Bunch — and when they met for lunch, Trump skipped the culture war and spent the time asking Bunch about chandeliers. Bunch is navigating the impossible: protecting the institution he built without provoking the president who could destroy it.
