Defense Department spokesman John Ullyot. (U.S. Deptartment of Veterans Affairs)
The Trump administration has sidelined a senior Defense Department spokesman, defense officials said Thursday, ending a brief and tumultuous tenure in which he clashed with colleagues and journalists who cover the Pentagon and aggressively defended the agency’s purge of government-produced content recognizing the contributions of minorities in the military.
John Ullyot, a public affairs official who also held senior communications roles during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, is expected to take another role within the Defense Department working on “special projects,” said a person familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive personnel decision. Ullyot declined to comment.
Ullyot’s removal followed an uproar Wednesday over the Pentagon’s removal of an online article about the military background of Jackie Robinson, who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in 1947 after serving in the U.S. Army. As news of the article’s removal drew widespread condemnation on social media, Ullyot released a statement attempting to explain the administration’s rationale — striking an unusually combative tone for a spokesman representing the view of a government agency with a nonpartisan national security mission.
“Discriminatory Equity Ideology,” his statement said in part, “… Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission.”
Since returning to office, Trump and the political appointees he’s positioned throughout the federal government, have worked vigorously to end initiatives that promote diversity, equity and inclusion within the workforce and to scrub from government websites and social media accounts most references to those terms. The Pentagon issued its order last month, days after Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired several senior military leaders they deemed overly focused on diversity.
Ullyot’s statement did not address whether the removal of Defense Department articles about Robinson and other minority trailblazers was done in error, but he wrote that if any material was removed “either deliberately or by mistake” that exceeded the scope of the directive, corrections would be made to ensure that the Pentagon “recognizes our heroes for their dedicated service alongside their fellow Americans, period.”
The removal of Ullyot, who served as Pentagon press secretary, follows the arrival last month of another spokesman, Sean Parnell, who has known Hegseth for years and has his trust, defense officials said. Ullyot had taken on a behind-the-scenes role in the department while Parnell has begun holding on-camera media briefings.
On Thursday, Parnell posted a video on X in which he said the screening of Defense Department content for DEI messaging was “an incredibly important undertaking,” but acknowledged mistakes were made in part due to the use of artificial intelligence.
“Some important content was incorrectly pulled offline to be reviewed,” Parnell said in the video. “We want to be very, very clear. History is not DEI. When content is either mistakenly removed, or if it’s maliciously removed, we continue to work quickly to restore it.”
Several defense officials who worked with Ullyot said that even before the blowback caused by Wednesday’s statement, concern was growing among colleagues across the Defense Department who were troubled by his judgment.
Within days of Trump’s inauguration, Ullyot ousted numerous independent news organizations from their permanent desks or television booths at the Pentagon, portraying the move as a new “rotation program” and replacing them primarily with right-leaning media outlets with a record of defending the president. After news organizations protested the decision, Ullyot announced an expansion of the rotation program and took away the workspaces used for years by several more outlets, including The Washington Post.
The Jackie Robinson article was restored on the Defense Department website later Wednesday, but the reversal did little to quell the furor. On Thursday morning, ESPN television personality Stephen A. Smith took up the issue, saying he does not think the article was removed in error and that it follows what he called a pattern of the president’s supporters ignoring why DEI efforts existed in the first place.
Smith, who is Black, said on ESPN’s “First Take” that the administration is “going about the business of trying to scrub history” to the point that even Robinson is targeted. Smith noted that Robinson was drafted into military service in 1942, court-martialed in 1944 for refusing an order from a superior officer to move to the back of a bus, and honorably discharged from the Army.
Smith said on ESPN that Trump deserves to be treated with respect as the president but needs to be “called to the carpet” when decisions like this are made. Smith challenged Trump, Vice President JD Vance or Hegseth to defend the decision-making in an interview on his program.
