Unveiling the Deep State: Mark Moyar on "Masters of Corruption"

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Hello, everybody.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, and I'm going solo today.

You're hearing this while I'm gone.

Jack Fowler and Sammy aren't with me today, but we're doing one of my VDH interviews.

And I mentioned, and we've talked to Mark Moyer about his great book that started out with Triumph Forsaken.

It's going to be a trilogy on the history of the Vietnam War.

But we're going to have him today talk about a new book, A Masters of Corruption, How the Federal Bureaucracy Bureaucracy Sabotage the Trump Presidency.

And Mark is a full professor of history.

He's a William Harris Endowed Professor of Military History.

He runs the military history new program, quite ambitious,

quite successful at Hillsdale College.

And he's also a member of our

military history working group

at the Hoover Institution, where I work at Stanford University.

And I've known Mark for 20 years and have followed all of his writings.

And we'll be right back to talk to him in a minute.

And we're back with Mark Moyer, the esteemed military historian and the author recently of Masters of Corruption and how the federal bureaucracy sabotaged the Trump presidency.

And while you discuss the deep state or administrative state, Mark, your particular

misadventure or experience with it came with the international,

the aid program, both civilian and military, that you were appointed to direct during the Trump administration, right?

Maybe you could tell everybody exactly what you were doing and what was your title and how you came about that job.

Yes, well, I had written a number of books on military history and also a book on international development before the Trump presidency.

And

those came to the attention of people who are running the Agency for International Development.

And so they asked me to join as a political appointee.

And I became the head of what was called the Office of Civilian Military Cooperation, which had about 55 people spread out and working with the Department of Defense to try to integrate development and humanitarian assistance with what the military was doing.

And it was.

If I could ask you, was that specifically, was your main focus on Afghanistan or did it cover all of our deployments abroad?

It started off focused on Iraq and Afghanistan because the military had such difficulty trying to work with USAID, primarily because USAID was reluctant to send people out.

Eventually, they sent more more out.

But then by the time I got there in the Trump era, those conflicts had receded.

And so we had people in all of the military's commands all over the world.

When you started out,

was everything pretty calm?

I mean, you come in, they wanted you to come.

They knew about your reputation as a military historian and your specialty.

both through publications and prior experience about international aid and the

cooperation between state and defense.

How long were you on the job when you assume control of this kind of large bureaucracy under your control that you started to notice problems?

Yeah, well, I had about six months in the agency prior to actually taking over that job.

And so part of the problem was that by the time I took over the office, it had been under the control of career bureaucrats for 18 months.

And this was a broader problem we saw in the Trump administration: that because they were slow to fill positions, you had federal bureaucrats, career bureaucrats actually holding all these leadership positions.

And in our case, certainly they used those opportunities to steer things the way they wanted, and especially to lock in spending because it's the money, certainly at our agency and many others, the money is where the real power is.

And so they actually put and locked in a lot of future spending on things that were Obama administration priorities.

So let me just elaborate a minute.

You're talking about people that were not political appointees that had been appointed by various prior administrations and they had de facto civil service tenure.

And they were sort of, they felt, as many people in the administrative state, they were exempt from oversight.

So you come in and you're surrounded.

And are you the only political appointment in your area of expertise, this division?

Yes, I was the only one in the office.

And if you look, that's one of the problems.

Government-wide, the ratio of political appointees to career staff is something like

one to 500.

So it's a very small number of people.

Now, a lot of them are leadership positions.

But

another thing I discovered is that

if you have one leader overseeing

a large group of people, it can be very hard to know what's going on.

And they have a lot of ways to try to keep you from fully knowing what's going on how much money were you talking about in in your budget maybe particularly in your uh division or the whole international aid budget

well it's a part of the issue in my case was i was we were going through a reorganization and i was the main candidate to take over a bureau that was being

merged and that bureau had a budget of about 300 million dollars annually and you know ultimately,

to fast forward a little bit, a career bureaucrat actually

tries to push me out of the way to get control of that.

But that was the original intent: I would have this one job while the new bureaus created, and it would spend about $300 million a year.

$300 million a year,

a third of a billion dollars almost.

So what, so

you're reviewing this and you're looking at the budget.

At what point did you start to sense that

your audit or your scrutiny of this existing budget or this reorganization process

was

inuring or incurring, I should say, hostility from these people beneath you?

And did you have any idea that, and this is

what we're discussing, everybody, is something in particular that applies to the entire Trump administration?

