Donald Trump’s latest attempt at a crowd-pleasing jab backfired spectacularly when he tried to goad a crowd of Navy officers into booing “Barack Hussein Obama”—only to be met with stony silence.
Speaking roughly 45 minutes behind schedule at the U.S. Navy’s 250th anniversary celebration in Norfolk, Virginia, on Sunday, the president addressed rows of active-duty service members—many of them unpaid amid the ongoing government shutdown—under a blazing afternoon sun.
The meandering, hour-long speech drifted between war stories, campaign-style quips, and personal boasts, but it was his attempt to drag Obama into the mix that most visibly flopped.
“A man that everybody loves, he was my doctor in the White House and I got to know him very well,” Trump began, referring to his former White House physician, Rep. Ronny Jackson. “He was also the doctor for Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?”
He paused, waiting for a reaction. None came. The silence stretched on.
Trump, however, continued and conjured up yet another bizarre line about his physical fitness, which is constantly under the microscope because of a relentless hand bruise, chunky ankles, a wobbly walk and a droopy mouth.
“He was a doctor for a man named Bush. And at a press conference they asked him, ‘Who’s in the best shape, who’s the healthiest, who’s the strongest, who’s the best physical specimen of the three?’” Trump said. The punchline: “That’s easy. President Donald Trump! And I said, ‘I love this guy!’”
The crowd stirred slightly, offering applause. It was an awkward echo of another dead-air moment earlier in the week, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who prefers the moniker “secretary of war”—delivered his own rallying cry to 800 top military officers at Marine Corps Base Quantico.
“Should our enemies choose foolishly to challenge us, they will be crushed by the violence, precision, and ferocity of the War Department,” he declared, before adding, “In other words, to our enemies, FAFO.” The acronym—short for “F— around and find out”—was met with tepid laughter and a faint “woo-hoo.”
“I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” Trump later said of the Norfolk audience.
The 79-year-old president, who famously avoided military service during the Vietnam War, went on to riff on everything from President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen to the word “tariffs” and the “N word”—his euphemism for nuclear weapons. “There are two N words and you can’t use either of them,” he said, to more silence.
Jackson, the man at the center of Trump’s “physical specimen” story, was stripped of his Navy rank and allowed his medical license to lapse after scandals over his conduct as a White House physician.
Dubbed “Candyman” for allegedly handing out prescription drugs “like candy,” he remains one of Trump’s most loyal allies—and the one who bandaged the president’s ear after he was grazed by a bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year.
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