Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told troops at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Sept. 30, 2026, “The number crunchers say we fired 10% of the generals and admirals across the force.” He added that the number of general officer positions was down another 10%. “So yes, 20% reduction across the board,” he said. Pentagon officials said Hegseth was directing every service to complete a 20% cut in generals’ and admirals’ positions by Jan. 1, 2027.

Hegseth himself says he wants 20% of them gone, and that comes on top of the ones he’s already gotten rid of. The Pentagon’s own figures show 831 generals and admirals at the end of May 2025, the month Hegseth first ordered a cut, and 851 at the end of July 2026. The number went up by 20. When Agence France-Presse asked whether the 20% cut was complete, the Pentagon answered, “We have nothing further to provide beyond the secretary’s comments.”

People don’t understand how big of a deal this is.

A self-coup happens when an elected leader uses illegal means to stay in office or to take powers the constitution gives to someone else. The political scientists who have recorded self-coups since 1945 found that most of the failures happened when two groups refused to go along: the military’s top officers and the top figures in the leader’s own party.

Trump and Hegseth identified both factors. They’ve spent nearly two years implementing the loyalty tests, and they have two more years of runway to ensure the next self-coup attempt doesn’t fail. By loyalty test I mean that a person’s command, promotion, federal job or party nomination depends on whether that person has gone along with Trump.

Over the course of this essay I intend to show you what stops a self-coup and who is being removed, and then I’m going to ask you to call your governor and tell them what you expect them to do about this increasingly urgent threat.

John Joseph Chin of Carnegie Mellon University and Joe Wright of Penn State are the political scientists behind the Colpus dataset, a record of coups since World War II. They have counted 46 self-coups by democratically elected leaders since 1945, a third of them in the past decade. Ordinary coups succeed about half the time. Self-coups by elected leaders succeed more than four times out of five.

“Most self-coup failures happen when military and party elites defect,” Chin and Wright wrote.

South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law on Dec. 3, 2024, and sent troops to the National Assembly. Lt. Gen. Kwak Jong-keun, who commanded the army’s special forces, testified a week later that Yoon had ordered him by phone to drag lawmakers out of the chamber and that he and his field commanders “concluded it was wrong.” All 190 lawmakers present voted to end martial law, including 18 members of Yoon’s own party. A court sentenced Yoon to life in prison in February 2026.

Peru’s president, Pedro Castillo, announced on Dec. 7, 2022, that he was dissolving Congress and would rule by decree. The armed forces and the national police issued a joint statement rejecting the move, and four of his ministers resigned. Congress voted to remove him, and Castillo was under arrest the same day.

Thirty years earlier another Peruvian president, Alberto Fujimori, shut down the legislature with the support of the armed forces, which occupied Congress with tanks. His self-coup worked.

The United States has already been through one self-coup attempt. Chin and Wright include Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election in their count. The Cline Center at the University of Illinois, which keeps the world’s largest registry of coups, categorized Jan. 6, 2021, as an attempted auto-coup, their term for a self-coup.

Trump’s attempt to stay in office after losing the 2020 election failed on both factors. A draft executive order dated Dec. 16, 2020, would have had the defense secretary send National Guard troops to seize voting machines, and Trump never signed it. Two days later Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Gen. James McConville, the Army chief of staff, said in a joint statement, “There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.” Republican officials in the contested states would not overturn their own results. On Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence wrote to Congress that his oath “constrains me from claiming unilateral authority“ over the electoral votes.

Trump has said that Pence could have kept him in office. He wrote of Pence in a January 2022 statement, “he could have overturned the Election!” JD Vance said in February 2024, five months before Trump chose him to replace Pence on the ticket, “If I had been vice president, I would have told the states“ to send multiple slates of electors. Vance will preside when Congress counts the electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2029. Congress amended the law in 2022 to say the vice president’s role in that count is limited to “performing solely ministerial duties,” and Pence had reached the same conclusion in 2021 without the amendment.

Trump told The New York Times in January 2026 that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states. The Atlantic reported in October 2024 that Trump said in a private White House conversation during his first term, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” people who were “totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, confirmed that Trump had asked him for generals like Hitler’s. Trump’s campaign denied the report.

