President Trump and the Military

In the days before Trump spoke to U.S. Navy sailors Sunday to commemorate the service’s 250th birthday, some superiors approached their grunts with a reminder: You swore an oath to the Constitution. The military is nonpartisan. It’s not meant to serve one party or political leader. It serves the nation.

But when Trump looked upon a sea of starchy white polyester, neckerchiefs and aviator sunglasses, he took a different view. “Let’s face it,” he said. “This is a rally.” He yowled about a “rigged” election and “woke” stuff. He inveighed against “transgender for everybody,” his shorthand for liberal lunacy. A group of MAGA true believers who follow him around the country sat by the stage.

The scene offered a look at how Trump melds his politics with his role as head of the armed forces. At a time when he is flexing his power over the troops in ever new ways, he is showing again how little time or patience he has for the idea that the military is apolitical.

Sending in the troops

Over the weekend, Trump sent National Guard troops from Texas to Chicago, against the wishes of the Illinois governor, a Democrat. The president also ordered hundreds of out-of-state National Guard troops into Portland, Ore., setting off a showdown with a federal judge who blocked the administration’s moves on Sunday night. Judge Karin Immergut (who was appointed by Trump) wrote in her ruling:

This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law. Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power — to the detriment of this nation.

Trump says there are national security reasons for these deployments — they protect federal buildings or immigration agents from protesters who would hurt them. As he put it to the sailors on Sunday: “We send in whatever is necessary. People don’t care. They don’t want crime in their cities.” He has also sent troops to Memphis and Los Angeles. But judges so far have said police can handle the problems. Trump said yesterday that he might use the Insurrection Act — an 1807 law that gives the president emergency powers to deploy troops on U.S. soil — to bypass rulings that block him.

His national security rationale can be at odds with the nakedly political way he sometimes explains his decisions. He slams elected Democratic officials in the cities where he has deployed the National Guard. “The ones that are run by the radical left Democrats,” he said last week, are “very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.” In this way, the troops end up looking to some like a cudgel for his political agenda.

Which is just fine by him. At least that’s what it seemed like when he addressed hundreds of top military commanders last week. Trump acknowledged then that they weren’t supposed to clap or laugh or react much. He told them to forget about those old rules. “You just feel nice and loose,” he told them. But they sat mostly stock still as he delivered a partisan speech for 73 minutes.

So he couldn’t crack the brass. Maybe a pier full of youngsters this weekend would be easier?

A rally

At the base in Norfolk, some sailors were fans of this president. Others were not.

He made one hell of an entrance, landing in Marine One on the deck of an aircraft carrier while the theme song from “Top Gun” blared. A squadron of fighter jets flew low overhead in a tight formation as he spoke his first words — “God bless the United States Navy”— and the troops roared with delight.

“I think he’s a great president,” said Josie Reyna, a 25-year-old aviation boatswain’s mate from Wyoming. Asked what she thought about Trump sending the National Guard into cities over the weekend, she replied, “I mean, I know that he just wants to do what’s right.”

Just then, a 37-year-old sailor named Ruben Reed who works in the Navy’s public affairs department, which helped stage the event, appeared and flashed her a warning look. After that, Reed shadowed me through the crowd, monitoring the young members of the Navy as they tried to communicate what they thought of Trump without sounding too wildly partisan. Even though their commander in chief had brought politics onto the pier, they knew they were not supposed to talk the way he does.

Megan Rush, a 26-year-old from Lafayette, La., who works as an electrician on aircraft carriers, said she had come out to the pier because she’d never seen a president before. What does she make of this one?

“Ummmmm,” she said, pausing for a moment. “I don’t know what to say.”

Reed piped up. “Are you happy to be here?” he asked, rhetorically.

“I’m happy to be here supporting the Navy,” Rush said pointedly.

“It’s OK to support the president,” Reed said slowly. “Its OK to support your president, Donald Trump.”

AU REVOIR, AGAIN

France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, resigned yesterday less than 24 hours after he’d hired ministers to run the government. His picks drew immediate opposition in Parliament — seen as too left by the right and too right by the left.

The unpopular centrist government, helmed by President Emmanuel Macron, has burned through four prime ministers in barely a year. And it lacks a parliamentary majority, putting it at the mercy of far-right and far-left parties that outnumber it. Those groups ousted Macron’s previous prime ministers with no-confidence votes.

