Perhaps no president in recent memory has so empowered the military—and disempowered himself—as Donald Trump. Whereas Barack Obama famously “signed off” on nearly every drone target, Trump has taken a deliberately hands-off approach. While he claimed on the campaign trail to “know more” than U.S. generals, since taking office the commander in chief has mostly relinquished responsibility for matters of war, preferring to shout suggestions from the sideline on Twitter. He has given the U.S. military the authority to set its own troop levels in Afghanistan and the Pentagon the flexibility to set troop levels in Iraq and Syria, although he has reportedly tired of this position of late, blaming his secretary of defense for “losing” in Afghanistan. The result has been a sometimes weaker-than-usual chain of command: when Trump announced on Twitter that transgender people would be barred from serving in “any capacity” in the United States military, with no clarification from the White House, the Defense Department effectively chose to ignore the order, pending more information.

This week saw the further breakdown of the traditional relationship between the commander in chief and the military when Trump insisted at a press conference on Tuesday that there were “very fine people” marching alongside the white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, where an apparent ISIS-style car attack by one right-wing extremist left an anti-racist protester dead and more than a dozen injured. Military leaders quickly rebuked both the attack and, implicitly, the president’s response, which was widely panned as a defense of the pro-Confederate rally.

None directly criticized the president. But the unprecedented backlash underscored the sometimes difficult relationship between Trump and the Armed Forces. While polls initially showed greater support for Trump among veterans than for Obama, the military had made great strides in recent years and months toward protecting L.G.B.T. troops, with the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and, more recently, rolling back a long-standing ban on transgender individuals. Trump’s decision to abruptly upend that process, while divisive, was also seen as unnecessarily disruptive.

With his comments on Charlottesville, Trump has put military leaders in a bind. While they all ultimately report to the president, the Defense Department has also made commitments to diversity and civil-rights protections that are difficult to square with the rhetoric coming out of the White House. Corporations seeking Trump’s favor have found themselves in a similar bind, torn between a sometimes fiduciary duty to work with the administration and distancing themselves from hateful rhetoric and executive actions—such as Trump’s travel ban—that are fundamentally at odds with generally progressive corporate values. Trump’s comments on the Charlottesville protests have already driven several business leaders to resign from Trump’s advisory councils. But while companies ultimately answer to their shareholders, the military still reports to Trump. What they insinuate on Twitter is another matter.