In November 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s transition team was considering a draft executive order creating a board to review three- and four-star officers and recommend removals. The Washington Post reported in February 2025 that candidates for top intelligence and law enforcement jobs were asked whether the 2020 election was “stolen” and whether Jan. 6 was an inside job. Two candidates who did not answer yes were not selected.

Hegseth fired the top uniformed lawyers of three services on Feb. 21, 2025, and days later called such lawyers “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Those lawyers advise commanders on whether an order is lawful.

Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain, told troops in a November 2025 video that they may refuse illegal orders. Hegseth censured Kelly on Jan. 5, 2026, and moved to cut his retired rank and pension. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon blocked the demotion on Feb. 12, 2026, writing that Hegseth had “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms.”

On Sept. 30, 2025, Hegseth gathered the generals and admirals at Quantico and told them that anyone whose heart sank at his speech “should do the honorable thing and resign.” One year later, from the same stage, he said of the generals who “clung to the woke department“ that “they no longer work here.”

Hegseth pressed the Army for months to strike four officers from a list of 33 recommended for promotion to one-star general. Two of the four are Black men and two are women. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll and Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, refused, citing the officers’ records. Hegseth took the names off himself and, on April 2, 2026, fired George.

Rep. Derek Tran, a California Democrat and Army veteran, asked Hegseth at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on April 29, 2026, whether he had removed the names. “I did,” Hegseth said. When Tran asked why, Hegseth answered, “Because we review every general officer.”

Federal law, in Section 618 of Title 10, says a name that a selection board recommends for promotion to general can be removed “only by the President.” Since Dec. 18, 2025, the Pentagon has also had to notify Congress within 30 days of any removal that isn’t for misconduct.

In August 2026, The Hill reported that Hegseth had blocked four more Army officers chosen for one-star rank. A U.S. official told the outlet that some of the four had ties to George and to Gen. Christopher Donahue, the Army’s commander in Europe and Africa, whom Hegseth had removed in June.

Driscoll resigned at the end of August 2026 after warning Trump that the firings and blocked promotions had damaged morale. The general who took over George’s job, Gen. Christopher LaNeve, had been Hegseth’s senior military assistant, and the Pentagon’s spokesman said Hegseth trusts him “to carry out the vision of this administration without fault.” The New York Times reported on Sept. 1, 2026, that LaNeve “does not appear to have the votes needed to be confirmed by the Senate.”

The Times counted more than 80 generals and admirals fired or blocked from promotion, more than half of them Black or female. One officer lost a promotion because Hegseth’s office wrongly believed he had allowed a mentorship group for female paratroopers in his brigade. Military officials told the Times that the purge “does not appear to be driven by job performance.”

One in five generals’ and admirals’ positions is to be gone by Jan. 1, 2027, and Hegseth has told Congress that he reviews every general officer. “Now the media calls that a purge,” he said at Quantico. “I call it accountability and long overdue, and frankly, the bare minimum. As usual, what the media levels as an accusation, I wear as an accomplishment.”

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company, would not lift two limits on the military’s use of the company’s software, one on fully autonomous weapons and one on mass surveillance of Americans. Hegseth designated the company a supply chain risk. A federal judge in California held one designation unlawful in August 2026, and an appeals court in the District of Columbia upheld a parallel one in September 2026. A Pentagon under secretary, Emil Michael, wrote after the second ruling that “no private company will insert their opinions in the chain of command.”

Five days after that ruling, Hegseth announced a new four-star command for autonomous and robotic systems. A soldier can refuse an unlawful order, and a machine does what its design permits.

The claim from Hegseth is that he wants fewer generals and an end to diversity programs, and that the firings have nothing to do with any election. Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said of the cut, “If it’s simply a matter of eliminating a very heavy top, there may be some validity to it, but I want to see it first.” Congress has made that kind of cut by statute. The 2017 defense authorization act eliminated 110 generals’ and admirals’ positions, and the count of generals and admirals fell from 921 in 2018 to 809 in 2023. Since Hegseth’s first order the count has gone up.

Neither aim explains why Hegseth called the services’ top lawyers roadblocks to a commander in chief’s orders, or why he censured a senator for telling troops they may refuse illegal orders. Neither explains why he fired an Army chief who refused to strike names from a promotion list, or why officers tied to that chief were blocked from promotion four months later. Hegseth told the House committee on April 29, 2026, “Out of respect for these officers, we never talk about the nature of their removal.”