Lecornu was headed for the same fate. So he quit, making him the shortest-lived prime minister in the history of modern France. The opposition wants Macron to dissolve the current Parliament and call new elections, which could topple his government and put the right-wing or left-wing coalition in power.

Read more about what this means for Macron.

THE LATEST NEWS

Oct. 7 Anniversary

In the two years since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has unleashed tremendous military might in Gaza. The result is a dismembered and disordered society.
Emily Damari was taken from an Israeli kibbutz and spent 471 days as a hostage of Hamas. As she returns to life, she told The Times, she can’t shake the memories of those still in captivity.
“I lost every beautiful thing in my life”: The Times spoke with dozens of Gazans about the devastation of two years of war.
Israel marked the anniversary in subdued fashion.

Politics

Travelers are starting to feel the impact of the government shutdown: Several airports had delays because of shortages of air traffic controllers.
As Trump cancels projects in Democratic-run states, he is cutting money from Republicans in competitive districts.
The C.I.A.’s deputy director demoted the agency’s top lawyer and put himself in the role.
The Pentagon loosened new press restrictions after weeks of negotiations with national news organizations.

Tech and Media

Paramount bought Bari Weiss’s news start-up, The Free Press, for about $150 million and made her editor in chief of CBS News. She got the top job by amassing a following of readers fed up with “wokeness,” Jessica Testa writes.
OpenAI announced a deal to use computer chips from AMD, weeks after signing a deal with a more dominant chipmaker, Nvidia.

Job hunters are trying to trick A.I. résumé screeners with secret prompts. Some recruiters say they reject any applicant they find using hidden text.

Higher Education

The number of international students arriving in the U.S. was down nearly 20 percent this August — the steepest decline since the pandemic.
Many Harvard students don’t do the reading and skip class, but rampant grade inflation allows them to coast through anyway, a report by faculty members found.
A Harvard professor was placed on leave for hunting rats with a pellet gun near a synagogue. The police charged him with damaging property but say the episode was unrelated to antisemitism.

THE MORNING QUIZ

This question comes from a recent edition of the newsletter. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)

A type of wearable collar — made by the biotech company Merck and profiled in a recent Times story — tracks the health, digestion and whereabouts of:

OPINIONS

A.I. is keeping the economy afloat. The Trump administration is using that as an excuse for policies that hurt the rest of the economy, Natasha Sarin writes.

Here are columns by Michelle Goldberg on American conservative media and Israel and Bret Stephens on two years of war in Gaza.

MORNING READS

Eat at Mouleena’s: Follow one woman as she quits her day job and chases her dream of opening a restaurant.

Fall Prime Day: Most of the deals during Amazon’s fabricated holiday are overhyped, but Wirecutter’s experts found some that are actually good.

Vow of silence: The artist Lee Lozano refused to speak to other women — first as an art project, then as a permanent change.

A stable rock: Chris Dreja, who died at 78, was the founding rhythm guitarist of the British rock band the Yardbirds: He balanced out the egos of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, the group’s holy trinity of star guitarists.

SPORTS

N.F.L.: The Jacksonville Jaguars beat the Kansas City Chiefs, thanks to a touchdown late in the fourth quarter. Here’s how it went down.

M.L.B.: In the division series, the Los Angeles Dodgers took a 2-0 series lead over the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Milwaukee Brewers did the same over the Chicago Cubs.

Gambling: In the 20 states where sports betting apps are still banned, “prediction markets” serve as a loophole.

PUTTING THE XXX IN X

“Babe, I’m leaning in close, my lips brushing yours with a soft sweet kiss that’s all for you,” said Ani, one of Elon Musk’s new sexually explicit chatbots.

Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has been lagging behind rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. One way to make up ground: Offer features that competitors don’t (or won’t).

So he engineered sexy bots. Read about them here. As users chat with the anime-looking avatars, they unlock more bawdy content, like the ability to strip Ani down to lingerie. “I predict — counter-intuitively — that it will increase the birth rate!” Musk wrote in a social media post. “Mark my words.”

More on culture: On late night, Jimmy Kimmel said his polling was better than Trump’s.