The Generals’ Ordeal: Trump’s Theater of the Absurd at Quantico
Don and Pete Play Army and Boy was that Fun.
I knew it was going to be an odd meeting. With Trump and Hegseth, you brace yourself for the usual performance—the grievances, the culture war pageantry, the casual disregard for norms. But this? This was stranger than even their usual.
Hundreds of America’s most senior military officers—men and women who command nuclear submarines, manage global alliances, orchestrate strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities—ripped from actual deployments spanning three continents, at a cost of millions, to be lectured about facial hair and fitness standards by a former Fox News talking head whose principal qualification for running the Pentagon appears to be that he once spent twelve months in Iraq and can still do a respectable number of pull-ups.
The scene at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday was pure Trumpian theater, so detached from the actual business of national defense it would be comic if it weren’t so dangerous. There was Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary and one-time National Guard major, dressed in a suit that screamed weekend meteorologist, sporting an American flag belt buckle worthy of a rodeo clown, positioned before a giant Old Glory like he was auditioning for a Patton remake no one asked for. And there was the President himself, rambling incoherently about tariffs before casually announcing he’d ordered Hegseth to use American cities as military “training grounds.”
Let that sink in. The Commander in Chief, addressing hundreds of generals and admirals charged with defending the nation, disclosed that San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles—cities run by Democrats, he noted—would serve as deployment sites for troops. “That’s a war too,” Trump said. “It’s a war from within.”
The military leadership sat in stony silence. They’d been explicitly warned by Pentagon brass: no reactions, no cheering, maintain the apolitical posture expected of professional military officers. Clap only when the Joint Chiefs clap. The directive revealed just how concerned senior leaders were about this event—a first-of-its-kind mass gathering with no precedent in recent military history.
When word leaked last week that Hegseth had summoned the brass, Washington had erupted in anxious speculation. Mass firings? A declaration of war on Venezuela? A loyalty oath ceremony? The truth was somehow both more mundane and more alarming: it was a lecture. About grooming standards. Physical fitness. The scourge of beards and “woke garbage.”
“No more beards, long hair, superficial, individual expression,” Hegseth told officers who oversee nuclear deterrence and global military operations. “We’re going to cut our hair, shave, shave our beards and adhere to standards.”
Then came the line that must have taken extraordinary self-control not to react to: “Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” Hegseth told the room of officers whose collective war experience makes his twelve months in Iraq look like a gap year. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”
This from a man whose leadership experience consists of serving as a major in the National Guard and whose time as Defense Secretary has been marked less by engagement with foreign counterparts and complex strategic challenges than by doing pull-ups for the Pentagon’s social media feed. There was something almost homoerotic about his fixation on male bodies—the grooming standards, the physiques, the constant invocations of hard, sweaty physical training. For someone who’d spent so much energy railing against “woke” culture, Hegseth’s address had the unmistakable tenor of a gym bunny’s Instagram feed crossed with a 1950s hygiene film.
The disconnect was staggering—and expensive. With a government shutdown looming, Trump and Hegseth pulled commanders from Europe, Asia, and the Pacific at a cost of millions. The top four-star combatant commanders and Joint Chiefs typically meet twice a year in Washington. But this gathering included hundreds of lower-ranking generals and admirals in what military officials confirmed was highly unusual. Democratic lawmakers had questioned not just the cost but the security risk of concentrating so many top military commanders in one location.
For what? So Hegseth could lecture officers with decades of combat experience about “warrior ethos.” So Trump could work through his list of political grievances while the audience sat in mandated silence.
“We have a really corrupt press,” Trump opined at one point. One officer rolled his head, looking restless. Another called the speech “terrible” afterward, speaking on condition of anonymity because criticizing the Commander in Chief publicly ends careers.
The silence spoke volumes. When Trump bashed Biden—calling the Afghanistan withdrawal “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country”—the room remained quiet. When he praised his own policies, promising that “you’ll never see four years like we had with Biden and that group of incompetent people,” there was no response. The contrast with Trump’s usual rally crowds, cheering on cue, made the mandated military silence almost painful to watch.
Hegseth’s address revealed a worldview frozen in 2005 Iraq. His entire vision of military readiness seemed derived from his experience as a junior officer—grooming, fitness, following orders. He defended his firing of more than a dozen military leaders, many of them people of color and women. He railed against “stupid rules of engagement.” He claimed, without presenting evidence, that standards had been lowered to meet “arbitrary racial and gender quotas.”
He announced that promotions would now be based on “merit”—the clear implication being they previously were not. “We’ve already done a lot in this area, but more changes are coming soon,” he said.
His obsession with physical fitness reached almost parodic levels. “If the secretary of war can do regular, hard P.T., so can every member of our joint force,” he announced, apparently unaware that the officers before him had more pressing concerns than whether their boss could complete a morning run.
The audience Hegseth was lecturing included officers responsible for maintaining America’s nuclear triad, managing complex alliance structures, coordinating multi-domain operations, and developing sophisticated air-tasking orders like the one required for strikes on Iran’s nuclear program earlier this year. These are not problems solved by better grooming standards.