Because as we knew, those four years, whether it was anonymous and Homeland Security, who said that they were going to block any Trump initiative, it happened throughout, but we want to concentrate to get some detail.

So how did you know what was going on?

How did you know they were going after you, particularly to stop what you, your reorganization or your audit?

Well, there were a number of signs early on.

So as I mentioned, we had large entities that went more than a year without political appointees.

And so some of them, I think, literally began to forget that they had political appointees in charge.

And so there were a couple of meetings where they would actually say things in front of me, such as,

yeah, we're trying to get the spending locked in so the front office won't be able to change it.

The most significant case was during a discussion of humanitarian assistance in Syria.

A senior official, career official, talked about how they were hiding.

the agency's activities in Syria because they were afraid that Trump would try to cancel them if he found out about it.

And I actually reported that up the chain of command.

But this was another problem we had.

Some of the people, the senior appointees within our agency, were either afraid of the career bureaucracy or, in some cases, in sympathy.

And so that complaint actually never went anywhere.

And that individual who talked about that didn't face any punishment.

Did you have anybody?

Did you have anybody in state or DOD

or attached to the White House that was a Trump, not just a Trump appointee, but a person who agreed with the Trump agenda and understood what you were trying to do and then was sympathetic and could get to Trump himself

to give you some support?

Yes, well, there was talk of doing that from time to time.

Although there was also a risk that the people above you and the chain of command would

hold it against you if you went around them.

Now, another thing I tried to do eventually was go to the presidential personnel office, which is supposed to look out for the appointees, but they also, the woman in particular, Katya Bullock, who I went to,

she was not interested really in the Trump agenda.

She actually would be fired in 2020 by Johnny McIntye when they started realizing that there were a lot of people who were in senior positions and in the personnel office who weren't actually very interested in implementing Trump's agenda.

Yeah.

So everybody, just to see to tell you where we are, Professor Moyer comes in.

He's got expertise.

He's a military historian.

He's published on international aid and development.

He's got this political appointment.

He's been cleared.

He's appointed, ratified.

And he's got this large division, 50, 55 career employees.

And we're talking about a budget not big by the standards of the entire budget, but enormous to anybody else,

a third, maybe almost a third of a billion dollars.

And he starts to incur hostility because he wants to reform the budgetary

process, but more importantly, see if we're getting in a cost-benefit analysis, the bang for the buck.

And immediately, he starts to incur hostility.

And he doesn't really, I mean, he's appealing to people to point out the problem that's innate in this basically careerist division that he's in charge of.

So when you started to set the alarm bells off,

what was their reaction?

How did they try to neuter you or your efforts or go after you?

What happened?

Yeah, well, It's worth noting that there are some of the career bureaucrats want to do the right thing and they know actually their job is to follow the orders of the White House and not to engage in subversion.

And so, when

I first heard of a particularly serious nature, was that my own deputy was involved in a criminal conflict of interest because he was the chairman of the board of a company called Impul, IMPL, while at the same time he had its government job.

And

we had a so-called ethics lawyer in our agency who was just abysmal.

We called him the unethical ethics attorney because he sanctioned a lot of bad behavior and then punished people who tried to do the right thing.

So, I went and reported this to the

head of HR at the agency, and he actually said, you know, this is great that you want to do something about this because most of the people here are afraid to report corruption because there'd be blowback or they might have their fingers on it themselves.

And so they started an investigation of this guy.

And he eventually,

there was overwhelming evidence against him.

They eventually forced him out of the agency, although, in symptomatic of the problem, he ended up making a lateral move to the Department of Defense.

And he's now a senior official there.

So he didn't actually face any punishment because basically once he left the agency, they said, okay, not our problem.

So

everybody, we're talking with Mark Mark Moyer, and he's got a new book out, Masters of Corruption, How the Federal Bureaucracy Sabotage the Trump Presidency.

And we're looking at

his tenure as a

high official in the international

development and aid bureaucracy and finds conflict of interest

in cost of benefit analysis, dollars that are not well spent, and in areas that may, in fact, not be necessary at all.

and these career people who depend i suppose on large lavish budgets being on questions start to get angry at him what did they do actually to stop you why how if if they feel that you're a threat to the size of their budget or their kingdom how what can they do to you what did they do do do to you because i i know in the book you go into detail maybe you can just remind people what it was what yeah well they started making accusations against me.

In one case, my computer was seized because somebody claimed that there was nefarious activity going on my computer.

And we know from a later investigation that they didn't find anything, which obviously they wouldn't have.

And then they also accused me of spending too much on travel,

things of that nature, again, without substance.

