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Need another metric to show that, for President Trump, “Make America Great Again” means regressing to a 1950s-style white patriarchy? Probably not. But here’s a good-bad one for you, marking the deplorable progress of Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s war on diversity in the leadership ranks of the nation’s military:

Hegseth’s virtually unprecedented and probably illegal blocking of promotions for high-ranking female officers in the armed services in 2026 has helped produce the lowest percentage of such nominations for women’s advancement in this century, including zero — zero — for female officers in the Navy, according to a recent data analysis by the New York Times. The brass has gotten the message.

Things aren’t any better for Black and other minority officers, men and women. This year Hegseth has vetoed at least 40 high-ranking promotions, half of them women and people of color. White men who’ve also been blocked often have been proponents of diversity. “For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons,” Hegseth lectured military leaders last year. “Based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.”

The combination of Hegseth’s stepped-up interference this year in the military’s promotions process — a thoroughly meritocratic one, despite his claims to the contrary — and his purge since early last year of senior........

© Los Angeles Times