Nobody knew why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned 800 of the top US military leaders, from posts all over the world, to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, yesterday for the most costly and boring pep rally in world history. He wanted to liberate the “warrior ethos” in the men—and the handful of women present, he said in his speech to them. The gathering marked “the liberation of America’s warriors, in name, in deed and in authorities,” he went on. “You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong always in polite society.”

Maybe Hegseth thought he was addressing the latest class of ICE recruits. How could he tell that auditorium packed with distinguished officers, uniformed and adorned in medals, sitting with perfect posture, that they “don’t necessarily belong always in polite society”? That was one moment—there were many others—when I couldn’t help but wonder what the assembled were thinking. Probably something along the lines of what Air Force veteran Senator Mark Kelly told reporters after the speech: “This is what you get when you install the Saturday morning news guy as secretary of defense.” Or as someone quipped: “Secretary Kegstand.” At any rate, he got no applause and no laughter from the crowd.

Hegseth took the opportunity to announce a few new rules, including what he called “grooming standards.” “No more beards, long hair, superficial individual expression. We’re going to cut our hair, shave our beards, and adhere to standards,” he said. That prohibition on beards is frankly racist, since Black men disproportionately suffer from a skin condition that makes shaving painful, sometimes impossible. But it doesn’t stop there. Since he is “directing that war fighters in combat jobs execute their service fitness test at a gender-neutral age normed male standard scored above 70 percent,” women will be out of combat unless they can match the exact fitness standards of men. He lifted the ban on cruel hazing of young recruits in training, and seemed to encourage torture of enemy combatants. He mocked so-called “rules of engagement” as “weak” and “woke.” Oh, and no fatties allowed in Hegseth’s warrior corps.

“If the secretary of war can do regular hard PT [physical training], so can every member of our joint force,” he said. “Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look. It is bad, and it’s not who we are.” So, decrees Hegseth, “today, at my direction, every member of the joint force at every rank is required to take a PT test twice a year, as well as meet height and weight requirements twice a year every year of service.”

Current Issue

January 2026 Issue

What were these men thinking when their morbidly obese commander in chief waddled onstage moments later for a 72-minute harangue? Trump made news with his speech, by warning these leaders that their mission is changing, and that they soon will be increasingly focusing on “the enemy within.”

But he larded his chilling call to illegally use military force against the “enemy within” with loony tunes complaints about Joe Biden, who he insisted signed each officer’s formal commission with an autopen. Not Trump: He told them he delighted in signing them personally. “I love my signature. I really do. Everyone loves my signature,” he said.

Especially the late Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump’s eyes were puffy; one eye drooped. He sounded increasingly demented as he droned on. He seemed rattled when those assembled didn’t applaud him either. But he was very clear about these leaders’ new mission: using American cities “as training grounds” for the US military. “Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape,” he told the officers. “What they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles—they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.”

The head of Veterans for Responsible Leadership blasted the Quantico abomination on social media, particularly Hegseth’s message that the goal of the assembled was to “kill people and break things”:

This is a disgraceful message. There was a soldier that I served with in the army that later was killed in Mosul, Iraq that said the reason he joined the military was because he believed that it was the greatest force for good that the world has ever known. He said the military not only taught its soldiers to be lethal, but it also taught us to be compassionate and empathetic and care about not only the American people but also freedom-loving and -seeking people from all over the globe. This is the true warrior ethos that so many of us veterans know and love. I’m thinking about him a lot tonight and will be damned if sons of bitches like Trump and Hegseth will transform our great military into something resembling the Russians’. His memory and service must not be in vain.

A former defense official told Politico the meeting was “a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing. 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 obeyed orders, but they didn’t have to like it, and they did not appear to. The silence was sometimes deafening.

All of those officers woke up this morning to the expected news that the government had shut down, with Trump and Republican congressional leaders refusing to reverse drastic cuts to healthcare in exchange for Democratic votes. I’m strangely optimistic about this development, too. Trump is promising mass layoffs, but there have already been hundreds of thousands of layoffs. He’s already rescinded spending on programs Congress approved, without a peep of protest from Republican leaders. Now he’s saying he can use the shutdown as pretext to cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, and to that I can only say, in the immortal words of Pete Hegseth: “FAFO.” When the officers ignored his obvious attempt at an applause line, the look on his face said, “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer folded the last time he faced this potential outcome, in March, to the chagrin of most Democratic senators. He feared, he said, what Trump would do with the power the shutdown gave him to mess with the federal workforce. In six months, we’ve seen Trump assume that power anyway; this time Schumer did the right thing. I don’t know where this goes, but I agree with Marcy Wheeler that although some Americans will suffer, they will also get to see that the only sector of government that continues to work as before is the growing and increasingly violent machinery of immigration enforcement. Most ICE agents are deemed “essential workers.” You won’t be able to get a Social Security employee on the phone if you have problems, but you will see your brown-skinned neighbors unlawfully seized by masked thugs.

We’re not headed for an authoritarian regime; we already live under one. And the sooner more people realize that, the sooner we can begin to effectively fight back.