The Weekly Sift

Lack of response leaves a lot of room for projection.

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Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosted an unusual meeting: America’s top generals and admirals, 800 or so of them, were called to Quantico from around the world to listen to Hegseth in person. And once the meeting was on the calendar, President Trump decided he should speak too.

DoD rules prohibit uniformed members of the military from participating in political events. Directive 1344.10 allows attendance at a political rally

provided the member is not in uniform and does not otherwise act in a manner that could reasonably give rise to the inference or appearance of official sponsorship, approval, or endorsement.

So for generals and admirals to show up in uniform at Hegseth’s meeting at all, they couldn’t view it as “partisan political activity”. In particular, it was not a Trump rally. They were attending to receive instructions from their civilian leadership, so that they could interpret that top-level guidance to their subordinates.

Typically, when you are receiving instructions from those above you in the chain of command, you don’t cheer or boo or heckle or stomp your feet. You listen, take notes, and think about what this means for your particular command. And if something you hear sounds political, you avoid “the inference or appearance of … endorsement”.

So that’s what the generals did.

One thing we know about Donald Trump is that he does not compartmentalize. For most of us, compartmentalization is such an integral part of being an adult that it’s hard to imagine someone going through life without it. Sometimes you speak as friend, as a colleague, as a parent, as a polite stranger, or in some other role. Depending on what role you are in, you may seem like a completely different person. You would no more confuse those roles than you would show up at work in your pajamas or wear a tuxedo to the beach.

But Donald Trump is, at every moment, Donald Trump acting in the interests of Donald Trump. The particular role the situation seems to call for makes no difference. So at the Quantico meeting he was not playing the role of President of the United States, or Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, or any other role. He was Donald Trump being Donald Trump.

Trump loves crowds, loves to rouse them, and loves to hear them cheer. He is used to the crowds that show up at his political rallies, so that’s how he spoke to the generals. He rambled, baited his enemies, threw red meat to his fans, and voiced weird sentiments that any other president would have restrained himself from saying out loud.

The generals took it all in without response. This left a lot of room for interpretation.

In his blog, West Point History Professor, Terrence Goggin claimed to have seen “silent fury“. But Jack Hopkins, interpreting lack of protest as complicity, saw “silent surrender“. Retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling saw leaders worrying about what to tell their troops. The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols saw men grasping, perhaps for the first time, that the Commander in Chief is not OK. Lev Parnas, a repentant Rudy Giuliani associate who may or may not be for real, attributed to his “sources” that the generals’ faces were being scanned by AI to determine who is and isn’t loyal to the Trump regime.

That’s a lot to sort out. But I present that range of reactions to emphasize that you should take everybody’s interpretation (including mine) with a grain of salt. Some reporters may have spoken to a few of the generals themselves — none of whom talk to me — but I doubt that anybody has interviewed a representative sample of them. So we’re all just applying what we think we know about the military mindset and speculating from there.

The speculation began before the meeting started. From the first announcement, it was an odd event. Gathering all our military leaders together in one room is a huge security risk; one well-placed bomb and the greatest military force in the world would be led by J. D. Vance and a bunch of colonels. It was also expensive. The generals came from all over the world, and many probably traveled with their staffs. It was also expensive in another sense: Probably these guys all had things they were supposed to be doing, and many of those things probably went undone for a few days.

So the before-the-fact speculation revolved around one question: What could Hegseth and Trump have in mind that would be worth all this? Retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges made an alarming guess:

July 1935 German generals were called to a surprise assembly in Berlin and informed that their previous oath to the Weimar 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.

Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad. Hegseth’s speech is here and Trump’s is here. Neither was worth flying around the world to hear in person, but they weren’t sign-or-else demands for a loyalty pledge. So we’re still just guessing about what the meeting was supposed to accomplish.

And as so often happens in the Trump administration, at times the absurdity overwhelmed the content. One way to watch the event is to view Hegseth as the comedian who warms up the crowd before the song-and-dance act comes on. The reaction that the generals might have had the hardest time suppressing was laughing out loud.

I mean, think about it: Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in America’s history, declared that “promotions across the joint force will be based on one thing: merit; colorblind, gender-neutral, merit based”. There is no definition of merit under which Hegseth becomes Secretary of Defense. No one with Hegseth’s resume could rise this high without being a White man, but we’re supposed to believe that everything in the Trump administration is colorblind and gender-neutral.

