‘It could have been an email’: Viewers stunned by Hegseth and Trump’s bizarre Quantico speeches to military chiefs
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.”
