Updated 6:25 p.m. ET

President Trump told reporters at the White House that he was “sticking up for the armed forces” in his pardons of military personnel.

The commander in chief has repeatedly intervened on behalf of the Navy SEAL recently convicted of misconduct. And Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Trump did it again over the weekend, directly ordering him to allow Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher to retire as a SEAL.

“I spoke with the president on Sunday. He gave me the order that Eddie Gallagher will retain his Trident pin,” Esper told reporters on Monday at the Defense Department, referring to the insignia designating Gallagher as a member of the elite commando force.

The order from the commander in chief effectively put an end to proceedings by a Trident review board that were called by the commander of Navy special warfare, Rear Adm. Collin Green. The panel was charged with deciding whether Gallagher and three of his supervising officers were fit for duty. In Gallagher’s case, the board was set to convene next week.

On Monday, Esper also reiterated his reasons for asking Navy Secretary Richard Spencer to tender his resignation on Sunday. He accused Spencer of circumventing the appropriate channels, including Esper himself, to engage in direct negotiations with the White House to allow Gallagher to remain a SEAL. Meanwhile, Spencer was saying publicly that the Trident review board process should be allowed to play out.

“This proposal was completely contrary to what we agreed to and contrary to Secretary Spencer’s public position,” Esper said, adding that he was “completely caught off guard by this information and realized that it had undermined everything we had been discussing with the president.”

Esper tried to undo the perception that Spencer’s dismissal was tied to the specifics of Gallagher’s case, saying instead that it was over the chain of command.

Hours later Trump pushed back for granting clemency to Gallagher and pardoning two Army officers earlier this month.

He said it was an unfair to try put away “warriors” like Gallagher, Army Captain Clint Lorance and Maj. Matthew Golsteyn. Lorance was convicted of murder six years ago while Golsteyn was about to face trial for the alleged murder of a Taliban bombmaker.

“We’re not going to do that to our people,” Trump said.

The move went against the advice of military leaders.

He also criticized former President Barack Obama for pardoning Chelsea Manning, a soldier who was convicted of leaking classified documents.

The standoff between Trump and the Navy’s top brass began even before Gallagher’s court-martial trial over the summer. Gallagher, who served multiple tours in Iraq, was accused of a slew of crimes, including the murder of a wounded Islamic State prisoner. In the end, he was acquitted of all but one charge — posing with a dead detainee. Part of his sentence included a demotion to the lower rank of petty officer first class.

Trump subsequently overturned that decision, commanding the Navy to promote Gallagher back to chief petty officer.

Green’s decision to initiate a review of Gallagher’s fitness as a SEAL was seen as a rebuke of the president’s order.

In his resignation letter, Spencer suggested that his dismissal was indeed connected to Gallagher’s review rather than any communication back channels.

“Unfortunately it has become apparent that in this respect, I no longer share the same understanding with the Commander in Chief who appointed me, in regards to the key principle of good order and discipline,” Spencer wrote. “I cannot in good conscience obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath I took in the presence of my family, my flag and my faith to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

On Sunday, Trump also linked Spencer’s ouster to Gallagher. “I was not pleased with the way that Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s trial was handled by the Navy. He was treated very badly but, despite this, was completely exonerated on all major charges. I then restored Eddie’s rank,” the president tweeted.

Then he introduced another reason for pushing Spencer out: “Large cost overruns from past administration’s … contracting procedures were not addressed to my satisfaction.”

The president added that he would nominate Kenneth Braithwaite as the next Navy secretary. “A man of great achievement and success, I know Ken will do an outstanding job!” Trump said.

Gallagher’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, told the Navy Times that neither he nor his client foresaw such fallout. “With this personnel change, this institution will improve and no one will go through the ordeal Eddie went through. At the end of the day, the most important duty any of us have is protecting America,” Parlatore said.

“This case is completely bananas,” he added.

