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What do Trump and Hegseth’s inflammatory speeches to military generals signal? | Moira Donegan

Shortly after Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s defense secretary, summoned all the military’s generals to Quantico, Virginia, from their positions around the world in an unusual demand for an in-person assembly, Ben Hodges, a retired general, took to social media to evoke a bit of history. “July 1935,” Hodges said. “German generals were called to a surprise assembly in Berlin and informed that their previous oath to the Weiman constitution was void and that they would be required to swear a personal oath to the Führer. Most generals took the new oath to keep their positions.” Hegseth’s account replied to Hodges post: “Cool story, General”.

Yet when the meeting finally happened on Tuesday morning, the army generals and navy admirals were treated to a 45-minute speech by Hegseth, followed by a rambling, hour-long address by Trump, which confirmed at least some of what Hodges seemed to fear. The defense secretary emphasized the army’s appearance, decrying “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon”, and signaled his intent to reshape the military’s culture so as to purge “wokeness” and evoke a more masculine image. “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses,” he said. “No more division, distraction and gender delusions. No more debris. As I’ve said before, and will say again: We are done. With that. Shit.” The military, Hegseth suggested, would become an advertisement for the Trump regime’s preferred cultural style, and this transformation will evidently involve many changes to what the armed forces look like when they are photographed.

To this end, Hegseth announced that he would also be eliminating or drastically curtailing the equal opportunity, whistleblower, inspector general and complaint procedures that allow military personnel to report harassment and misconduct. The changes seemed designed to particularly roll back efforts undertaken over the course of the 2010s to reduce sexual assault in the military and end its impunity.

“No more frivolous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more smearing reputations,” Hegseth, who settled a lawsuit brought by a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2020, said. (The settlement terms are confidential. Hegseth has said the allegations were false). “No more walking on eggshells.” One former official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told CNN: “I think what this is, is people are sick and tired of not being able to make inappropriate or sexually explicit jokes at the staff meetings.” Hegseth, it seems, is committed to restoring this treasured freedom.

Hegseth similarly declared that he would be changing procedures that have allowed the military to be more diverse – such as eliminating special permissions for soldiers to grow beards, frequently used by Black soldiers, and raising physical fitness standards for specialized, often high-pay and high-status combat roles to what Hegseth seemed to believe is a threshold only men will meet. Hegseth, who has opposed women serving in combat roles, said that candidates for such jobs will be held to the “highest male standard”, which he also said was “gender neutral”. “If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” Hegseth said. “That is not the intent,” he added, questionably. “But it could be the result.”

As for the officers themselves, a group which included several Black men and women of various races, Hegseth seemed to offer what he evidently thought was a flattering assessment of their masculine violence and virility. “You kill people and break things for a living,” Hegseth said to the assembled generals. “You are not politically correct and do not necessarily belong always in polite society.” The speech was repetitive and heavy on moments of self-conscious macho posturing. “To our enemies,” Hegseth said at one point “FAFO” – or, fuck around and find out. The defense secretary paused, seeming to wait for applause, but nobody clapped.

Trump, meanwhile, also signaled that he seeks to transform the military into a partisan tool of his regime, repeatedly telling the assembled leaders that they would be tasked with missions targeting Americans. “America is under invasion from within,” the president said. “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform you can take them out. It’s war from within.” Trump, who just days ago deployed 200 national guard troops to Portland, Oregon, with orders to use “full force, if necessary” offered that he had instructed Hegseth to use American cities as “training grounds”. At other times, Trump meandered, as he often does, into off-script comments that were difficult to parse. “But they’re not going to stand in our way, ever again,” Trump said. “You’re not going to see four years like we had with Biden and that group of incompetent people that ran that should have never been there. Because we have the United States military, the best, the boldest, the bravest, that the world has ever seen, that the world has ever known.”

Trump, like Hegseth, sometimes paused, seeming to expect the generals to clap or laugh. But the laughs were not forthcoming; the military audience was largely silent.

There is something pathetic about Hegseth and Trump, who have schemed and failed their way into positions of power and prestige that are comically outsized to their character. It is telling that Hegseth is so preoccupied with making the military into a photogenic spectacle of masculine strength – an anxious fixation on surface and spectacle that only highlights the US’s declining influence abroad.

It is telling, too, that Trump can barely string sentences together, appearing distracted, sleepy, and barely coherent as he tells the armed forces to train their guns on his own people. There is no pretext that can sustain the delusion that these are serious people, or that their instructions to the military come from any motive other than their own desire for narcissistic gratification.

They do not want to be strong to pursue the nation’s interests; they do not want to be strong to pursue any principles; they certainly do not want to be strong so that they can ensure the safety of the innocent. They want to be strong so that they can look big and important on TV. And for that, they flew the generals in from around the world, at tremendous taxpayer expense, to force them to sit as a captive audience for a pair of speeches that sounded like poor imitations of an action movie monologue.

But as Hodges suggested, the ostentatious idiocy of these men does not mean that the generals and admirals assembled will not follow their orders. These military leaders have received the signal that their troops are to become whiter and more male; they have received the instruction that their next missions will involve suppressing domestic dissent. They have a choice between following their orders and keeping their jobs, or following an abstract set of principles, and leaving them. Most of them will choose the former.

The US military, for all its wreckage and violence it imposes abroad and for all the cruelty and exploitation of the poor that it inflicts at home, has one consistent virtue: it has always been under quite firm civilian control. Most of the time, that’s a good thing.