Noah Feldman, Columnist

Trump, the Navy SEAL and the Trident Pin

Why the secretary of the Navy had to resign, and the admirals couldn’t.

November 26, 2019 at 10:00 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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The confusing saga of Donald Trump’s intervention in the case of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher seems to be over at last. Gallagher’s demotion has been reversed — a demotion that resulted from his posing with the corpse of a captured Islamic State fighter in Iraq — and he will get to keep his trident, the pin that signifies SEAL membership and that Navy officials wanted to take away. The main political casualty is the secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, who was fired by the secretary of defense after (it would seem) trying to get Trump to stay out of the issue on behalf of the admirals.

The whole fight between Trump and his admirals looked remarkably opaque from the outside. That’s because underneath, important and conflicting principles were at stake.