Gallagher said he is “overjoyed” that the president stepped in on his behalf once again. In an interview on Fox & Friends that aired Sunday morning, Gallagher name-checked Green and Spencer.

“This is all about ego and retaliation. This has nothing to do with good order and discipline. They could have taken my Trident at any time they wanted. Now they’re trying to take it after the president restored my rank,” Gallagher said.

It is unclear where the events of the last few days leave the Trident review board proceedings for Gallagher’s three supervising officers: Lt. Jacob Portier, Lt. Cmdr. Robert Breisch and Lt. Thomas MacNeil.

Police are searching for the bold thieves who made off with priceless diamonds and other historic treasures from the Grünes Gewölbe or “Green Vault” state museum in Dresden, Germany, early Monday morning. Officials say the criminals took parts of three jewelry sets.

The museum has a large collection of jewels, Baroque artifacts and intricately crafted golden tableaus that were amassed between 1723 and 1730 by August the Strong, the Saxon elector and arts patron who later became king of Poland.

Early reports of the heist sparked incredulity and worries about its scope, as the historic Green Vault collection includes thousands of rare and irreplaceable items. While the material value of what was taken seems to have fallen short of the potential $1 billion of loot that was initially reported by some German news outlets, Marion Ackermann, the general director of the State Art Collection in Dresden, said the pilfered items have priceless cultural value.

Police in Dresden say the heist took just minutes, and that the thieves targeted three vitrines in the museum’s “Jewel Room.” They released surveillance video showing two black-clad people rushing into the room and using what looks to be a hatchet or small axe to smash glass display cases, delivering vicious blows to force their way into the finely crafted case. The scene takes place in darkness, with the room’s ornate walls and polished checkerboard floor illuminated only by the infiltrators’ flashlights.

“We are shocked by the brutality of the burglary,” Ackermann said, according to Deutsche Welle.

The criminals got into the Green Vault by breaking a security grill and window in the historic royal palace that houses the museum, police said at a news conference held around 1 p.m. local time.

Saying the stolen jewelry pieces are essentially the crown jewels of Saxon kings, Saxony’s Art Minister Eva-Maria Stange said on Monday, “They belong to Saxony.”

As NPR’s Rob Schmitz reports from Berlin, one of the museum’s most prized possessions is safe.

“One of the museum’s best known treasures, the 41-carat Dresden Green Diamond, happened to be away on loan to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art at the time of the break-in,” Schmitz says. “Other exhibits include a table-sized sculpture of the Indian royal court made of gold, silver and precious stones, as well as a golden coffee service by an 18th century court jeweler.”

Details of the heist are still emerging, as police investigate and look for the perpetrators. Saxony’s police say they believe the thieves fled the scene in an Audi A6 sedan — and that an identical vehicle was later found on fire in an underground parking lot.

Laying out a timeline on its Twitter feed, the museum’s parent organization, the Dresden State Art Collections, says the first police car was called to the building at 5:04 a.m. local time. Within a minute, a report emerged of an escape vehicle, setting off an intense search in the city. Around the same time, officials realized there had been a power failure in the museum’s section of Dresden.

Soon afterwards, an electrical control box nearby was found to be disabled — and the authorities are still working to determine whether that may have been a case of sabotage. While initial reports suggested the power might have been cut to the museum’s security systems, police later said that the outage had affected street lights in the area of the crime scene.

New of the heist was startling, given the museum’s status as one of Europe’s largest collections of jewels and European artistry. And the break-in triggered strong personal feelings in Saxony, where the museum serves as a repository of a cultural identity that goes back for centuries.

In response to the intrusion, Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer said, “Not only the state art collections were robbed, but we Saxons!”

Referring to the wider significance of the valuable treasures held in the Grünes Gewlbe, Kretschmer said the history of Saxony cannot be understood without the Green Vault.

Saxony Interior Minister Roland Wöller said it’s a “bitter day” for the state’s heritage, adding that the criminals had stolen “treasures of unimaginable value.” As of now, he added, officials are assuming the burglars knew precisely what they wanted to take, and how to get it.