And then they accused me

of publishing classified information in a book that I'd written two two years earlier, which also was spurious.

But what happened was they came up with this ingenious scheme where they got somebody at the defense department to accuse me.

And then the unethical ethics attorney I mentioned said, well, this accusation came from another agency, so we have to treat it as gospel.

And that was his exact words, a gospel.

So,

because this guy didn't actually provide evidence to support this charge, and so that was eventually used to fire me, even though there should have been due process, which means I get to see what the evidence is.

And

this is actually more than five years ago it started.

I still have a case in court to try to find out what the supposed evidence was.

And the government's done everything to hide it because I think they realize that there was no legitimate evidence there.

At this point, obviously, because you're a well-known military historian, you're a conservative, you're working for a conservative administration, there must have been people sympathetic to you because they appointed you to a very high position.

So at this point, when you understood fully, and it's hard to understand given the stealthy ways the administrative, the state operates, were you, at what level were you able to say, could you call a

deputy secretary of the defense?

Could you call

a State Department official that you might think and say, look, can you, was there anybody in the White House you could call?

Well, I called someone I knew at the Department of Defense.

Um, and then that uh, word of that got to this ethics attorney at our agency, and he told me that if I tried calling other people, then that would make me look guilty.

And he assured me that this was a fair process because I was on put on leave for six weeks while they did this investigation.

And so I was waiting again.

What's supposed to happen at this end of the investigation is either they revoke your security clearance, in which case you get due process, or they restore it.

But what instead they did was they simply fired me.

And this was with the complicity of somebody named Bonnie Glick, who was the number two person in our agency.

And this is one of the other huge problems.

So she was a political appointee, but she was also married.

to the top lobbyist for the agency's contractors, which is a massive conflict of interest interest that a lot of people complained about.

Well, it turns out she is buddies with Kacha Bullock, this person at presidential personnel, which I didn't know at the time, though.

So you have these corrupt political appointees being put in.

Again, Bonnie Glick hangs on until 2020, and then she, too, will finally get kicked out.

But this was a problem.

across the Trump presidency is that they weren't prepared to govern the first time.

Absolutely.

That's an excellent point.

They had no constituency in Washington because the never Trump Republicans despised them as much as the left did.

And very few people were willing to serve that were permanent or permanent members of the Washington apparatus.

So just as a side question,

because I've known you so long and I knew your book, and obviously it's ridiculous that you disclosed.

Did they retract that charge that you had used classified information?

Well, they didn't retract it, but

we've had,

you know, they actually gave me back my security clearance a year after this happened.

So somebody looked at it and said, this is ridiculous.

But then when I actually was

appointed to go back into the Trump administration in 2020, and just as I'm about to go in,

somebody else

tries to revoke the clearance, but they seem to leave out the classified information part and to be saying instead that

I didn't give the government enough time to review this book.

Now, I had a 30-day non-disclosure agreement for this book, which is called Oppose Any Foe.

It's a history of special operations.

And they took forever and ever to go through it.

And they actually had a whole year to review it.

And

we gave them an opportunity to object in court, which they refused to do.

So,

but they shifting grounds, and this is again a common tactic we see that they will change what the charge is

to try to prevent you from actually finding any holes in their case.

Did you, and you had to provide your own counsel at your own expense?

Yes, yes, I did.

And you're still, that's still, you're still incurring that expense?

Yes, in the current case.

So the latest case started about two years ago because they tried twice to revoke the clearance.

And then, again, that should have triggered due process.

But then they tried claiming that they didn't actually have to turn over the evidence.

So we sued them two years ago, and it took about a year in district court.

Uh, and they ruled against us, but then the appeals court just a few weeks ago said no, actually, the first court was wrong, but we're still uh waiting and for yet another decision as to what the court's going to do.

What

just to, and all of this, everybody is summed up and analyzed in mark's new book uh masters of corruption did you have other people either during before or after within the administration that felt because the public knew of things that were going on i i mentioned the anonymous person who wrote a new york times uh op-ed and bragged as we remember that he

and he was a very he the New York Times said he was a very high official in Homeland Security and he was not.

And he bragged that there was

a group of people who were trying to literally obstruct every executive order that Donald Trump issued.

Did you have other people with similar stories that you came to know because of this?

Yes.

One of the people I've particularly gotten to know is Adam Lovinger, who was at the Defense Department.

And the Defense Department also had a lot of problems with

political appointees.

And

the Secretary of Defense Mattis actually talked about trying to bring in apolitical political appointees, which a lot of us thought was strange.

