Why was Trump’s speech in American military brass was such a disaster | Sidney Blumenthal
NO Dictator or potential dictator on the first day has ever gathered before him in a room the whole body of upper officer of his armed forces in order to store them as failures and humiliated for their personal appearance and not very involved, while degrading entire classes serving in the army, the navy and the degraded and unworthy air forces. No dictator has never pleaded for generals and admirals to applaud his remarks, followed by a deafening silence.
Donald Trump is used to entering the din of a jazzy crowd with the YMCA. “I have never entered a room so silent before,” said Trump when he addressed the country’s highest military leaders to the Navy Base Quantico on Tuesday. “Don’t laugh. I don’t know if you have the right to do that.” He was trying to force a little titing, an old lounge gag to wake up a dead audience. “What do you know?” Have a good time. ” The actor who felt his routine bombed before he even started to try to relax the play. Trump instinctively replaced the ungrateful gestures with threats. “If you don’t like what I say, you can leave the room. Of course, there is your rank, there is your future.”
Trump’s syllogism has perfectly encapsulated its victim psychology and the policy of remuneration. If you do not fold your knee towards him, he is personally injured. Your failure to worship it should be punished. Your light of His Majesty ordered you to ruin.
Trump cannot understand that the silence of the commanders during his unprecedented address has demonstrated their greatest service. Their discipline has shown loyalty to defend their oath to the Constitution. By their calm, they presented themselves as models for the rest of the body of officers and troops. They are not faithful to Trump or to any cult of personality, but to his constitutional role. They were used as a backdrop for a campaign gathering, but they were resistant to serve as partisan players.
Trump’s inability to understand their stolidity in the face of his provocations showed his misunderstanding not only of the military but of the presidency under the law. When he offended their silence in Stoney, his reprimand revealed that he saw them simply as his pawns. They were not different from his personal lawyers whom he had installed at the Ministry of Justice to make his auctions, including the abolition of Epstein files.
Trump had come on an urgent mission for them to achieve. He was there to tell the military leaders that they had to be his indisputable agents for the greatest reversal of the military strategy since the “war against terrorism” – a new war to be waged against his political adversaries perceived at home in violation of the posse comitatus act of 1878, which prohibits the national deployment of the American army as a police force.
All the superior generals around the world had been gathered for the unprecedented event at the base of the Marine Body Quantico on the order of the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. They had no idea of the important opportunity they were summoned. They did not dare to speculate that Hegseth led them to be his captive audience for his auto-referential vanity Ted Talk attempt to rehabilitate his image and assert his authority. It would have seemed too stupid for words.
But the commanders could have obtained more than an index that they were gathered for the last episode of IT cannot occur here, by reading the executive order of Trump of September 22, designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, an “organization” which does not exist. This was followed by a presidential memorandum of national security n ° 7 on September 25, citing the murder of Charlie Kirk and a series of disparate events as pretexts: “This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge in an organic way.
According to the NSPM-7, a new “national strategy” would be implemented against an ideology of “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christiania; support for the reversal of the American government; Extremism on migration, race and sex; and hostility towards those who have traditional American opinions on family, religion and morality. ” Jimmy Kimmel was not mentioned.
These vapors were not a description of an ideology as much as a meli-Mélo de Maga Shibboleths. If there was an ideology expressed, it was a lower fascism based on a repressive impulse which mentioned a versatile enemy called “antifa”. Any feeling of irony, of course, was completely missing. In fact, January 6 was the last attempt to overthrow the US government, encouraged by Donald Trump. Trump’s management as a paragon of “traditional American views of the family, religion and morality” defies satire and only underlines the recurring demand for the release of Epstein files.
The theatrical presentation in Quantico started with HegSeth Darting from front and back on the stage. He was a motivating speaker as a drilling sergeant with a book in Hawk – and an act of warm -up for the headliner. To observe it was like seeing the negative of a photograph. The darkest parts were reflections of his own grievances against criticism and censorship caused by his past behavior.
The former adult of the National Guard said he was “considered an extremist”; It was reported as a “threat of initiates” possible by the colleagues officers. (Hegseth denied that he is an extremist). Despite many accounts of his alcoholism, he told Megyn Kelly in an interview: “I never had a problem of alcohol consumption”, but then would have promised a senator that he “would not touch alcohol while I have this position”. Hegseth was accused of sexual assault in 2017 and settled a trial brought by the woman who accused her. (The conditions of settlement were confidential. Hegseth said that allegations were false).