The police acknowledged that the theft is an emotional topic for many Saxons, but they also urged people not to speculate about details of the crime, or who might be to blame.

The treasures of the Grünes Gewölbe have been part of Dresden and Saxony’s resurgence from the ravages of World War II and the Cold War. The pieces survived U.S. and British allies’ relentless bombing of Dresden, only to be seized by the Soviet Union. They were later returned to East Germany, but the full breadth of the collection’s thousands of pieces wasn’t put on public display until around 15 years ago, the museum says on its website.

The Green Vault theft comes two years after another German museum was the victim of a shocking high-profile heist: In March of 2017, thieves crept into an upper window of the Bode Museum in Berlin before smashing a bulletproof case and grabbing a 220-pound solid gold coin worth an estimated $4.3 million. Four suspects in that case went on trial in January, in a process that is still ongoing.

So poor was the education she received at her public high school, Pilar Vega Martinez had to take an extra year to study for the Prueba de Selección Universitaria — the Chilean version of the SAT.

The work paid off. Her score on the exam was good enough to get her into the top-rated University of Chile. Vega is now in her third year, studying to be a nurse. And thanks to an important change in government policy, life got easier after that: She didn’t have to pay.

That’s because Chile has made college tuition-free — through a policy called gratuidad — after years of angry public protests about escalating tuition and student loan debt and the gulf in quality between the institutions attended by the wealthiest and the poorest students.

It’s a version of “free college” along the lines of what many in the United States are talking about — including several Democratic candidates for president.

Chile’s educational system has significant parallels with that of the U.S.: a robust sector of private colleges alongside public universities; high college tuition; and, before gratuidad, significant student loan debt.

That makes it a prime test case for the American version of the idea.

Among other things, what has happened in Chile proves that free tuition is politically popular.

In 2013, Michelle Bachelet, then the socialist candidate for president, made it a centerpiece of her campaign and won by a 2-to-1 margin; several years later, the Chilean Congress passed it by a vote of 92-2. Sebastián Piñera, the conservative who succeeded Bachelet, has continued the policy.

And it’s a popular idea in the U.S., too: Seventy-one percent of Americans support free tuition at public universities or colleges for students who are academically qualified, according to a survey by PSB Research for the Campaign for Free College Tuition.

How it came to be

A driving force behind the move to gratuidad in Chile was deep socioeconomic divisions in society, a remnant of Chile’s authoritarian government that ruled the country from 1973 to 1990.

In 2011, the frustrations and anger boiled over into strikes and protests. Demonstrators marched against high college costs and large amounts of personal debt from student loans.

The frustrations then were similar to those that have sparked political protests in recent weeks.

“In Chile, you can’t move things” without people in the streets explains Miguel Crispi, who is now a deputy, or member, of the Chilean Congress.

Back in 2011, the debate was all about education.

Chileans, over their breakfasts, “were talking about inequality,” says Crispi, who was a student leader during those protests. He recalls whole families “talking about, ‘How can we afford a higher education? Is it fair to go into debt for studying?’ “

As in the U.S., the movement rose above financial concerns about paying for college to a broader, philosophical principle: Higher education is a right.

“The most important way of being free is having the tools for doing what you want to do in life. That’s education,” says Crispi. “It’s about being free or having the chance to be free.”

It’s expensive

When gratuidad finally began in Chile, lawmakers quickly realized that the ambitious program — free tuition for everyone — costs a lot, even in a country with just over 5% the population of the U.S. It became clear the program had to be scaled down and delayed, with complex restrictions added.

The same thing has happened to free-college proposals in the U.S.: A campaign promise by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to make community college in that state tuition-free, for instance, had to be reduced to a pilot program. And the free-tuition plan in New York state set an income limit for recipients.

In Chile, the biggest cost-saving measure was reducing the number of students who qualified. College would not be free for everyone but for the poorest Chileans — only those whose families were in the bottom half of the income range.