And he tried to bring in a Democrat, Michelle Flournoy, as his deputy.

But Adam was in the Office of Net Assessment, and he found out that that office was paying the infamous Stefan Halper, who was part of

it.

Not the steel dossier Halper, right?

That guy?

It is.

Yeah, it's the same guy who he's the guy who was trying to entrap uh george papadopoulos and he but i thought he disappeared off the radar and sort of floated somewhere we never found out where he is i'm not sure where he went actually but he got paid over a million dollars by the office of net assessment for work that was seems never to have been completed and so adam lovinger raised this question and then uh james baker the head of the office of net assessment went after Adam's security clearance, claiming he took a sensitive document outside a protected area, which, and that's part of the problem with this, the clearance process is they can go after you for the most trivial offenses.

I mean, it's a bit also like what they've done with Trump and these trivial offenses they're charging him with, while at the same time, you have people committing massive offenses

like James Baker paying all this money to Stephen Halper, and they don't get punished.

Everybody, the book is Masters of Corruption, and it's published by Encounter Books.

Encounter Books is under the directorship, remember, of the brilliant Roger Kimball, who's the editor-in-chief.

We at the Bradley Foundation, I'm on the board and I'm assigned as an oversight because we do help fund Encounter Books.

And if you're wondering, well, why didn't the publisher come up with

a Doubleday or Alfred Knopp type of battery of lawyers because they were publishing?

And it's the fact that we're the only real conservative publisher left and we have a limited budget and we're the home for conservatives that are routinely ostracized and alienated and sort of ghosted by mainstream publishers.

And Roger's problem right now, just to detour it a little bit, is it's not a problem,

it's kind of a bounty of riches that we have some very, very prestigious authors who have had lifelong relationships with the major publishers, you know,

Double Day, as I said, Random House, et cetera.

And suddenly they have been, I guess during the woke period, they have been on dehoused and they have come to us in encounter.

So we are being, Roger, I should say, because he's the one that does it all, is being inundated, but we don't have a lot of resources to help an author.

And that's one reason that Mark has had to incur such expense.

Let me just ask you before we go finish on a couple of other topics.

Are you optimistic pessimistic if trump were to win the election i the heritage foundation for example under kevin phillips phillips a wonderful guy he has this heritage 2025 project where they're looking at some 20 000 political appointees and giving them scrutiny, background checks, and then trying to forge an agenda with the Trump team.

Should he be elected?

The idea is that in the interim, they would not repeat the mistakes that they did before.

But what would be your advice as someone who had firsthand experience with the interior administrative resistance of Trump?

Are you confident that he can break through this time, that he's wiser?

Or can anybody who has such a different agenda from the mainstream Democratic and Republican Party?

Yeah, well, the Heritage is Project 2025 and also the America First Policy Institute have recognized early on that there is this enormous problem with getting political appointees in the first Trump administration at all levels.

And so they've been spending the last several years vetting people.

And so I think there's going to be a huge improvement on the personnel front.

You'll have people ready to go right away.

Security clearances will be submitted right away.

So you'll have the agency staff.

And I think you won't see the same number of self-serving people or people who don't care about the president's agenda.

Another thing they're doing that I've had some part in is preparing appointees for

actually what they're going to do.

So one of the problems I mentioned in the book is that we had no preparation when we went in as political appointees and we're kind of left to fend for ourselves.

And you're dealing with career bureaucrats with decades of experience.

It's very easy for them to pull the wool over your eyes and to mislead you and deceive you.

So they're going to be doing training sessions.

And

this book is one of the reasons I wrote Masters of Corruption was to provide some background for people who go service political appointees so they can kind of get a sense as to what the landscape is like and the pitfalls to avoid.

We're with Mark Moyer, author of the recent Masters of Corruption, an insider's view, really, of how the administrate tried to overcome the efforts of the Trump administration to bring reform and transparency.

And we'll be right back with Mark in a minute.

And we're back with Professor Mark Moyer.

A couple of final questions on this topic.

Would you, if Trump were to be elected, has the experience soured you or is the experience made you angry or has it encouraged you to go back in if asked to try to help the effort to stop what happened to you so that it doesn't happen to other people well i do have a great job now at hillsdale college one of the few places that will still hire conservative academics uh you know i do talk at the end of the book about how

for all the bad things that happen we shouldn't simply decide to turn our backs on the government because if good people do that then the government's just going to get worse so you know if i were asked to serve in an important position,

certainly that would be something I'd have to give serious consideration to.

