Yesterday Was Not as Bad as You Thought
It was much worse. Don't sanewash this
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” Milley said. “We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.” — General Mark Milley1
The government is shut down, but the noise and the crazy will be as loud as ever. Hey, I don’t make the rules here.
Welcome to October, 2025.
The War On America
It’s notable that the generals sat in stony silence as their leaders strutted, ranted, and declared war on their fellow Americans.
There was no cheering, no raucous applause, no foot-stomping Hooyahs at yesterday’s command performance. It was a remarkable scene. “A Novice Defense Secretary Lectures the Brass on What It Takes to Win”:
The military officers assembled in the room listened silently. It is likely, though, that at least some of them were seething at his suggestion that their collective failure to enforce basic standards had caused, or even contributed to, the military’s failings in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I keep trying to imagine what was going on inside the minds of those generals as they listened to this endless stream of big-dick-cosplaying from the Secretary of Defense and President of the United States.
I had to fly 8000 miles for this shit?
I might have to go to war with these lunatic chodes? FFS.
What I going to tell my troops?
Don’t roll eyes.
These guys are actually rooting for war crimes, and they want me to invade American cities. FFS.
Don’t roll eyes.
What’s my pension status?
And finally:
WTAF? Is this almost over? Can I go now?
“Imagine, writes Matt Labash, “working for decades to become a general officer, only to have to get lectured by a preening idiot like Pete Hegseth. Instead of sticking to what he does best — like matching his zany socks to his zany pocket square, or knocking up his mistresses — Pete insults you by making you fly halfway around the world to listen to his cosplay TEDx talk on ‘wokeness’ and the ‘warrior ethos.’
“We are an unserious country run by unserious people.” And that was on full display in Quantico.
By now, of course, we ought to be used to this fetid mélange of absurdity and menace; embarrassment and threat. As he spoke to the assembled brass yesterday, Pete Hegseth was a blustering frat-boy boor whose unfitness was on stark display. Trump, of course, was worse.
There was no mention of character, honor, or following the law. Just Secretary Kegstand lecturing the assembled generals and admirals on lethality, fatness, haircuts, biceps, and wokeness. (Nick Catoggio aptly calls it “Patton for Dummies”.) Of course, all of this could’ve been done in an email, a Zoom call, or even a YouTube video. But the humiliation was the point.
And then there was the president himself.
We’ve run out of synonyms for incoherent, rambling, batshit crazy, deranged, and demented. So, suffice it to say that a lot of what Trump said was simply drooling piffle as if his prefrontal cortex was turning into rancid guacamole. You can read about this here: 6 Most Bonkers Things Trump Told Top Military Brass (actually “6” only scratches the surface.)
It was not an oversight that there was no discussion of foreign policy, or of the threat posed by Russia or China, because the theme of the day was the deployment of the military against the enemy within. Which, unambiguously, means turning the world’s most lethal military against Americans.
Here’s a sample of what the Commander-in-Chief told his generals:
Trump suggested the generals and admirals would be crucial to his fight against the “enemy from within” and could use the homeland as a “training ground.”
“We’re under invasion from within,” Trump said. “No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”
He added: “In our inner cities – which we’re going to be talking about because it’s a big part of war now. It’s a big part of war.”
At another point: “I told Pete, 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.”
“San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They’re very unsafe places. And we’re gonna straighten them out one-by-one. It this is gonna be a major part for some of the people in this room. It’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.”
Over the last few years, we’ve gone so deeply down this path, that the brazen declaration of war on American cities in the presence of the nation’s top generals, lacked the shock effect it should’ve had.
But the low-energy bluster on display yesterday should not distract us from this fundamental redline moment: The Commander-in-Chief wants to create a MAGA-fied military unrestrained by moral legal rules of conduct that he can send to a war on America itself.
And it’s important to note that none of this was a one-off, or a gaffe that can brushed off.
It is what Donald Trump has been saying he would do for years.
Back in March 2023, Trump made it clear that he had picked an enemy: Us. You can watch the tape. He previewed what a Trumpian Purge would look like:
TRUMP: The State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all of the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the Deep Staters and put America first.
Even as international tensions were growing, Trump was threatening a massive purge of the nation’s defense infrastructure. He proposed dismantling — and completely overhauling — the Defense Department, the nation’s intelligence agencies (our eyes and ears), and the country’s foreign policy capabilities.
Mass firings, the loss of centuries of experience. A purge of independent, adult voices, and anyone else who might tell the new president “no.”
He meant it then. And he is doing it now.
He also made it clear who the real enemy was: Other Americans.
TRUMP: But the greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia… it is probably, more than anything else, ourselves and some of the horrible, USA-hating people that represent us.
Here was the nub of Trump’s message. We should not fear Putin or Russia… but, rather, ourselves. Or, rather, we should fear other Americans.
Our real enemy is one another.
And that is what he told Ameria’s generals yesterday.
**
Here’s Tom Nichols’ take in The Atlantic:
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….
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.
Exit take: So, what do we make of the silence of the generals? (Which seemed to rattle Trump a bit.) Members of the military are not supposed to cheer partisan diatribes. That’s part of their code of conduct.
But Trump is the destroyer of norms. He expects them to do his bidding; to salute, say, “Yes sir,” and hate the people he hates. Instead, he got thundering silence. Crickets.
I choose to see that as a good sign. And I hope I’m not wrong.
Nota bene
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration’s effort to deport pro-Palestinian academics is a deliberate attack on free speech meant to “strike fear” into non-citizen students and chill campus protests.
“The effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day,” U.S. District Judge William Young concluded, in a scathing, 161-page opinion that he described as the most crucial he’s delivered in his 30 years on the bench….
Perhaps more remarkable than the blistering ruling is Young’s assessment of President Donald Trump himself, condemning him as a bully who “ignores everything,” engages in “hollow bragging” and uses his power and gifts of communication to strip away constitutional rights.
“The President’s palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech,” Young wrote, describing the courts as the most crucial bulwark to this threat.
“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,” Young added. “Is he correct?”
Yes, We Have More Podcasts
I joined Rick Wilson for a lively chat yesterday. You can watch it here:
**
But wait, there’s more … yesterday I also sat down for a fantastic conversation with Mike Murphy and John Heilemann as we reacted in real time to the Hegseth/Trump berating of the generals.
Hacks on Tap:
And, ICYMI: I had a livestream with Matthew Sheffield on the GOP’s Free Speech Hoax.
Finally
Wednesday dogs
Eli and Auggie discuss the government shutdown.
Trump Suggests That Mark Milley Deserves Execution - The Atlantic (Gift Link)
Late Friday night, the former president of the United States—and a leading candidate to be the next president—insinuated that America’s top general deserves to be put to death.
That extraordinary sentence would be unthinkable in any other rich democracy. But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (The phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.) Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic’s publication of a profile of Milley, by this magazine’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed the ways in which Milley attempted to protect the Constitution from Trump.
What was on full display yesterday was the essence of Trump's cosplay presidency. Two men who have the titles but are incapable of doing their jobs. Two men acting their notion of what strong masculinity is like while showing their impotence. Two men acting as if they are knowledgeable all the while displaying their ignorance. If they had a scintilla of self awareness they would be embarrassed but they have none.
Would love to be the fly on the wall during the talks the generals held with each other after the near psychotic "talks" by Petey and POS as they left Quantico.