Gratuidad has since been expanded to include the bottom 60%. Even after those revisions, the price tag for Chilean taxpayers is $1.5 billion a year. (In the U.S., Sen. Bernie Sanders’ plan to make two- and four-year college free for everyone — regardless of income — is projected to cost the government $47 billion per year.)

Is it working?

Despite the investment in Chile, the reform is making only slow progress toward its primary goal: expanding access to higher education for the lowest-income students. That’s because nearly 90% of those low-income students already had financial aid before gratuidad.

But looked at another way, the prospect of free tuition does inspire students to enroll in college who might not have considered it previously. A recent report found that 15% of Chilean students in the program would have otherwise not sought a college education. And Chileans who get free tuition are also slightly less likely to drop out than their classmates who don’t, the government has found.

“For some families, the assurance that they are not going to be facing any payment at all makes a difference in their willingness to take the chance and have their kid apply,” says Andrés Bernasconi, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile who studies gratuidad.

When Pedro Córdova Guerra, 55, was growing up in the suburbs of Santiago, he didn’t even let himself dream about college. His family was poor, and in his mind, college was only for the wealthy. “Back in my time, there were no opportunities,” he says. “I used to be bitter that I didn’t get a chance to go to school. It was very difficult.”

He says he lived through that big shift in thinking: “There were new ideals around education. … We expect it to be a right.”

And his children are living that ideal. His middle daughter, Verónica Córdova Freire, is using gratuidad to study mechanical engineering at the University of Santiago.

But even with free tuition, Verónica tells us she is still struggling financially. To save money, she lives at home with her parents and two siblings.

She rides a bus to campus, which takes about 2 1/2 hours each day. “That’s two hours I’m not sleeping, not studying,” she says. Her school helps pay for lunch, but it’s not enough; she eats most meals at home with her family.

Many students we talked with face the same challenges. Gratuidad doesn’t cover other costs, including rent, food, books and transportation.

Most free-tuition programs in the U.S. don’t cover those expenses either. And because they don’t, two of the most ambitious programs, in Tennessee and New York state, have failed to improve affordability for low-income students, according to a report by the Institute for Higher Education Policy.

In fact, that report found, in Tennessee it was higher-income students who benefited, getting an average of nearly $1,500 each to help them pay for college educations their families could already afford.

The length it covers

Beyond the financial limitations, however, students in Chile have another big complaint about gratuidad: the time limit. The program requires students to complete their degrees, or courses of study, on time. For example, a traditional four-year degree must be completed in that time.

One expert likened it to a time bomb and, sure enough, this year 27,000 of the students who had been enjoying free tuition came to the end of their eligibility before they graduated, according to the University of Chile Student Federation Research Center.

Pilar Vega Martinez, who is in her third year of studying to be a nurse, says that last year she got bronchitis and missed weeks of school. “I was doing really well,” she says, but now, it will take her longer to finish than gratuidad will pay for.

“I’m still thinking about how I’m going to pay for that last year,” she says in Spanish during a study break in the university’s library. “I’ve had to work while studying to start saving money.”

Students in Chile take 10% to 30% longer than the prescribed time, on average, to finish their degrees, the government says. That mirrors what happens in the United States, where many students need, for example, five or six years or more to complete a bachelor’s degree.

“In 2011 the principal problem was that gratuidad didn’t exist,” says Ximena Donoso Rochabrunt, who just finished law school and is studying for the equivalent of the bar exam. “And people are still mad that its existence is only partial.”

The impact on private universities

Private colleges in Chile, which can participate in gratuidad if they choose, are facing a financial squeeze because the government limits the tuition they can charge. In the first year, only a few private institutions took part, since they have relatively high tuition and serve wealthier students whose families’ incomes are too high to qualify anyway.

