Trump’s Message to Generals and Admirals
A long and unusual speech has implications for civil-military relations.
WaPo defense beat reporters Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp and Alex Horton (“Military leaders absorb highly partisan presentation from Trump, Hegseth“):
Hundreds of the U.S. military’s top leaders absorbed highly partisan addresses from President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, with each harshly criticizing their predecessors and touting their agendas in a summit that was extraordinary in nature but ultimately broke little new ground.
[…]
Trump, in meandering remarks that stretched about an hour and 10 minutes, joked that if those in attendance did not like what he had to say, they could leave the room — but “there goes your rank, there goes your future,” he added, drawing some uncomfortable laughter. Since returning to power, Trump and Hegseth have fired numerous generals and admirals, often without cause — and focusing on a disproportionate number of women.
The president defended his polarizing use of the armed forces to police American cities, decrying what he said was “the enemy within” while insisting he should be allowed to use military force domestically. He extolled his decision to rebrand the Defense Department as the Department of War, lamented his inability to end the conflict in Ukraine, and tacitly acknowledged the highly sensitive movements of U.S. submarines off the coast of Russia.
“I call it the ‘n-word,’” the president said of the submarines, appearing to allude to the vessels’ nuclear power. “There are two n-words, and you can’t use either of them.”
The assembled military brass sat through the presentations mostly silent, in keeping with the military’s nonpartisan tradition. Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University, said that they “managed well a very difficult walk along a high wire” by listening respectfully to both partisan speeches without responding. Trump and Hegseth, he added, also deserve credit for showing that they understand why the military leaders were remaining quiet.
“The speeches raised a lot of questions that the military will have to grapple with in the months ahead,” Feaver said. “But they won’t have to do so on live TV, and so a very tricky moment in American civil-military relations did not produce the disaster that some feared.”
Their White House beat colleagues Emily Davies and Matt Viser (“Trump tells a roomful of silent generals to join a ‘war from within’“):
President Donald Trump delivered a meandering address to an unprecedented gathering of the country’s top military leaders, railing against his predecessor, celebrating tariffs and floating the idea of using American cities as a training ground for the military as he painted a picture of the U.S. under attack “from within.”
Trump in recent months has lambasted blue cities and states as hotbeds of crime, but the speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday morning marked the first time he publicly directed military leaders to be “a major part” of fighting a “war from within” in cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.
“We’ve brought back the fundamental principle that defending the homeland is the military’s first and most important priority. That’s what it is,” Trump said. “It is only in recent decades that politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia, while America is under invasion from within.”
The president spoke for more than an hour to a largely silent room at the military base about 30 miles south of Washington, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had summoned generals and admirals from across the globe. Trump, who draws energy off of instantaneous feedback, appeared to speak more slowly than usual and in a monotone, seemingly affected by a largely mum audience.
[…]
The military follows strict customs and courtesies, which include showing deference and respect to the commander in chief and refraining from showing approval or disapproval of political statements. On Tuesday, laughter occasionally followed a joke, but Trump’s attacks on former president Joe Biden were met with silence and his efforts to elicit a call-and-response in support of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, fell flat, according to pool reports.
“I was told that, ‘Sir, you won’t hear a murmur in the room,’” Trump continued. “I said we had to loosen these guys up a little bit.”
Over at NYT, defense reporters Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Shawn McCreesh (“Trump and Hegseth Recount Familiar Partisan Complaints to Top Military Leaders“) weigh in:
President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned more than 800 of the country’s top brass to a military base in Virginia on Tuesday to voice a familiar litany of culture war talking points and criticize a military that they complained had become distracted by political correctness.
The rare and highly anticipated call-up drew the country’s military commanders, who flew in from Asia, Europe and points between on short notice. The president delivered a rambling address that included familiar talking points and critiques and Mr. Trump’s revelation that he had told Mr. Hegseth to use American cities where he has deployed troops as “training grounds” for the military.
[…]
Mr. Trump praised his own tariff and border policies and insulted former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Discussing his efforts to send troops to American cities, he said: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
Newly promulgated social media rules constrain me from commenting on these remarks. Suffice it to say, I’ve never seen anything like it.
And that I share Feaver’s assessment of the civil-military relations aspects of all of this. Our senior military leaders are rightly uncomfortable being subjected to attacks on their former commander-in-chief and former senior military leader. That they refrained from visible reaction was to their credit.
As to some of the rest, it remains to be seen what was spontaneous bluster and what foreshadowed substantive policy shifts. There are extreme interpretations that, if manifest, would require making professional choices more difficult than sitting on their hands.
