Driscoll’s resignation comes after months of tension between him and War Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Post previously reported that Hegseth feared being fired by Trump and replaced by Driscoll.
Page A6From§Eachthe supper edition — 31 August 2026
Army Secretary resigns as five outlets settle on five different euphemisms for the same fight.
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear: Cabinet-adjacent personnel changes happen. Dan Driscoll resigned as Army Secretary, and that is, by any measure, a Tuesday. Officials leave. It's called an administration, not a marriage. If anyone is trying to make five headlines out of one press release, that's a them problem, not an us problem.
Now, the coverage. New York Post calls it 'long simmering tension.' Fine, tension exists in every workplace — has anyone met a workplace? CBS says 'friction.' Also fine. Friction is what happens when two ambitious men — did I say two, I mean two public servants — share a building. The Washington Examiner calls it a 'monthslong rift.' The Hill calls it a 'months-long turf war.' Fox just says he resigned, submitted the letter, no adjectives, and frankly Fox should get a medal for the kind of restraint everyone else in this business apparently forgot how to practice.…
…(cont) Here's the thing about turf wars — did I say turf war, I meant to say there was no turf war, there was a healthy disagreement about — you know, I don't actually know what it was about, none of us do, and that's rather the point I was trying to avoid making.
Five news organizations independently landing on five different words for the same eight months of a Cabinet secretary and a Defense Secretary not speaking is not a pattern, it's a coincidence of vocabulary. Editors like variety. Nobody wants to print 'friction' five times in one news cycle, that's a style-guide problem, not a Pentagon problem.
And even if it were a Pentagon problem — which it is not, I want to be extremely clear it is not — the resignation letter went to the President, which is exactly the correct chain of command, which proves the system worked, which is the opposite of a crisis, which is what I have been saying this entire column, which I would now like to stop saying out loud, because on reflection five simultaneous synonyms for 'fight' from five separate newsrooms that don't coordinate with each other is, actually, now that I'm looking at it typed out, a fairly specific kind of coincidence, and I retract the word coincidence.
“Nobody quits a job over nothing, and nobody needs five synonyms to describe nothing. Tension, friction, rift, turf war — that's not a vocabulary problem, that's five newsrooms independently confirming the same fight and not one of them getting told what it was actually about.”
“This is routine personnel movement, full stop. Cabinet-adjacent officials resign, letters get submitted to the President through the proper channel, and calling that a crisis because four different papers used four different adjectives is — did I say routine, I meant to say I don't actually know what happened either.”
The receipts
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is set to depart his role at the Pentagon in the coming days, leaving the Trump administration after being embroiled in a months-long turf war with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to two sources…
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has submitted his resignation letter to the White House, a senior U.S. official confirms. The White House has not yet accepted his resignation.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll submitted his resignation this week after disagreements with War Secretary Pete Hegseth seeped into the public eye. Driscoll, who is a college friend of Vice President JD Vance, is expected to leave the Pentagon…
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is resigning, the White House confirmed.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.