This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
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.
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. Of course, there goes your rank; there goes your future.
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?
