Trump put on a disturbing show for America’s generals and admirals.
SEPTEMBER 30, 2025 An article in the Atlantic Daily (via Apple News).
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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s convocation of hundreds of generals and
admirals today turned out to be, in the main, a nothingburger. Hegseth strutted and
paced and lectured and hectored, warning the officers that he was tired of seeing fat
people in the halls of the Pentagon and promising to take the men who have medical
or religious exemptions from shaving—read: mostly Black men—and kick them out of
the military. He assured them that the “woke” Department of Defense was now a
robust and manly Department of War, and that they would no longer have to worry
about people “smearing” them as “toxic” leaders. (Hegseth went on a tirade about the
word toxic itself, noting that if a commitment to high standards made him “toxic,” then
“so be it.”)
All in all, an utterly embarrassing address. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The
assembled military leaders likely already knew that Hegseth is unqualified for his job,
and they could mostly tune out the sloganeering that Hegseth, a former TV host, was
probably aiming more at Fox News and the White House than at the military itself.
What they could not ignore, however, was the spectacle that President Donald Trump
put on when he spoke after Hegseth.
The president talked at length, and his comments should have confirmed to even the
most sympathetic observer that he is, as the kids say, not okay. Several of Hegseth’s
people said in advance of the senior-officer conclave that its goal was to energize
America’s top military leaders and get them to focus on Hegseth’s vision for a new
Department of War. But the generals and admirals should be forgiven if they walked
out of the auditorium and wondered: What on earth is wrong with the commander in
chief?
Trump seemed quieter and more confused than usual; he is not accustomed to
audiences who do not clap and react to obvious applause lines. “I’ve never walked
into a room so silent before,” he said at the outset. (Hegseth had the same awkward
problem earlier, waiting for laughs and applause that never came.) The president
announced his participation only days ago, and he certainly seemed unprepared.
Trump started rambling right out of the gate. But first, the president channeled his
inner Jeb Bush, asking the officers to clap—but, you know, only if they felt like it.
Laughs rippled through the room.
Trump then wandered around, lost in the halls of
history. He talked about how the Department of War was renamed in the 1950s. (It
was in the late 1940s.) At one point, he mentioned that the Atomic Energy
Commission had confirmed that his strike on Iran had destroyed Tehran’s nuclear
program. (Iran still has a nuclear program, and the AEC hasn’t existed since the mid
’70s.) He whined about the “Gulf of America” and how he beat the Associated Press in
court on the issue. (The case is still ongoing.) The Israeli-Palestinian conflict? “I said”—
he did not identify to whom—“‘How long have you been fighting?’ ‘Three thousand
years, sir.’ That’s a long time. But we got it, I think, settled.”
He added later: “War is very strange.” Indeed.
And so it went, as Trump recycled old rally speeches, full of his usual grievances, lies,
and misrepresentations; his obsessions with former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack
Obama; and his sour disappointment in the Nobel Prize committee. (“They’ll give it to
some guy that didn’t do a damn thing,” he said.) He congratulated himself on tariffs,
noting that the money could buy a lot of battleships, “to use an old term.” And come
to think of it, he said, maybe America should build battleships again, from steel, not
that papier-mâché and aluminum stuff the Navy is apparently using now: “Aluminum
that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about
two miles away.”
Ohhhkayyyy.
Even if these officers had never attended a MAGA event or even seen one, they were
now in the middle of a typical, unhinged Trump diatribe. The president had a speech
waiting for him on the teleprompter, and now and then Trump would hunch his
shoulders and apparently pick off a stray word or phrase from it, like a distracted
hunter firing random buckshot from a duck blind. But Trump has always had difficulty
wrestling Stephen Miller’s labored neoclassical references and clunky, faux
Churchillisms off a screen and into his mouth. Mostly, the president decided to just riff
on his greatest hits to the stone-faced assembly.
As comical as many of Trump’s comments were, the president’s nakedly partisan
appeal to U.S. military officers was a violation of every standard of American civil
military relations, and exactly what George Washington feared could happen with an
unscrupulous commander in chief. The most ominous part of his speech came when
he told the military officers that they would be part of the solution to domestic threats,
fighting the “enemy from within.” He added, almost as a kind of trollish afterthought,
that he’d told 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.”
This farrago of fantasy, menace, and autocratic peacocking is the kind of thing that
the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan evocatively called “boob bait for the
Bubbas” and that George Orwell might have called “prolefeed.” It’s one thing to serve
it up to an adoring MAGA crowd: They know that most of it is nonsense and only
some of it is real. They find it entertaining, and they can take or leave as much of
Trump’s rhetorical junk-food buffet as they would like. It is another thing entirely to
aim this kind of sludge at military officers, who are trained and acculturated to treat
every word from the president with respect, and to regard his thoughts as policy.
But American officers have never had to contend with a president like Trump. Plenty
of presidents behaved badly and suffered mental and emotional setbacks: John F.
Kennedy cavorted with secretaries in the White House pool, Lyndon Johnson
unleashed foul-mouthed tirades on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Nixon fell into
depression and paranoia, Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden wrestled with the indignities
of age. But the officer corps knew that presidents were basically normal men
surrounded by other normal men and women, and that the American constitutional
system would insulate the military from any mad orders that might emerge from the
Oval Office.
Likewise, in Trump’s first term, the president was surrounded by people who ensured
that some of his nuttiest—and most dangerous—ideas were derailed before they could
reach the military. Today, senior U.S. officers have to wonder who will shield them
from the impulses of the person they just saw onstage. What are officers to make of
Trump’s accusation that other nations, only a year ago, supposedly called America “a
dead country”? (After all, these men and women were leading troops last year.) How
are they supposed to react when Trump slips the surly bonds of truth, insults their
former commanders in chief, and talks about his close relationship with the Kremlin?
In 1973, an Air Force nuclear-missile officer named Harold Hering asked a simple
question during a training session: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch
my missiles came from a sane president?” The question cost him his career. Military
members are trained to execute orders, not question them. But today, both the man
who can order the use of nuclear arms and the man who would likely verify such an
order gave disgraceful and unnerving performances in Quantico. How many officers
left the room asking themselves Major Hering’s question?
Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a contributor to the Atlantic Daily
newsletter.