Retired Lt. Gen. Dan Caine wasn’t a household name before Friday, but his surprise selection as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff highlights a long-standing fascination President Donald Trump has held for the military leader.
Their connection appears to trace back to a 2018 meeting in Iraq, a moment that seemingly left a lasting impression on the president.
During a 2019 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump recounted his first encounter with Caine.
Then serving as the deputy commander of a special operations task force combating ISIS, Caine reportedly told the president that the militant group could be eradicated within a week. This bold assertion, it seems, resonated with Trump.
Since then, he has retold the story about how he met “Razin” Caine multiple times – and the praise has only grown more effusive.
“He’s a real general, not a television general,” Trump said in Miami on Wednesday, two days before his Truth Social post catapulted Caine from retirement to a nomination to be the most senior active-duty officer in the U.S. military.
If approved by the Senate, Caine will take over a military that is reeling from change in the first 30 days of the Trump administration and will inherit a Joint Staff rattled by Trump’s surprise firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown.
Caine, a retired F-16 pilot, will be promoted to four-star general, and then have to undergo a potentially grueling Senate confirmation process to get a four-year term as the uniformed head of the nation’s military.
Caine’s military career is a far cry from the traditional path to becoming the president’s top military adviser. Previous generals and admirals have led a combatant command or a military branch of service.
Caine did not rise that high in the ranks before retirement. According to Trump, he was “passed over for promotion by Sleepy Joe Biden,” whom Trump defeated in November’s presidential campaign.
“But not anymore!”, Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Earlier this year Caine described on a podcast how as a young man he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, a fighter pilot.
“We started moving around as a kid. So I felt like this was something that I really, really, really wanted to do, was fly jets in the Air Force,” Caine said.
He graduated in 1990 from the Virginia Military Institute with a bachelor’s degree in Arts and Economics.