For those institutions that do sign on, “costs are going to go up and income is going to stay very still,” says Claudio Ruff, rector of the private Universidad Bernardo O’Higgins and president of the national association of private universities. His office overlooks a grassy quad, with a portrait of O’Higgins, the 19th century Chilean independence leader, on the wall and opera music playing in the background.

Already, Ruff says, 15 private universities and colleges have closed or are in the process of closing because it’s hard to compete with “free.”

Schools like his that remain but have opted out of gratuidad are cutting money-losing programs, offering discounts and scholarships and adding research to attract more students, including international ones.

The colleges have largely themselves to blame for this predicament, argues Luis Felipe Jiménez Leighton, an economist and former adviser to the Education Ministry who helped negotiate gratuidad. Their high fees helped drive the protests that resulted in the free-tuition system.

“Fat cats,” he called them. “Now [they] have to get lean. And that’s a consequence of gratuidad that we didn’t intend, but it’s a byproduct and to some extent it’s a welcome byproduct.”

Some private institutions in Chile may have gotten fat, concedes Ruff. “But not any more. Private universities spend more money [than public ones], but they spend it better.” Besides, he adds, private universities can “tighten their belts faster.”

Looking ahead

As it stands now, gratuidad is set to expand if and when tax revenues allow. But the argument in Chile now is over whether it should.

Three years in, has it been worth it? Many, like Rosa Devés, say yes. Devés is a vice president for academic affairs at the University of Chile.

When some people ask “why am I going to pay for a rich person to go to university?” her answer is: “You’re not paying for the rich person. You’re paying for the institution that will have all the representation of the society in it.”

But Chile simply may not be able to afford that, says Leighton, the economist. “We’re not in a state of abundance where we can finance everything,” he says. “You have to prioritize some things and in the process to leave somebody in and somebody out.”

Right now, 68% of Chileans say they are against extending free tuition to everyone, preferring that only people in the bottom 70% of income be covered, one poll found.

Conservatives, who now hold a majority in government, would prefer to put more money into primary and secondary education, where inequalities grow.

“Free tuition is not the only solution for getting more vulnerable students into university or into higher education,” notes Jaime Bellolio, a conservative deputy in Congress who serves on the education committee. Regardless of free tuition, he explains, students still need the academic preparation if they are to gain admission into top universities.

“If you want to have more vulnerable students in good universities and good professional institutes you have to level up the quality of education before they come.”

He acknowledges that this point is not as politically catchy as “free tuition”: “It’s not as good for the elections, but it is better for the long run, and it’s better public policy. Those first years are the ones that make all the difference.”

Still, Devés argues that Chile has made big steps forward since Chileans took to the streets eight years ago.

“The path is not perfect,” she says, pulling out a copy of the actual statute. Devés helped write the law and has highlighted some of her favorite parts. She tears up as she reads the words aloud. Translated from Spanish:

“The law establishes that higher education is right, that should be within reach of all people, in accord with their abilities and merits.”

“I feel quite proud,” she says. “It may be just words, but still, they are the correct words.”

The work isn’t finished yet, she adds, but gratuidad is “a very important starting point.”

This story about tuition-free colleges was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

When Barack Obama stood in Chicago’s Grant Park facing throngs of people in 2008 and declared that “change has come to America,” Arielle Monroe was a freshman in college.

Obama was her generation’s rock star, who swept away the nation’s last remaining racial barrier in politics and inspired a multiracial, multigenerational coalition to support him.

“All different kinds of people related to this man, how we all believed in him,” she said. “There was this whole message of hope — right? — in that it’ll all get better for people who have grown up maybe not feeling that that’s a possibility.”

Now, with less than three months before Democratic voters begin to cast ballots to select their nominee, Monroe is one of many voters who hasn’t yet found a candidate to inspire her in that same way.

“I’m not excited right now, but I hope to be soon,” she said.

More than a decade after his election, which represented one of the most hopeful moments in American politics, a debate is breaking out among Democrats over Obama’s legacy and which direction the party should go during a moment in which the historic divides Obama sought to bridge seem more vast than ever.

