Well.
It is day 261 of our captivity, and on Thursday, September 25, former Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, along with the star of “Celebrity Dictator: Let’s Arrest Everyone,” decided to throw a big, chest-beating jamboree for the entire command structure of the United States military.
I refer to Mr. Hegseth as the “former” secretary of defense because he and Donald Trump have determined that the term “defense” is a sissified holdover from the “woke” degradation of the world’s premier fighting force. It is so much more muscular, and masculine, to redefine our armed forces as the “Department of War,” led by Pistol Pete Hegseth, who has rebranded himself “secretary of war.”
The same man who blithely announced the details of an upcoming, top-secret Houthi bombing raid to the editor of Atlantic magazine via Signal—the chat application favored by January 6 extremists—just as blithely announced the forced march of military brass from all over the globe to a required meeting in Quantico, Va., as if it were an invitation to a yard sale. In other words, there was nothing secret about it—the planned gathering of commanders was announced to everyone in America. It seems impossible that the secretary of war would be unaware that leaking this information to everyone in America also meant that he leaked it to everyone on the planet, but when your military is being run by two of the biggest blowhards in the universe, you should expect nothing less.
It probably occurred to the assembled commanders that telegraphing such a meeting to everyone on the planet meant that one malign foreign actor, or perhaps a consortium of malign foreign actors, could have dropped one big bomb on Quantico and disabled the entire United States military, along with annihilating the United States president and the secretary of war.
It probably also occurred to them that for three days (one assumes a wasted day of travel on either end of that dystopian clambake), our armed forces worldwide had no commander on the ground in the event of an attack on one or more of our military bases.
Generals are, among other things, highly trained strategists. It seems impossible that any of them, had they been asked, would have called the decision to order every commander to Virginia to tell them in person that they were too fat, too hairy, and too scrupulous in their adherence to the Geneva Convention strategically useful. That nonsense could have been communicated more efficiently in an email.
One wonders if they took a moment to consider, as our secretary of war and their commander-in-chief stood on stage and insulted them repeatedly, that the televised spectacles so favored by the circus freaks who are currently running our country only serve to endanger all of us. Truth be told, one can only guess at what any of them might have been thinking, because they sat uniformly expressionless as Secretary Frick and President Frack nattered away.
Production values were hardly subtle, as one would expect of the former hosts of “The Apprentice” and “Fox and Friends.” Their remarks were delivered in front of an enormous American flag, and one imagines that the resemblance to the equally enormous, cinematic flag that appeared behind a ranting George C. Scott in the movie “Patton” was entirely intentional. The made-for-TV president and his Fox News wingman simply could not resist a tacky homage to a Hollywood movie about a tough-as-nails commander who relentlessly abused his underlings.
Of course, the showbizzy nod to General Patton was particularly laughable when one considers that Donald Trump was a serial draft dodger and Hegseth was a drunken soldier in the Minnesota National Guard who went on to run two veterans’ organizations into the ground through his gross mismanagement and subsequently interfered with the court martial of navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who was credibly accused of multiple serious offenses during his deployment to Iraq.
One of the worst offenses committed by Gallagher was the murder of a 17-year-old prisoner of war who was being treated by a medic for his injuries. Two SEAL witnesses testified that Gallagher walked up to the wounded prisoner and stabbed him with his hunting knife without provocation or explanation. He and his commanding officer then posed for photographs of them standing over the body, holding up the dead captive’s head by the hair as if he were a hunting trophy.
Pete Hegseth, like the United States president, is a dangerous creep who has no scruples or moral code. General George A. Patton would have thought both of them beneath contempt and would have been delighted to court martial both; and judging from the uniformly stone-faced looks of the generals who had to endure Hegseth’s tirade and Trump’s word salad, they might be similarly inclined.
If you would like to read a verbatim transcript of Hegseth’s remarks, it can be found online at Air and Space Forces Magazine. Allow me to summarize his tirade, and feel free to read the transcript to verify my accuracy:
Hello, you fat, hairy, out-of-shape, woke pansies! We are doing away with policies that forbid the abuse and hazing of recruits, we are doing away with the Geneva Convention, and we are reframing the United States military as a group of vicious, white male sociopaths who do not belong in polite society. If you do not approve of our new, improved, homicidal, sexist, racist standards, then get the hell out. Oh, and servicemen will no longer be permitted to wear dresses.