The Trump military, Hegseth said, would promote top performers and “get rid of poor performers more quickly”. But of course, Hegseth himself is a poor performer. He endangered the security of a combat mission by discussing its details over an unclassified nonmilitary channel with uncleared civilians present, a blunder that would have gotten him fired in any previous administration. But he suffered no consequences, because standards are only for the lower ranks, not Trump’s inner circle.

The gist of Hegseth’s speech called for the military to better match the John-Wayne-movie image of the military Trump sees in his mind: more manly, more fit, clean-shaven. (Talk to Generals Grant and Lee about the military importance of shaving.) If servicemen don’t want to shave their beards, “it’s time for a new position or a new profession”. But the past administration was wrong “to kick out Americans who refused an emergency vaccine” — as if a beard were a bigger threat to combat readiness than being unvaccinated during a pandemic.

And then, just before yielding the stage to the grossly obese Trump, he derided “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon”.

Hilarious.

Of course, this image of manliness is going to have real consequences for military people who are transgender or female or perhaps even non-White or non-Christian. Each of the leaders in the audience has a decision to make: Are they going to stay loyal to their people and try to shield them from those consequences, or will they offer them up as sacrifices to the new regime?

Now we get to Trump. It’s hard to know what to make of Trump’s speech, because he blathered for 70 minutes. Much of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness consists of random thoughts that have no consequences. For example, he mused about bringing back battleships, which were already mostly obsolete when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships, by the way. You know, we have — Secretary of the Navy came to me — because I look at the Iowa out in California and I look at different ships in the old pictures. I used to watch Victory at Sea. I love Victory at Sea. Look at these admirals. It’s got to be your all time — in black and white. And I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers alongside of them and man, nothing was going to stop. There were 20 deep and they were in a straight line and there was nothing going to stop them. And we actually talk about, you know, those ships. Some people would say, no, that’s old technology. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s old technology when you look at those guns, but it’s something we’re actually considering, the concept of battleship, nice six-inch size, solid steel, not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away. Now those ships, they don’t make them that way anymore. But you look at it, and — your secretary likes it and I’m sort of open to it. And bullets are a lot less expensive than missiles, a lot of — a lot of reasons. I should take a vote, but I’m afraid to take that vote because I may get voted out on that one. But I tell you, it’s something we’re seriously considering. They were powers. They were big powers. They were just about as mean and scary as you could be, and so we’re looking at that.

That’s the kind of thing you nod your head to and then say, “Sure, Grandpa. Can I get you a glass of water? Do you need to go to the bathroom?”

Other parts of the speech seem more serious, and maybe they were, but who can say? Much has been made of Trump saying that “America is under invasion from within”, which doesn’t actually make any sense. He blathered about removing “1700 career criminals” from Washington DC, which seems to be all the people arrested for immigration offenses during his military crackdown, many of whom either had no non-immigration criminal record or minor offenses like traffic violations.

It’s hard to know what to think about this. During the campaign, he painted a picture of major cities afflicted by an “immigrant crime wave” that no one else could find in the statistics. (Cities with lots of immigrants had no worse crime that cities with few.) Maybe no one has told him that this was nonsense, so he honestly imagines that his military sweeps are achieving long-term results. (Violent crime indeed was cut in half during his occupation of DC. But was the cause really “1700 career criminals” who are now off the streets permanently? Or did the native-born muggers and carjackers just stay home during the occupation, and will return as soon as the troops go away?)

Reading the transcript, again and again I found myself wondering: Does he really believe all this? Maybe he’s surrounded by people who feed his delusions so that he can live in a pleasant fantasy world where his inspired leadership has made America “the hottest country anywhere in the world”, and he’s stopping wars right and left.

So I wonder: Is that what the generals heard?

Military people, in my experience, are practical fact-based people. They are surrounded by bullshitters (like contractors who make extreme promises about the latest whiz-bang they’re building), and they can be bullshitters themselves sometimes, so they develop a good ear for claims that can’t be verified.

If that’s an accurate picture, then they were well aware that Trump was describing a fantasy world. And they wondered, as I did, whether or not he believed in it. If they concluded that he did, then I imagine that they are very afraid right now. Not just their careers, but possibly their lives and the lives of their troops as well, depend on surviving under the Mad King for another three years.