The research on militaries selected for loyalty is consistent. Caitlin Talmadge, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found in her book “The Dictator’s Army” that authoritarian regimes facing coup threats tend to adopt practices that “squander the state’s military power.” The economists Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin concluded that weak and vulnerable rulers end up “hiring mediocre but loyal subordinates.” Joseph Stalin purged three of the Red Army’s five marshals in 1937 and 1938, and Germany invaded three years later. The United States was seven months into a war with Iran when Hegseth gave his speech.

The second factor is the party.

Twenty-one Republican state senators in Indiana voted on Dec. 11, 2025, against the congressional map Trump wanted. Trump wrote on Truth Social that Republicans who opposed the map “will be, I am sure, met with a MAGA Primary in the Spring.” Eight of the 21 sought renomination on May 5, 2026, and at least six of them lost.

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana voted to convict Trump at the impeachment trial over Jan. 6. Trump called him a “disloyal disaster” and endorsed his opponent, and Cassidy lost his primary on May 16, 2026. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky broke with Trump over the Iran war and the Epstein files and lost three days later to a challenger Trump had recruited, in a primary that drew $32 million in ad spending, the most ever for a House seat.

The House Republican who filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth, on Sept. 15, 2026, was Massie, four months after he lost that primary.

The definition of a self-coup covers two acts in the United States: using illegal means to keep the presidency past noon on Jan. 20, 2029, and taking from the states and Congress the powers the Constitution gives them over the elections held before then. Hegseth set one of the dates on the runway, and the Constitution and federal law set the others:

Nov. 3, 2026: the midterm elections.
Jan. 1, 2027: Hegseth’s deadline for the 20% cut.
Jan. 3, 2027: the new Congress is seated.
Nov. 7, 2028: the presidential election.
Jan. 6, 2029: Congress counts the electoral votes, with the vice president presiding.
Jan. 20, 2029: Trump’s second term ends at noon, and the 22nd Amendment bars him from being elected to a third.

Trump and Hegseth have two more years of runway no matter which party wins Congress in November. A Democratic House and Senate without supermajorities can’t do much to remove anyone from office, because convicting an impeached official takes two-thirds of the Senate. Investigations are great but if the deluge of scandal hasn’t stopped them in the last decade, why would we expect this time to be different? Further, Congress can’t compel a captured Justice Department and FBI or command the troops. Any law to reverse the executive aggrandizement of this term, carried out under the unitary executive theory that the president alone controls the executive branch, would need two-thirds of both chambers to override a veto.

People have called a lot of different events the coup: Jan. 6, the 2024 election, convictions with no consequences, a captured judiciary. What the history books call the coup will be something that happens in the next 27 months. It’s what they’re preparing for right now.

Here’s what we learned. The actions that stopped Trump in January 2021 came from a vice president, from Republican officials in the states, from the secretary of the Army and from the Army’s chief of staff. Vance now holds the first of those offices and has said he would have told the states to send multiple slates of electors. At least six Republican state senators in Indiana who refused Trump in December 2025 lost their primaries five months later. Driscoll and George refused Hegseth and are gone, and the general in George’s place is the one the Pentagon says will carry out the administration’s vision “without fault.” A self-coup attempt in the next 27 months would be put to the people who hold those jobs then, and Hegseth’s deadline for cutting one in five of the generals’ and admirals’ positions is Jan. 1, 2027. Neither Trump nor Hegseth can remove a governor, and every state gives its governor the authority to declare an emergency.

CALL TO ACTION

Who you’re contacting and how: Reach out to your governor. You can do that by email, phone, FaxZero or even a printed letter. You could even go to the governor’s office during business hours, bring donuts, and tell the staff you’re going to talk to them about an issue you care about if the governor isn’t there.

Find your governor by clicking on this sentence.

What you’re asking for: a public commitment, before Nov. 3, 2026, to declare a state of emergency and use those emergency powers if the federal government does not respect the election in your state. Every state gives its governor the authority to declare an emergency, and you can read what those powers cover, even print it out and share it if you like, by clicking on this sentence.

Let them know who you are, what you want, and why you care. Offices count identical messages once, so write it in your own words.