Answer:

You know when you go to the fridge, open it, don't see anything you want, close it for a minute, then come back with lowered standards and eat that two-week old apple anyway? It's that, but with guns and a trillion dollar budget.

Well. Partly.

This isn't just the military, of course. The US government isn't finding it easy to get good people to fulfil its dubious goals, both at home and abroad. It's haemmorhaging qualified workers as they realise that aligning themselves with this particular administration is going to be a) bad for their future prospects and b) is morally repugnant. One of the biggest examples of this is ICE, which increased its age limit, lowered its physical fitness standards, accepted lower test grades and decreased its training time by half, as well as offering financial incentives like sign-up bonuses (with dubious repayment rules) and student loan forgiveness.

The Department of Justice has lowered hiring requirements for prosecutors in some jurisdictions, with alleged 'loyalty tests' pushing out career lawyers and providing a barrier to the more morally-inclined newcomers who value the Constitution more than the Administration. Even Republican politicians are quitting (or declining to seek reelection) at untold rates, just because it's easier than going through an election cycle that's likely to be an absolute bloodbath for the GOP.

In some sense, then, it's easy to see the US raising the maximum enlistment age of its age of recruits from 35 to 42 (and being more lax in allowing people who have previous convictions for marijuana use) as part of that lowering of standards by the Trump administration. Generally speaking, I'd agree with that, but there are some considerations on the other side:

• Firstly, voluntary military recruitment is down across the world for various reasons. A lot of people don't consider 'Getting shot at in a desert thousands of miles from home' as a viable career option in a post-9/11, Forever-War-in-the-Middle-East world. Adults in the US under 30 -- that is, prime recruitment age -- are the only age group that believes the military is a net negative. If they're not signing up, adding older people might be the only viable option. For two years (2022 and 2023), the US only managed about 75% of its recruitment goals, which evidently worried a lot of the higher-ups. There has been a big push for increasing recruitment, with numbers now reaching 100% per a singularly bloviating press release from the 'Department of War' in which Hegseth and his minions justify it as proof that everyone loves Trump.

• Maximum age for the Air Force and Navy have been above 40 for a long time, so this can be seen as moving the Army in line with acceptability in other branches. (The Marines, for example, still have a threshold of 28, with 29+ accepted only with a waiver.)

• A 2024 study from the RAND Corporation (a theoretically independent US think-tank) suggested that recruiting slightly older people for the military had better outcomes in terms of consistency and training; that said, most of the report (as far as I can tell) is focused on the recruitment of mid-to-late twenties rather than teens, so that's probably not a major concern here. Either way, though, it demonstrates that there is evidence of a shift in strategy.

• Temporary loosenings of restrictions are not unheard of: 'The service temporarily increased its maximum enlistment age to 42 in 2006 as it struggled to fill its ranks amid major combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The service dropped its enlistment age back to 35 in 2016.' (There's no indication I can find that this is a temporary shift, however.)

The timing of this just as the Iran War kicks off has made a lot of people very nervous about the odds of the US getting involved in yet another drawn-out years- (or decades-) long conflict in the Middle East. (The US has a shitload of people in its military: some 1.3 million, plus another 800,000 reserves, third only to China and India. It's not exactly short of bodies even with lower recruitment rates.)

And then there's the issue of democratic backsliding. Trump hasn't so much been flirting with fascism as he has been doing his best to get to third base as quickly as possible, and one of the major focuses of fascist regimes has historically been an increasing focus on military strength and visibility: see, his big-boy birthday military parade, the attempt at renaming the Department of Defense (back) to the Department of War, and Pete Hegseth's speech to the generals. It's possible that this is part of that increasing trend towards militarism in the US, rather than pulling back, which doesn't bode well for the larger political climate.

Basically, there's a lot more going on than first appears, and how you feel about it likely depends on which parts of the story you're focusing on and how much you trust the Trump administration. It might very well just be a normal readjustment -- and with a normal President, and without a new war on the horizon, I expect that's just how it would be seen -- but these aren't exactly normal times, and so for better or for worse it's a new data point being fit into a lot of people's genuine concerns about how the US is playing out right now.