But another thing, too, and I give this advice to other people who are thinking about it, it's good to make sure going in that you have some kind of backup plan because

you may find yourself in a position where you're you're asked to take risks or to make a difficult decision and you don't want to be in a position that you have no alternative but to stay.

And that's one of of the reasons why the swamp is what it is, is because a lot of the people are not willing to walk away.

So I think the founders were right that people should be willing to serve in the government, but it shouldn't be a career.

And you go and serve, and then you go back to what you were doing back in the rest of the country where most of the people actually live.

Did you think that your

position at Hillsdale and the environment at Hillsdale was sort of a source of relief, at least, that you knew that you were coming into government for a finite period and people that you work with would like you to come back.

And you did come back, and they were encouraged, and it was kind of a support group.

Was that the feeling you had?

I mean, people here, and this is again, you know, this college was not a huge bastion of Trump support initially.

But like most, I think, Republicans, when

Trump ran to the head of the pack in 2016, most people got behind him because they saw him as much better than Hillary Clinton.

And one of the reasons I like this place so much is that it is a place to nurture leaders of the future.

When I was an undergraduate,

you still had some conservative professors left at other schools, but now they're pretty much gone.

And so Hillsdale is increasingly a place where you can nurture conservative minds.

And we don't do indoctrination, certainly, but we provide the sort of classical education that used to be common in most of the country.

We're going to shift gears for a minute because I think we've talked before on a podcast with Mark about the first volume and second, Triumph Forsaken.

the Vietnam War 1954 to 1965, and then the continuance of that in volume two, Triumph Regained, the Vietnam War War, 1965 to 1968.

This is a multi-volume revisionist.

I say that in a very positive sense, a revisionist history of Vietnam.

Not blaming anybody or this or that necessarily, but just suggesting that the current orthodox view that Vietnam was lost from the beginning is not accurate, that there were decisions made.

Had they been

different decisions made,

Vietnam might might have ended up like something perhaps like South Korea.

But Mark, you're working on, are you working on the third volume now?

I am, yes.

So the third volume will pick up in 1969 with the Nixon presidency, and then will continue on to the end of the war in April of 1975.

And we actually have the 50th anniversary of that.

ignominious event coming up.

So we're going to be doing some events around that at Hillsdale.

And that's going to be the final volume?

That will be the final volume, yep.

And that's going to go all the way through the Ford administration.

Yes.

Yep.

Yeah.

And

the books have got a lot of attention, if I'm not mistaken, didn't

wasn't there a group of people who had it, he published a whole book to respond to you?

I remember you had a lot of people who were in the book.

Yes, there was because there were several of these academic roundtables, and

some of that morphed into a book that was called

Triumph Revisited, and it had both pro and anti-positions.

But I think

in both the books I've done so far, in the last one, there's a huge amount of footnoting, a lot of new sources, especially from the North Vietnamese side.

And I think they have stood up to the criticism.

And we have not really seen anybody come in and publish things on the same period that have sort of undone what they've done.

Instead, we see people moving off into niche topics

in consonance with academic fads that favor race, class, and gender studies.

Some of the main things, if you remember, if you've read the volumes, is some of the main

arguments that Mark made that were novel, such as DM should not have been assassinated, that he was sort of the best chance the Americans had to find an honest broker or someone that agreed with the same agenda as we did, and he was an effective leader.

And then, of course, Mark argued that both the late bombing campaigns and even the earlier ones were more effective than has been said, has been written about or critiqued, and they were maybe curtailed prematurely.

But one of the more interesting

revisionist arguments is that the so-called goat of Vietnam, William West Moreland, was not, and that actually search and destroy have been caricatured, and they were quite effective.

And

just as a preview to our readers, in your doing your research for the third, I don't want to give away, but are there areas of that magnitude of revisionism that you're looking at in the latter years that were fundamentally historically changing?

Yes, there certainly is.

And I've still got a long ways to go on it, but

one of the most interesting things is we see the South Vietnamese government

actually getting better,

particularly with the 72 Easter offensive and the period that follows.

And the U.S.,

Nixon is pulling people out at a rapid rate, more so than most people think is desirable.

But the South Vietnamese actually do quite well.

And it's really the mounting opposition in Congress that turns the war ultimately around the middle of 74 against the South Vietnamese.

But had we kept supporting them, it would be, I think it's very similar to South Korea.

I mean, South Korea was not a liberal democracy

during the Korean War and many years after.