“That’s like an insane insult to his senior officers, who all made their bones fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Elliot Ackerman, who led Marines in the second battle of Falluja and served with Marine special operations in Afghanistan. “Those guys have got a lot more dust on their boots than he does.”
Military historian Eliot Cohen was even more pointed: “He views the world from the point of view of a not terribly successful major in the National Guard. For him it’s push-ups, pull-ups and pugil sticks. It’s aggressiveness.”
The criticism from former military officials began before the event even ended. Retired Army Major General Paul D. Eaton, who served in Iraq, put it bluntly: “Pete Hegseth spent millions to fly in all of our generals and admirals to rant about facial hair and brag about how many pull-ups he can do, and have Donald Trump sleepwalk through a list of partisan gripes.”
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a West Point graduate who served in the 82nd Airborne, called it “an expensive, dangerous dereliction of leadership.” His statement continued: “While American forces confront real threats across the globe, Mr. Hegseth and President Trump chose to pull generals and admirals away from their missions to listen to hours of political grievances.”
The gathering came amid Trump’s recent orders deploying National Guard soldiers to Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, and Portland ostensibly to assist with immigration enforcement and combat crime—despite violent crime rates falling sharply in recent years after pandemic-era surges. Local officials have objected to the mobilizations. Trump has also directed the military to attack boats in the Caribbean allegedly carrying drugs, offering no detailed legal justification.
Hegseth’s nostalgic vision kept returning to World War II, which he called the last time America won “a major theater war.” His entire framework seemed designed to return the military to that era—simpler, more straightforward, unencumbered by the complexities of modern warfare. What he didn’t acknowledge: in World War II, the entire nation mobilized against fascist powers in an existential conflict. Today’s security environment involves cyber warfare, information operations, nuclear deterrence, and threats designed to undermine American credibility without triggering conventional war.
These subtleties had no place in Hegseth’s address. Nor did he mention that National Guard troops he commands are currently deployed in Washington, D.C. on “beautification missions”—raking leaves and picking up trash.
On women in combat, Hegseth struck a carefully calibrated tone—different from his 2024 book “The War on Warriors,” where he wrote that women “bring life into the world” and their “role in war is to make it a less deathly experience,” suggesting they’re mentally unsuited for combat roles. On Tuesday, he argued the military had improperly lowered standards to accommodate women who “may not be as able to carry a rucksack or lift a casualty on the battlefield.”
“War does not care if you’re a man or a woman,” Hegseth said. “Neither does the enemy.” He insisted he didn’t want to prevent women from serving in combat, only that they meet the “highest male standard.” Then came the kicker: “If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it.”
The officers listened in mandated silence to all of this. It’s likely at least some were seething at the suggestion that their collective failure to enforce grooming standards had caused—or even contributed to—the military’s difficulties in Afghanistan and Iraq. These were officers who had made their careers in those wars, who understood the strategic and political failures that doomed those conflicts had nothing to do with beard regulations.
Hegseth divided the room into two categories: “the woke” and the war fighters. Most present, he generously assessed, were the latter. “You are hereby liberated to be an apolitical, hard-charging, no-nonsense, constitutional leader that you joined the military to be,” he told them.
The irony was apparently lost on him. Nothing says “apolitical” quite like flying the entire military leadership to Virginia for a televised political rally disguised as a policy address.
Kori Schake, a former defense official in the George W. Bush administration who now directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, captured the absurdity: “It appears to be one more demonstration of Secretary Hegseth mistakenly believing our military leadership needs to be directed to focus on fighting wars.”
Trump, for his part, acknowledged the cost as he boarded the helicopter to Quantico—sort of. “These are our generals, our admirals, our leaders, and it’s a good thing, a thing like this has never been done before, because they came from all over the world,” he said. “And there’s a little bit of expense, not much, but there’s a little expense for that. We don’t like to waste it. We’d rather spend it on bullets and rockets.”
The “little bit of expense” he dismissed included international flights for hundreds of senior officers, the disruption of ongoing military operations, and the security risk of concentrating America’s military leadership in one location—all so he could bash the media and his predecessor while Hegseth lectured experienced combat commanders about the importance of shaving.
Through it all, those generals and admirals maintained their composure. “I couldn’t be prouder of our highest-ranking leaders for maintaining an apolitical face under immense pressure,” said retired Major General Eaton.
It was, perhaps, the most impressive display of discipline in the room. The self-control required to sit expressionless while being insulted, lectured, and used as props for a political performance—that’s a kind of fortitude that can’t be measured in pull-ups.
One officer’s restless head roll. Another’s whispered “terrible.” These tiny cracks in the facade were the only visible signs of what must have been widespread dismay at watching the military’s apolitical tradition trampled by men who view expertise as weakness and complexity as evidence of “woke” corruption.
The real question—the one hovering over that silent room in Quantico—is how long this can continue. How many more expensive, pointless spectacles before the damage to military professionalism, readiness, and morale becomes irreparable? How many more deployments to rake leaves in Washington or patrol American cities before the fundamental purpose of the military gets lost entirely?
Trump and Hegseth didn’t answer those questions on Tuesday. They were too busy congratulating themselves on their pull-ups.
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