Joy Reid Lashes Out at Trump Crew As ‘Dumb Idiots’ and ‘A**holes’ Amid Pentagon Racism Bombshell

Independent media host Joy Reid slammed President Donald Trump’s administration as “dumb unqualified idiots” in response to the bombshell New York Times revelations about racism at the Pentagon.

According to the report, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s chief of staff told a military leader that Trump doesn’t “want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events.”

The report also said Hegseth struck two Black officers and two women officers from the promotion list.

Reid was a guest on Friday’s episode of The Jim Acosta Show, during which host Jim Acosta asked her about that report, as well as Trump’s most recent rant about Somalia:

JIM ACOSTA: Mr. Buria, Hegseth’s chief of staff, told Mr. Dristigal, who was the army secretary, that Trump would not like to stand next to a Black female officer at military events, including what takes place at Arlington National Cemetery.

And I mean, you know, Trump was at the White House today, you now, saying, we’re gonna take Minnesota back from Somalia. He says, you know, this crazy racist stuff.

But what Pete Hegsath has been doing over at the Pentagon, to me, is an- absolute disgrace. It’s a disgrace and it needs to be stopped.

JOY-ANN REID: And one of the other things in the article that stood out to me is that 43% of the people who serve in the United States military are people of color, 43%. So more than four in 10, that means that people of colors serve at disproportionate rates to their population.

And so you have a military that’s 43% non-White male, and yet the officer corps is something like 93% White and male. And so when you had the previous defense secretary, Lloyd Austin.

He came in and one of his missions was to make the military look more like the country. And it’s not that he was trying to promote unqualified Black and brown people and women and people who were LGBTQ.

He just tasked his subordinates to look harder within the ranks of the officer corps to say, are there people who would be qualified to get an opportunity to be promoted? Because historically, the officer Corps was 100% White male.

And so all that Lloyd Austin did was say, look harder. There’ve got to be some really great qualified people that are not White guys. And he promoted those people.

Pete Hegseth came in, criticized that. And so we have to end that. Not only is he essentially only promoting White men, but he’s also bringing back people who had problematic records in terms of their behavior.

So not only can you be a White male of any ability. And make it into the officer corps or become a one-star general. He’s bringing people back who were sidelined because they did something wrong, because they were either violent or they were insubordinate.

He’s basically saying you could be a violent, insubordinate a**hole, but as long as you’re a White male, as a matter of fact, we want you back even more if you’re violent, insubordinate a**hole.

They don’t even want quality White men. They really actually seem to prefer… The kind of White men who will commit war crimes. If you’re a guy who wants to commit some war crimes and get violent in the Caribbean, that’s who P-Tag Seth wants. He doesn’t want the best of the best. He wants the most violent. He wants to biggest a**holes. He wants people like himself.

JIM ACOSTA: No, and that’s how the Trump administration is. It’s DEI for a**holes, for jackasses. Kash Patel. I mean, this just, this story came out today too. The Kash Patel has been hacked. I don’t know if anybody has seen this, but this was being reported in Reuters today. The Iran link hackers are broken into Kash Patels, personal email box, publishing photographs of the director and other documents to the internet. Now, I mean he, he puts out his own, uh, ridiculous looking photos anyway of him chugging beer with the hockey team and so on. But I don’t understand, like to me, the whole, like going after DEI and woke stuff, it’s bullsh*t. People need to understand it’s a bullsh*t, it’s smoke screen, it a distraction, so they can get their own fellow jackasses in all of these positions of power. I’m sorry, Tulsi Gabbard, Kristi Noem.

JOY-ANN REID: Come on. They’re not quality. Come on, come on. I mean, come on, we call it DUI. They have the DUI hires, right? These are the people who are. They are dumb, unqualified idiots.

Everyone they hire are dumb unqualified is their DUI hires. Yeah. And that’s a double entendre. Yes, it is. But yeah, it’s not like they’re like, bring us your best and brightest White people. They’ll like bring us your worst. Bring us the most unqualified, stupidest. Most self-aggrand, give us the worst, because they’re trying to prove a point that you actually, if you are White and Christian, you don’t actually have to be qualified.

You can be bad at your job, but you’re always going to be elevated above a non-White Christian male who is good at their job, because they are trying to approve a point. And this, again, it takes it back to your point about the Republican party. The purpose of the Republican Party, is to create White Christian male hegemony. Not to create a quality country or a democracy, but to say to White males, you don’t even have to try.

Watch above via The Jim Acosta Show.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!