Embarrassing. But then again, having a president who helped Jeff Epstein sexually abuse children is so embarrassing, it’s all downhill from there.
Kudos to the military leaders.
I dare to speak for descendants of American slaves: racist scumbag pedophile President Trumpflation can go to hell.
Yeah, I was about to make a comment about a line you wrote. Before I started typing, my brain trained a spotlight on this paragraph.
I will leave it at:
Free Speech! Free Joyner!
Maybe I should commission a t- shirt that no one I come into contact with irl would understand.
As a snarky aside, who thinks Lil Petey is pissed that Trump came in and stepped all over his big moment?
Or was this planned from the beginning?
What must it be like to be a career military officer who has spent that career quietly putting the safety of the nation above political strife, even when the nation could or should not know what the danger was, only to sit through this political clown show.
The silver lining may be the Brass see TrumpCo up close and personal, no media filter.
There’s that scene in A Clockwork Orange where they clamp Malcolm MacDowell’s eyes open and pour in eyedrops while forcing him to watch scenes of depravity. I bet that’s how this audience felt.
@Joe:
Another embarrassing flop for the pederast and the drunk. They should have renamed it Department of Cringe.
Oh, for fucks sake. If Whoopi Goldberg tells him that it’s ok if he uses the n-word, would that be enough to make him happy and then just go away?
Is there a different Black celebrity that he would find more authorative? What’s Oprah up to?
Quoting myself from last Thursday:
I have been spectacularly wrong about things. I did not anticipate the whole “illegal shutdowns of congressionally established departments and/or institutions” business. I thought it was posturing.
This one, on the other hand, seems pretty solid. I mean, it’s several horrible things, so there’s that…
Add in Pete Hegseth doing a lot of posturing and finger-shaking. Like the boss.
What Trump wants is clear: he wants soldiers to kill liberals, immigrants, Blacks Trans and gays. I mean that literally. If he can find a way to do it, he’d like to kill everyone on this page.
I mean, cut through all the bullshit, that’s what he wants. Soldiers or ‘law enforcement’ thugs or right-wing militias, he wants to see American men, women and children bleeding in the streets. That would make him feel like a man. And who would even care about Epstein?
Those of you who still have MAGAs in your life, it is time to confront them with this. Ask them: if Trump orders liberals killed, will you support that? Will you participate? If not, then why are you loyal to a man who does want that? Put these people on the spot. Get up in their faces, don’t be passive, don’t play along.
ETA: BTW, those of you who attend churches, have you demanded to know why your denomination is remaining silent?
As usual, journalists have concealed the true nature of Trump’s deranged rant by re-ordering cherry-picked extracts into something resembling coherent themes. The closest they could bring themselves to an accurate description was to call it “meandering”.
It was gibberish. Garbled stream-of consciousness drivel. The President of the United States, jumping from topic to topic at random, said among other things:
– America is seriously considering bringing back battleships. Steel doesn’t burn like aluminium, you see, and those bullets the big guns fire are a cheaper than missiles.
– Changing to a merit system was a tremendous achievement for which he gave “great credit to the Supreme Court because I thought they had tremendous courage”.
– Thanks to tariffs, “we’ve taken in trillions of dollars. We’re rich. Rich again.”
– He deserves the Nobel Prize, but “They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing. They’ll give it to a guy that wrote a book about the mind of Donald Trump and what it took to solve the war.”
The whole thing was like this. It was terrifying. Firstly because the President of the United States is self-evidently off his head, secondly because nobody appears willing to do anything about it, and finally because so many powerful interests in America are enthusiastically cooperating with him.
Trump said that the central government is at war with an internal enemy. Hegseth said that war fighting should not be restrained by effete rules of engagement and recently reinstated the medals of Wounded Knee soldiers. Right now there is no shooting in American cities except for the “normal” background mass shootings by deranged people. When the war enters the active phase, we can expect mass destruction.
@Michael Reynolds:
No doubt, he is aching to duplicate Tiananmen Square in Chicago. He spoke with fervent admiration of the Chinese government’s slaughter of thousands of students and other protesters. You know he wants that show of power for himself.
@Ken_L: Very much this.
The combination of labeling of the nebulous ‘Antifa’ as a terrorist organization, the delight with which the Trumpers declare that they can kill ‘terrorists’ in Venezuelan waters and the promise of unleashing the army on the ‘enemy within’ seems.. ominous.