Last Thursday, September 25, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suddenly announced he was calling about 800 of the nation’s top military generals and admirals, along with their top enlisted advisors, to meet at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia, today. Such a meeting was unprecedented, and its suddenness meant military leaders across the world had to drop everything to run to Washington, D.C., at enormous financial cost for the country. Under those extraordinary circumstances, speculation about what Hegseth intended to say or do at the meeting has been widespread.
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.
The Senate adjourned today without agreeing to the continuing resolution the House passed to fund the government until November 21. The Republicans refused to include the Democrats in any of their negotiations, and the Democrats, whose votes the Senate needed to pass the measure, said they would not agree to a continuing resolution unless it included a fix to extend the premium tax credits that support healthcare insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. While Republicans extended the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, they let the premium tax credits run out at the end of this year. Without that support, healthcare insurance premiums will skyrocket.
“We are shutting down,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said tonight, “because Donald Trump thinks he’s a king. This was totally avoidable, but Donald Trump told Republicans, ‘Don’t negotiate with Democrats.’… We didn’t shut down when Joe Biden was president. Why? Because Democrats, when they were in the majority, took their responsibility to govern seriously, reached out across the aisle, and built bipartisan funding agreements with the Republicans…. We aren’t asking for the moon. We are simply saying, we don’t want health insurance premiums to go up by 75% on the American public. That’s what Republicans have engineered as a means to pay for their giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. We aren’t asking for some big new healthcare program. We’re simply saying, if we’re gonna vote for a budget, we want that budget to not increase premiums on families across this country by 75%, bankrupting American families. You know what else we want? We want this president to start acting… lawfully.”
House Democrats have been running a 24-hour live stream in which they and guests are talking about the shutdown and the importance of protecting health care.
Republicans seem aware that shutting down the government at the same time many Americans see their healthcare premiums jump dramatically will not be popular. Although the Hatch Act prohibits the use of government resources for partisan gain, the White House ignored the act to blame Democrats for the shutdown. This afternoon, Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo reported that federal employees at the Social Security Administration, Small Business Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Commerce—and as well as other agencies—received an email blaming Democrats for the looming shutdown. It said Trump “opposes a government shutdown,” but Democrats were “blocking this Continuing Resolution in the U.S. Senate due to unrelated policy demands.”
The website for the Department of Housing and Urban Development showed a banner reading: “The Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish lists of demands. The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people.” Melody Schreiber of The Guardian reported that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs said in a statement that “Radical liberals in Congress” were attempting to shut down the government “to achieve their crazy fantasy of open borders, ‘transgender’ for everybody and men competing in women’s sports.”
This evening, Trump posted on social media three pictures of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) in the Oval Office with bright red caps placed on the Resolute Desk in front of them bearing the words “Trump 2028.”
But Trump’s ability to project dominance is weakening, and today’s performance didn’t help.
In Boston today, Judge William G. Young answered an anonymous correspondent who trolled the judge on June 19 by writing a postcard that said: “TRUMP HAS PARDONS AND TANKS…. WHAT DO YOU HAVE?” Young reproduced the writing at the top of his decision finding that Trump’s attempted deportations of legal residents for their pro-Palestinian speech violated the First Amendment. Then the judge answered: “Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution.”
Judge Young explained how Trump’s officers are using fear—through masked ICE agents, for example—“to terrorize Americans” so they stop resisting the president’s attempts to silence opposition. But, the judge went on, “The United States is a great nation, not because any of us say so. It is great because we still practice our frontier tradition of selflessness for the good of us all. Strangers go out of their way to help strangers when they see a need. In times of fire, flood, and national disaster, everyone pitches in to help people we’ve never met and first responders selflessly risk their lives for others. Hundreds of firefighters rushed into the Twin Towers on 9/11 without hesitation desperate to find and save survivors. That’s who we are. And on distant battlefields our military ‘fought and died for the men [they] marched among.’ Each day, I recognize (to paraphrase Lincoln again) that the brave men and women, living and dead, who have struggled in our Nation’s service have hallowed our Constitutional freedom far above my (or anyone’s) poor power to add or detract. The only Constitutional rights upon which we can depend are those we extend to the weakest and most reviled among us.”
The judge concluded: “I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.
“Is he correct?”
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/09/30/hegseth-whistleblower-watchdog-pentagon/
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5528556-hegseth-warrior-ethos-physical-fitness/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/30/hegseth-meeting-pushback-00588181
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/live-blog/shutdown-senate-health-care-trump?entry=1528694
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/30/federal-agencies-democrats-shutdown
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/us/politics/donald-trump-draft-record.html
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.282460/gov.uscourts.mad.282460.261.0.pdf
Bluesky:
chrismurphyct.bsky.social/post/3m244lgrjr22r
mollyjongfast.bsky.social/post/3m232upd5qk2t
This post has been syndicated from Letters from an American, where it was published under this address.