As a host of Fox News, Hegseth had been an ardent defender of forgiveness or to grant him of leniency to the accused or recognized soldiers guilty of war crimes. Hegseth described them as “warriors” rather than “war criminals”. “If he committed a premeditated murder, then I did too … We all put in prison,” he said about one of them. Hegseth expressed support to members of his own unit in Iraq killing three unarmed prisoners who were invited to run and then fired. Once Hegseth has been confirmed, he served the defender general of the first -rank judge. He pushes a plan to send many others to work in the immigration courts.
Hegseth said the soldiers should not “fight with stupid commitment rules”, his long -standing complaint against rules designed to protect civilians and enforce military law against war crimes.
Now, in his speech, Hegseth said he was distant “debris”. He encouraged the regulations of relaxation aimed at preventing prohibited violence within the armed forces. He announced the “revision” of the complaint of the Inspector General and the Denunciators, which would undermine legal protections and protect violent or reckless delinquents of responsibility. He would impose, he said, discriminatory measures of “non-sexist” or “masculine” physical norms for combat roles, declaring: “If that means that no woman qualifies for certain combat jobs, as much as that.” (In 2023, more than 17% of the military force consisted of women, with thousands of combat roles.)
Hegseth jumped in front of the commanders, barking obscenities – “fafo”, or fucks and discover. “More months of identity, dei offices, guys in dresses. No more cult of climate change. More division, distraction or gender delusions. More debris. As I have already said and I repeat, we have finished with this shit.”
The generals were without expression to his vulgarity which could be charged under the code of uniform military justice as a violation of indecent language which “neglects the damage of a good order and a good discipline”.
According to Pete, it was the flaccid generals who had to work like Pete. “It is quite unacceptable to see big generals and admirals in the corridors of the Pentagon and leaders in the country and the world. It is a bad look,” he said. “More Beardos.” It means you, Gen Grant.
Hegseth, finally, apparently obtained his revenge for having been labeled as a “threat of initiates”. He shouted: “More side monitoring careers, no more walking on shells.” He accused the brass of the soldiers by assessing the mental stability of officers: “We have eliminated so -called toxic leaders under the cover of double -blind psychology assessments, promoting in place of optional compliance, instead and more than.” Then he plugged his book: “You might say that we finish war against warriors. I heard that someone wrote a book on this subject.” The title of his book was The War On Warriors.
Not once, Hegseth only mentioned “Russia” or “Ukraine”. He has not made the slightest reference to the huge missile attacks in Russia bombing Ukraine, Russia’s drones on Romania, Estonia and Denmark, tensions on the United States that hesitate in the Western Alliance, or pronounce everything that could be interpreted as a strategic thought.
After his threatening speech, Hegseth gave way to Donald Trump. Trump showed his usual contempt for the military by bait them with a range of partisan beards to which they remained rigidly motionless. He slipped into a whirlwind of self -jewel followed by anxiety. There were songs on the “Gulf of America”, calling Joe “The Autopen” and looking at the 1950s television victory at sea, before Trump cared to fall on the stairs. “Every day, the guy falls downstairs,” said Trump about Biden. “We cannot have it. I am very prudent. You know, when I walk down, like, I am on the stairs, like these stairs, I am very – I walk very slowly.” He couldn’t contain his desire for Barack Obama. “So one thing with Obama, I had no respect for him as president, but he drew up these stairs. I have never seen him. Da-Da, Da-Da, Da-Da, Bop, Bop, Bop. He would go on the stairs. I would not hold up. I said, it’s great. I don’t want to do it.”
In the midst of his flow of conscience, he abandoned his new mission for the military against “the enemy of the interior”, with the big American cities as “training grounds … Those who are led by radical democrats … and this will be a major part for some of the people in this room. It is a war too. It is an interior war. ” Silence.
The next day, on October 1, in Memphis, Hegseth appeared as a member of a detachment with the Attorney General Pam Bondi and the deputy chief of staff of the White House, Stephen Miller, to speak before a rally of glacial agents and federal marshals in anticipation of the arrival of a contingent of troops of the National Guard. Miller delivered his imitation of Patton. “The gangbangers with which you treat – Do they think they are ruthless?” They have no idea how ruthless we are. Do they think they are difficult? They have no idea how difficult we are. Do they think they are hardcore? We are so much more hardcore than they are. ” Miller, not a simple general, gave order. “You are unleashed.”
You might say that Stephen Miller embodied the new “warrior ethics”. No beard. Shaved head too. And without law.
