President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth held their big military meeting on Tuesday that saw top brass from across the world flown in to a meeting in Virginia, all to be told to lose weight and prepare for possible deployment against the American public.
“We flew every general from across the world for this?” Democratic Senator Reuben Gallego, an Iraq war veteran, said in a post on X. “This meeting could have been an email.”
Predictions for the purpose of the surprise meeting ranged from Trump demanding a loyalty oath from generals to Hegseth publicly firing “woke” generals.
But the actual meeting was more of a spectacle than anything else. Trump and Hegseth again insisted they would end “woke” and “politically correct” policies in the military,
Hegseth also railed against overweight military officers and said he would demand fitness tests and weigh-ins for officers twice a year going forward, a move that will likely be unwelcome by the services’ older members and those suffering from injuries.
“If the secretary of war can do regular, hard [physical training], so can every member of our joint force,” he told the officers.
In addition to calling for overweight officers to lose weight, Hegseth also said he wanted to enact gender-neutral training standards across the armed services.
“If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” he said.
Hegseth also insinuated that the military failed in its missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, a move that may not sit well with many of the officers who began their careers fighting on those fronts.
“I mean, first of all, that’s like an insane insult to his senior officers, who all made their bones fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Elliot Ackerman, who led a group of Marines during the second battle of Falluja and served with a Marine special operations group in Afghanistan, told the New York Times. “Those guys have got a lot more dust on their boots than he does.”
Responses on social media ranged from confusion to tempered relief that something darker wasn’t planned for the meeting.
“I didn’t want America to go fascist. I think that is very bad,” Nicholas Grossman, an international relations professor at the University of Illinois, wrote. “But I take some solace in the fact that we got such stupid, petty fascists, the sort who order an in-person meeting of military leaders not to execute a large-scale purge, but to make them listen to him wax philosophical about gender.”
Several defense officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, criticized the meeting in statements given to Politico.
“More like a press conference than briefing the generals,” one of the officials said. “Could have been an email.”
Another official called the whole thing a “total waste of money” as the U.S. taxpayers foot the bill to fly all of the officers back to Virginia from around the world.
Another former official said the meeting wasn’t just a waste of money, but a waste of the officers’ valuable time.
“It‘s a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing,” a former defense official said. “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.”
The officers at the meeting remained professional throughout the meeting.
“It’s really funny that Hegseth’s little GI Joe fantasy league speech was met with… silence,” writer Roxane Gay said on Bluesky.
That didn’t appear to sit well with Trump, who is used to coming out to adoring crowds of MAGA loyalists.
“Trump opens with a threat to the generals: ‘I’ve never walked into a room so silent … Have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud … If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future. but you just feel nice and loose,'” MSNBC producer Kyle Griffith wrote.
Historian Kevin Kruse criticized the meeting as being little more than a show for Hegseth and Trump to talk at the gathered officers.
“Hegseth complained about fatties and beardos, and now Trump is bragging about the quality of stationary he uses,” he wrote. “Their ‘warrior ethos’ is all about appearances, nothing more. Which is ironic because Trump looks and sounds like a** here.”
The president rambled in his typical style during the meeting, at one point calling for the production of more battleships, a decision he was inspired to make based on an old naval film he watched.
“Trump notes than in World War II they were building a ship a day but we don’t build ships anymore. Does he … not realize that the military needs of 2025 are different than those of 1945?” journalist Philip Bump wrote.
The president also made a somewhat darker comment, suggesting that he would deploy the U.S. military to crush dissent in cities run by Democrats.
“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,” Trump said.
He noted allegations that protesters were throwing bricks at vehicles driven by federal agents and the National Guard, and suggested that military members should exit their vehicles and “do whatever the hell you want to do” in response.
Hegseth, during his portion, essentially told any military officers who disagreed with his leadership to resign.
“It’s nearly impossible to change a culture with the same people helped create or even benefited from that culture,” he said. “If the words that you hear today make your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”
