An Army investigation criticized the Army’s top enlisted leader for using Twitter to defend female soldiers after Fox News host Tucker Carlson said they were weakening the military.
The investigation’s outcome has at least one Army general worried that “The Army has gone full MAGA,” a reference to former President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, Make America Great Again.
In March 2021, Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe defended female soldiers after Carlson criticized new military policies providing maternity uniforms, “making it easier for women to pump breast milk on duty, and relaxing grooming standards to allow them to have ponytails and braids,” Insider reported.
In a segment that month, Carlson said, “While China’s military becomes more masculine as it assembles the world’s largest Navy, our military needs to become, as Joe Biden says, more feminine — whatever feminine means anymore, since men and women no longer exist.”
The statement likely referred to comments that President Joe Biden said referencing women in key military positions. Biden never said the military need to become “more feminine.”
In response to Carlson’s comment, Donahoe published a video on Twitter of him honoring a female officer. Donahoe wrote, “just as a reminder that Tucker Carlson couldn’t be more wrong.”
Donahoe’s response received “national media coverage” from Fox News personalities like Carlson and Laura Ingraham, as well as RepublicWorld.com and OpIndia.com, two right-wing Indian news outlets, Task and Purpose reported.
“While potentially admirable,” the Inspector General report said of Donahoe’s response to Carlson, “his post brought a measurable amount of negative publicity to the Army, enough that [the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs] warned [the Secretary of the Army] of the fallout…. [His tweets] exhibited poor judgment… [and the] subsequent media coverage drew national attention … and it cast the Army in a negative light.”
An Army general who anonymously spoke to Military.com to avoid retaliation said, “Why would any women want to serve now? The Army gave a hunting permit to radical partisans. … The Army has gone full MAGA.”