And we did have people on our side who were committed, but we decided to abandon them to the fate and to

slaughter and imprisonment by the communists.

Let's, as in our final segment, There's very few universities.

Ohio State is one.

Yale used to have some type of military strategic program that's sort of on the downside now.

Duke did

some universities in Texas at the Hoover Institution.

We have a large program, the Military History Working Group.

But Hillsdale has one.

And it's, why don't you tell us about it, Mark, and what your role is and what's your...

what's your objectives and what are your hopes that what happens in the next two or three years.

Yes, well, we have what's called the Center for Military History and Strategy, which was

the brainchild of

our president, Dr.

Larry Arne, who has a keen interest in these topics.

And Hillsdale has actually hired some new military historians, which is almost unheard of.

So we're actually building at the time when everybody else is folding up and we have a robust offering.

And we now have a military history minor that involves some core courses and some elective courses.

We have

an annual conference, which this year's conference will be on Christianity and Roman warfare.

And we're delighted to have you, Victor, as one of our featured speakers here, but that will be at the Hillsdale campus at the end of August.

And then we also bring in other distinguished lecturers and we have some distinguished fellows who visit.

And we're also

looking to do something around the 50th anniversary of the fall of Vietnam.

Next year will be a Vietnam year.

And then 2026, we'll be focusing on the American Revolution with the 250th anniversary of the nation's birth.

How many professors do you have that are considered full-time members in residence in Hillsdale and what are their expertise?

And maybe if you'd like to name them, you could go ahead.

Yes, well, we have several who focus almost entirely on military history.

So we have Professor Dave Stewart,

who studied with Jeffrey Parker at Ohio State.

We have Dr.

Paul Ray,

who does the ancient world and ancient military history.

We have Dr.

Jason Gurkey, who also is

focused on the ancient world.

We have uh dr tom conner who's sort of an emeritus status, but he's still teaching World War II here.

We have in total our history department right now is 18.

I think we're going to be up to 19 soon, which is very high by the standards of almost any college.

And one of the problems that we see elsewhere is that students aren't interested in history anymore because the kind of things being offered are not what people want to take.

They don't want to have

race, class, gender studies being the primary focus of many, if not most of the classes.

So we know military history is very popular, especially among male students.

And so this is a real strength of the institution.

I can second that.

We at the Hoover Institution, you know, the Stanford History Department became, I guess, for lack of a better word, woke.

And it's suffering drastic downturns, both in majors

and in just participants that enroll for classes.

So what we've been doing at the Hoover Institution, Conda Lisa Rice is a big advocate of history, but especially military history.

So we've got a pretty good program in history at the Hoover Institution with Neil Ferguson, the military and global historian.

I think everybody's working now on the multi-volume biography of Himney Kissinger.

We have Andrew Roberts, the biographer of Churchill, Napoleon, George III.

And he's a visiting participant.

And then of course, Stephen Kotkin, the Stalin biographer, H.R.

McMaster, who was a military historian,

three-star general in the military, and has written, he's

just about to publish his memoirs as National Security Advisor.

So we've been trying to make up for the dearth of what Mark's been talking about, traditional history that deals with the stuff of life, economics, diplomacy, wars.

plagues, physical concrete things rather than the construction of gender and which particular group is a victim and which particular group is an oppressor.

And it's kind of a war for history.

And Mark is a member of our larger group of the Military History Working Group and participates.

We have about 50 military historians.

Let me just ask you a couple of last questions.

Are you searching now for a younger military historian?

Yes, we are going to be doing a search in the fall for another person.

It is fairly open in terms of specialization, but we are looking for another person, and it is certainly an excellent opportunity for folks.

Now,

we also have a problem with these other programs closing down.

We don't have very many PhD programs that can produce military historians anymore, but there are some still surviving.

And so we are out there looking.

actively searching for another sharp historian.

That's great.

Well, everybody, we're going to conclude, but I urge all of you to

order Masters of Corruption by Mark Moyer, How the Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged the Trump President's His Out by Encounter Books.

And

Mark is working on the third volume of Triumph Forsaken is volume one, Triumph Regain.

What is the tentative title, Mark, of the third and last volume that you're working on presently?

Tentatively, it's Triumph Betrayed, because it really is a

a betrayal, you know, one of the, I think,

most

terrible things that the United States has ever done in its history.

That rank up with the withdrawal and the humiliation in Kabul under Joe Biden.

Yes.

Yeah.

I want to thank you, Mark, and thank you, everybody, for listening.

This is Victor Davis-Hansen for the VDH show, and we're signing off.