At a recent gathering of Democrats in Wyandotte County, Kan., Melissa Bynum said she wants to hear candidates paint a big-picture vision for the future. But she worried that some candidates weren’t recognizing Obama’s legacy.

“Well, I think that they need to make sure that they are acknowledging all of the good that he was able to accomplish in his eight years in the White House,” she said.

She specifically mentioned health care, which has been one of the most animating issues of the Democratic presidential primary.

The debate over the direction in which the party should go spilled into public view during the November presidential debate, hosted by MSNBC and The Washington Post.

Early in the evening, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked about Obama’s recent remarks about the electorate, made at a Washington gathering of the Democracy Alliance.

“This is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement,” Obama said during his Nov. 15 remarks, according to audio of his remarks that was captured off microphone. “They like seeing things improved. But the average American doesn’t think that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it. And I think it’s important for us not to lose sight of that.”

Democratic strategist Joel Payne said Obama’s comments were both an “implicit defense of the Obama years,” as well as “a bit of the warning to the party to not lurch too far, in this instance, to the left.”

They were also an apparent beginning of a more public role in the 2020 primary for Obama, who until recently had largely kept a low profile.

Sanders, who has campaigned on calls for a political revolution, was asked whether Obama was incorrect.

“No, he’s right,” Sanders said. “We don’t have to tear down the system, but we do have to do what the American people want.”

Then he segued into a defense of the “Medicare for All” single-payer proposal he’s championed as a replacement to the Affordable Care Act.

During last week’s debate, Democrats also tussled over who would be the best candidate to reinvigorate the multiracial, multigenerational cohort of voters whom Obama brought to the polls in 2008.

California Sen. Kamala Harris repeatedly, explicitly argued that she is the candidate “who has the ability to go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump and someone who has the ability to rebuild the Obama coalition and bring the party and the nation together.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden said that he was “part of that Obama coalition,” adding that he came “out of a black community, in terms of my support.”

And South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg said he wants to build a coalition that includes not just left-leaning voters, but moderates and “future former Republicans,” adding that “everybody is welcome in this movement that we’re building.”

But days before the debate, Paul Avila doubted that lightning could strike twice.

“Well I’m not sure it’s possible. That happened over a decade ago,” he said when asked if any candidate in the race could rebuild the Obama coalition. “Things have changed a lot over the past 10 years. I don’t see anybody yet that could be another Barack Obama.”

Avila is still undecided in the 2020 race but says he’s leaning toward supporting Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Sanders because they’re “much more progressive, willing to take more chances in order to win.” He also likes Buttigieg, who he described as “sharp as a tack.”

But he was less bullish on Biden, who he says “is a little past his prime, and he also has some baggage that he’s carrying around” from his Senate career.

When asked about Obama, Avila said that he was a “good president, but there were some things about his presidency that left a lot to be desired.”

Florentino Camacho, who attended the Wyandotte County Democrats breakfast, and lives in Kansas City Mo. said that Obama was one of the best presidents of his lifetime, and praised him for being a president who fought for all Americans, something he said President Trump isn’t doing.

But, he worried that Democrats could be unprepared for the playbook Republicans will throw at them in the general election.

“I think they’re doing good, but they have to start fighting as bad and as dirty as the Republicans,” he said.

Gary Bradley-Lopez, 21, supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and said that none of the current candidates is “bringing the kind of fire” that Clinton did that year, or that Obama did in the two prior elections.

He says his biggest priority in a candidate is that they be a woman or a person of color — he isn’t interested in electing another white man. And he says that though he’s “culturally” excited for candidates like Harris, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, he still doesn’t know who he’ll support.

“I’m not sure if there’s a candidate that right. Like, Oh, I can’t wait to go knock on doors for them or I can’t wait for them to be president,.” he said. “I’m not sure that candidate is even in the race yet.”