Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth forced hundreds of America’s top military commanders to attend an in-person assembly at Quantico, but practically no one was impressed with its messaging.
Over the course of 45 minutes, Hegseth railed against “woke ideology,” transgender people in the military, and “beardos,” and announced changing fitness standards that will effectively push women out of combat roles. But most of that was the same rhetoric that Hegseth has been spewing since he was floated as the Pentagon chief in December.
That left military officials in “disbelief,” frustrated and disturbed that they were ordered to Virginia with little notice, leaving their posts around the globe in order to accommodate Hegseth’s ego.
“I have yet to find a single military official who was in the audience today who thought that this was a good presentation,” The New York Times Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper told MSNBC on Tuesday.
The meeting could have been boiled down to an email, per Cooper, who underscored that Hegseth’s intense MAGA messaging was not received particularly well by a military that is “supposed to present itself as nonpartisan.”
“All I’ve had from them so far, from the people I’ve talked to, is a combination of disbelief that some of them were made to fly from, some of them, Asia, from all over the world,” she continued, “all the way to Quantico to listen to the same familiar type of culture war complaints that we’ve been having since [Donald] Trump was reelected.”
Trump addressed the crowd after Hegseth, but his words weren’t received much better, according to Cooper, who referred to the president’s address as a “campaign-style stump speech.”
Trump was notably unimpressed with the commanders’ quiet reception to his remarks, at one point pulling a Jeb Bush by telling the crowd that they should applaud him.
“So you didn’t hear the kind of cheering that we usually get, because President Trump is used to playing for the type of crowds that favor him,” Cooper said. “And so he’s not very used to performing in front of an audience that’s just giving, looking back stone-faced. But that’s what you were getting from these generals.”
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