Now we know. This morning, in front of a giant flag backdrop that echoed the opening scene from the movie Patton, Hegseth harangued the career military leaders, pacing as if he were giving a TED talk. The event was streamed live to the public, making it clear that the hurry to get everyone to Washington, D.C., in person was not about secrecy.
In his speech, Hegseth reiterated his vision of a military based in what he calls the “warrior ethos.” Ignoring the military’s mission of preventing wars through deterrence, its professional and highly educated officer corps, and its modern structure as a triumph of logistics, he told the military leaders that today was “the liberation of America’s warriors, in name, in deed and in authorities. You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong always in polite society.”
He claimed that “we have the strongest, most powerful, most lethal, and most prepared military on the planet. That is true, full stop. Nobody can touch us. It’s not even close.” But then Hegseth, who became defense secretary from his position as a weekend host on the Fox News Channel, complained that “our warriors” are not “led by the most capable and qualified combat leaders.”
He claimed that “foolish and reckless politicians” had forced the military “to focus on the wrong things” and that it had promoted too many leaders “based on their race, based on gender quotas.” “We became the woke department,” he said. “We are done with that sh*t.” He is loosening rules about hazing and bullying, changing physical fitness reforms with the idea that they will get women out of combat roles, and prohibiting beards, which will force Black men out of the service, for Black men suffer at a much higher rate than white men do from a chronic skin condition that makes shaving painful and can cause scarring.
He also said he was tired of seeing “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals,” and that he would institute a second physical fitness test every year.
“[I]f the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink,” Hegseth said, “then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”
The military leaders listened to Hegseth without expression, in keeping with the military’s longstanding tradition of rejecting partisanship. While Hegseth paused for applause that did not materialize, he seemed to be playing to the cameras rather than his live audience.
In contrast, when President Donald J. Trump took the stage, he seemed uncomfortable at the lack of audience participation in what was essentially a rally speech. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he began. “This is very interesting. Don’t laugh, don’t laugh. You’re not allowed to do that. You know what? Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room.”
The president who received five draft deferments—four for college, one for bad feet—continued to a room full of career officers: “Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future. But you just feel nice and loose, okay, because we’re all on the same team. And I was told that, sir, you won’t hear a murmur in the room.”
For the next 70 minutes, he spoke slowly, slurring words, delivering to the hundreds of professionals who had rushed from around the world to attend this meeting a rambling, incoherent stream of words that jumped from what appeared to be prepared remarks to his own improvisation. He covered the “Gulf of America,” the seven or eight wars he claims to have ended, the “millions and millions of lives” he has saved, nuclear weapons (one of the two “n-words” he informed the military leaders you can’t say), his demanding “beautiful paper, the gorgeous paper” with “the real gold writing” when he signs things (“I love my signature. I really do. Everyone loves my signature,” he said), finding $31 billion on “the tariff shelf,” making Canada the 51st state, his dislike of the “aesthetics” of certain Navy ships, wild claims about his 2024 electoral victory, the press, America First, immigrants from prisons and mental institutions, and Venezuelans not daring to go out in boats for fear the U.S. will “blow [them] out of existence.”
The speech was highly partisan, attacking former president Joe Biden by name eleven times, calling him “the auto pen” and claiming his administration was really run by “radical left lunatics.” “We were not respected with Biden,” Trump said.
“They looked at him falling downstairs every day. Every day, the guy is falling downstairs. He said, It’s not our President. We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for, like, a month, stairs, like these stairs, I’m very—I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall, because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that. You walk nice and easy. You’re not having—you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down, but don’t—don’t pop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a President, but he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop. He’d go down the stairs. Wouldn’t hold on. I said, It’s great. I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually, bad things are going to happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. This country was going to hell.”
Like Hegseth’s, Trump’s speech seemed to have been designed to announce a new mission for the military. He claimed the U.S. has domestic enemies, “insurrectionists” “paid by the radical left,” and said that cities “that are run by the radical-left Democrats…they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within…. And I told Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.” Trump told the audience that “our inner cities” are “a big part of war now.”
A former defense official told Jack Detsch and Leo Shane III of Politico the meeting was “a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing. It’s also an inexcusable strategic risk to concentrate so many leaders in the operational chain of command in the same publicly known time and place, to convey an inane message of little merit.”
Either one of those speeches, in full view of the American public and foreign governments, would be enough to torpedo an administration before Trump. But the day was not over.
by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American | Read more:
[ed. The quotes say it all. See also: The Silence of the Generals; Doing Vlad's Business; and Collateral Damage: All from the same link:]
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This Washington Post investigation into some of the human costs of the murder of USAID will take your breath away:Fever ravaged the body of 5-year-old Suza Kenyaba as she sweated and shivered on a thin mattress in a two-room clinic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pigtailed girl who liked pretty dresses was battling malaria and desperately needed medication that could save her life.Pure cruelty. Pure waste. We’ve repeatedly written this year about the staggering damage done by DOGE’s clownishly arrogant annihilation of USAID: children starving to death in war zones while already-purchased food aid rotted on shelves because the people in charge of distributing it had been fired; babies dying of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa because Elon Musk’s crack team of geniuses decided treating them for pennies a day was too much bother—or, what might be worse, just callously turned off their spigot of money without bothering to figure out what it was for. The toll is unimaginable. We owe it to the dead to remember. We owe it to their loved ones to fix it.
That medication, already purchased by a U.S.-taxpayer-funded program, was tantalizingly close—a little more than seven miles away. But it hadn’t reached the clinic where Suza was being treated because President Donald Trump’s suspension of foreign aid had thrown supply chains into chaos.
The injections Suza needed had traveled thousands of miles to the Central African nation, USAID and other records show, only to be stranded in a regional distribution warehouse in the same city where she was gasping for air.
Less than a week after her symptoms began, Suza was dead. Congolese government data shows that in Suza’s province, deaths caused by malaria nearly tripled in the first half of this year.