A Fight Over a West Point Job Reveals Two Visions of America Under Trump
Jen Easterly, who had served in Republican and Democratic administrations, was headed to the academy. Then a right-wing activist stepped in.
Aug. 3, 2025Updated 8:10 a.m. ET
The Army secretary announced that Ms. Easterly would no longer serve as the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in the department of social sciences at West Point.Ben Curtis/Associated Press
Hours after West Point pulled its offer to have her teach cadets, Jen Easterly posted a short essay in which she laid out what happened to her and what it meant for the country.
“This isn’t about me,” she wrote last week. “This is about something larger.”
Over three decades, Ms. Easterly, 57, had compiled an impeccable résumé as a West Point graduate, a Rhodes Scholar and an Afghanistan war veteran. She had served as a key aide on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council and led a critical cybersecurity agency under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Now she was blackballed — in her own words, “a casualty of casually manufactured outrage that drowned out the quiet labor of truth and the steady pulse of integrity.”
The source of the casual outrage arrayed against her was Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator and self-described “Islamophobe,” who has become a powerful and largely unaccountable enforcer in President Trump’s Washington.
“Wow @PeteHegseth! Looks like some of your underlings are trying to screw you,” Ms. Loomer wrote on X on July 29. She accused Ms. Easterly of using her position leading a cybersecurity agency in the Biden administration to “silence Trump supporters” who questioned the integrity of U.S. elections.
The next day, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, an Iraq war veteran and Yale Law School classmate of Vice President JD Vance, announced that Ms. Easterly would no longer serve as the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in the department of social sciences at West Point.
Ms. Easterly’s rise in elite policy circles over three decades and her sudden fall at the hands of Ms. Loomer, 32, tell the story of how Washington is changing during Mr. Trump’s second term and why it might never be the same.
And it raises big questions about the ways power and influence are currently wielded in Washington; what it means to be a patriot; and whether loyalty to Mr. Trump or any sitting president should be a prerequisite for government service.
In December 1989, with the Soviet Union crumbling, Ms. Easterly joined four other soon-to-be college graduates on PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour to discuss the decade that was ending and her hopes for the future. Her parents had both served in senior positions in the Reagan administration. She was finishing her final year at West Point and had been selected for a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University.
Ms. Easterly talked about the importance of public service and the spread of democracy and pluralism worldwide. Asked about her goals, she said, “I want to be the first woman chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” Then she quickly amended her answer. “By that time,” she said, “I probably won’t be the first woman.”
Nearly 32 years later, just days after Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, Ms. Easterly sent a message to her staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. In it, she described her husband’s struggles with PTSD upon his return from the war in 2009 and her decision to leave the Army at the end of her third combat deployment because she feared that her continued absences were hurting her young son.
“I’ve found the events of the past week more than heartbreaking — heart-rending, really,” she wrote.
She found solace in the belief that American soldiers had fought for something bigger than themselves, bigger than even the Afghan people. They were fighting in defense of “the most profound idea in human history,” she told her team. “The idea that men and women are born free and by their birth alone entitled to liberty and justice.”
Ms. Easterly did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Ms. Loomer, a podcaster and persistent social media presence, has run for Congress, but never served in government. Senior White House officials, who view her as unmanageable and often toxic, have blocked her from serving in the Trump administration.
But her unwavering loyalty to Mr. Trump and deep, often conspiratorial, doubts about the federal government have vaulted her to a position of influence in Mr. Trump’s orbit. “On a daily basis, I communicate with the most powerful and wealthiest people in the world,” she recently told The New York Times.
Her rise was also fueled by the post-9/11 wars, which cost trillions of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of American, Iraqi and Afghan lives. Their failure, over the course of more than 20 years, highlighted the massive blind spots of the country’s political and foreign policy elite.
Ms. Loomer’s view of the country and its future reflects that legacy of long and costly failure. “I feel like Western civilization is in a death spiral,” she told The Times.
She often describes Mr. Trump as the country’s only real hope of redemption and casts herself as his fiercest advocate.
At least a half-dozen White House officials have been pushed out after Ms. Loomer pressed for their dismissal. A senior administration official said the departures were not necessarily Ms. Loomer’s work, but Mr. Trump has repeatedly praised her as a “true patriot” and ideological enforcer.
“I play to an audience of one,” Ms. Loomer said.
To some, Ms Loomer’s role in bringing down Ms. Easterly stands as an object lesson for the U.S. military and others in who survives in today’s Washington. Ms. Easterly had been appointed to her position by Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, West Point’s dean.
“A Homecoming Worth Celebrating,” he announced on social media on July 29. On July 30, Ms. Easterly’s appointment was rescinded.
“Now some TV commentator keen to score political points can humiliate even very senior officers,” said Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel, Vietnam veteran and emeritus professor in history and international relations at Boston University. “And, of course, those officers allow themselves to be humiliated with the secretary of defense as either bystander or co-conspirator. It is an extraordinary moment.”
Ms. Easterly expressed similar concerns in her recent social media post. “When outrage is weaponized and truth discarded, it tears at the fabric of unity and undermines the very ethos that draws brave young men and women to serve and sacrifice,” she warned.
She closed with a message to West Point’s cadets that echoed the hope she had expressed decades earlier as a 21-year-old cadet on NewsHour.
“The world needs your strength, your courage, your warrior spirit, your will to win,” she wrote. “But it also needs your empathy, your intellect, your humility, your integrity.”
Ms. Loomer often speaks of an America that is corrupt and crumbling, despoiled by an arrogant and out-of-touch elite. “There is a CIA Coup of the Trump admin taking place right now,” she wrote in a Saturday post on X.
In her message to West Point’s cadets, Ms. Easterly described the country in more optimistic terms. “I believe in our great nation, our great experiment to continually form a more perfect union,” she wrote.
Both she and Ms. Loomer were sharing their visions of America. For the moment, Ms. Easterly was the outsider.
Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military.