President Bone Spurs, whose verbatim remarks can be found online at Roll Call Magazine, had plenty more to say, just in case our commanders were not sickened enough by Hegseth’s diatribe. Although it is always difficult to summarize word salad, I am willing to give it the old college try:
Uh, hello. Why aren’t you wearing your red MAGA hats and cheering for me? What’s wrong with you? Loosen up! If you don’t like me, then you can leave the room, after which I will fire you and rescind your benefits. We have the greatest economy in the history of the world, due entirely to me. Also, now we have the Gulf of America—I renamed it with a big black sharpie that I keep on my desk for when I feel like renaming things! And guess what—I’ve decided to train your troops by sending them to occupy Chicago and kill Democrats! We’ll settle the Middle East, which hasn’t happened in 3,000 years! Did I mention that I rebuilt our nuclear? I have also moved submarines to the coast of Russia, which they now know because I just announced it on live TV! Have I mentioned that police and firefighters love me? And I invented Space Force! Let me close by saying that I never use an autopen, and now I write everything on premium gold-leafed paper!
In the stony silence that followed the remarks of both Hegseth and Trump, I could imagine the internal musings of our most dedicated military leaders:
I just flew in from Greenland for this?
Why does Pete Hegseth have teeth like a jackal?
The commander-in-chief is neither mentally nor morally fit to command a troop of toy soldiers, let alone real ones.
We are being insulted and harangued by two of the most dangerous idiots on the planet.
While the U.S. military are trained up one side and down the other to exhibit discipline, conformity, obedience, and compliance with all lawful orders, it becomes a bit of a sticky wicket when the orders are no longer lawful but stand in direct contravention of the Constitution that all members of the armed services vow to protect and defend, along with defending our country from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
As was established in last week’s column (“When the enemy is us”), Donald Trump is doing his level best to designate United States citizens as a domestic threat to the security and safety of our country. If he can make that case to the courts, then he can declare all of us enemy combatants, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send all the generals and their troops into our neighborhoods to destroy us. He also intends to unleash them on polling places during the next election—not only to intimidate voters, but to set the stage for immediate military seizure of any voting machine in any location where MAGA candidates are likely, justifiably, to lose.
Here is the problem: The only insurrection that has taken place in this country since the Civil War occurred on January 6, 2020, when Trump’s MAGA militia stormed the Capitol to kill legislators and the vice president on their way to subverting the election. Please note that during the only instance in the last 160 years when it would have been appropriate to invoke the Insurrection Act and summon the military, the once-and-future president sat in his office drinking Diet Cokes and watching it all unspool on television, as if it were a made-for-TV after-school special.
And here is another problem: All the commanders in the United States military know perfectly well that there is no existing insurrection anywhere in America at present—there are only government-sponsored, Gestapo-style goon squads violating the civil and human rights of both citizens and noncitizens all over our country. In other words, the Trump administration is actively violating the Constitution all day, every day, and all the guardrails have failed.
All but one, that is: The United States military is the one guardrail that has not yet failed. Emphasis on “yet.” The stress tests have already begun.
Donald Trump has consistently revealed himself to be a seething madman. He is already ordering the military into the streets of our cities to smother dissent and frighten the villagers, and the entire command structure of our fighting forces just endured an unhinged rant from two men who should have never been given access to the levers of power and are uniformly unfit for service.
It seems reasonable that after being subjected to the ridiculous spectacle that greeted them in Quantico on September 25, at least a few of them may be mulling over their strategy both for upholding their oath to the Constitution and defending us from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Because they are not as stupid as Hegseth and Trump believe them to be—mostly because Hegseth and Trump really are that dumb—they undoubtedly know that ordinary citizens engaging in their entirely constitutional right to peacefully assemble and protest are neither domestic enemies nor insurrectionists. The generals know exactly who the domestic enemies are because they were just forced to spend an entire day with them in Virginia.
Because they are militarists and their stated mission is to protect both the Constitution and the United States citizens who are being savaged every day, unconstitutionally, by the domestic enemy who lives in the White House, it stands to reason that there are two natural decisions before them. First, they can simply refuse to give unlawful orders to their troops, because the orders are… unconstitutional. They can instruct their troops that in their absence, after they have all been fired in a Watergate-style Saturday-night massacre, the soldiers must lay down their weapons and refuse to obey unlawful orders from anyone, including the toxic secretary of war and the seditionist-in-chief.
Or perhaps they will decide, alternatively, to stage a coup d’état, arrest and imprison the domestic terrorists in the White House who are subverting the Constitution and destroying our democracy, outlaw MAGA as a domestic terror organization, and give this country six months to hold a free and fair election in which every local, state, and federal office will be up for grabs.
Perhaps then, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.”
Historically, once a dictator has consolidated power, he never leaves office voluntarily. Sham elections—or perhaps, no elections—ensure that he will never be unseated; crass and cowardly sycophants prop him up and enforce his totalitarian whims; and terrified citizens submit. Historically, a dictator leaves office under only one of three conditions: Either he drops dead after choking on a Big Mac because he is too fat for anyone to successfully perform the Heimlich maneuver on him; or a foreign enemy kills him; or a military junta removes him.
On September 25, the commanders of the United States military received their marching orders directly from Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump.
Time to rally the troops.
