Bulwark Takes - JVL and Bill Kristol React to Hegseth & Trump’s Strange Speech to Generals

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

JVL and Bill react to President Trump and Sec. Pete Hegseth’s speeches to the American generals that gathered today (9/30) at Quantico.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my colleague at the bulwark, Bill Crystal. We have just wrapped up first ever briefing of the full flag officer corps of the United States military by the Secretary of Defense, not Secretary of War, requires an act of Congress to change that no matter what he calls himself. But I'm happy he has his pronouns and titles in ways that align with his identity and the President of the United States. Bill, so I want to start out here.

We're going to play a bunch of clips for people who mayn't have seen it. I think you and I have sort of fundamentally different views. I think this was as serious as a heart attack. You, I think, think it was clownish. I think, but these views are not intention, right? They're reconcilable. Yeah, the heart of Trumpism is that it's both, or out of Trump is that he's both clownish and very dangerous.

And so I think we'd probably agree. I would, I mean, I wrote about this. I guess the last three morning shots, and so I've been very alarmed about the upshot of this. And I'm slightly reassured in this respect, the senior officers, the general flag officers, behaved in an exemplary way. I mean, they were stone-faced. They did not rise to the debate. Hakesh and Trump both wanted applause, offered applause lines, invited applause. Really, Hegsteth paused, very conspicuously. Trump almost literally asked for it a couple of times. And they did not do that. They stood as they always do when when the president comes into the room and leaves. They

gave him fructory and respectful applause at the end. But that was pretty much it. There wasn't even much chuckling to know his two or three sort of witty lines. So I thought in this respect, what most worried me was that he would be able to convey to the American people that the senior military leadership of the United States is totally on board every aspect of his authoritarian and a liberal agenda. And I'll let you go on this now since you were that, I think it's what aligned you so much is he was not very abashed and laying out that agenda, but I don't think he, I don't think for the public watching or the troops who are watching, which I think is a very important part of the audience, would think that the military is, you know, rah, rah behind this.

Yeah, I want to say, this is not you reacting just from the video feed that we were able to see. This is from in the room reporting from pools and other reporters. So, for instance, from the pool report, we have much more still, quiet than he is accustomed to. Pool can see several officers sitting in a row looking expressionless and inscrutable with few smiles. POTUS's attacks on Joe Biden have been met with silence. And, anyway, this is, again, same thing. Again, another, not from the pool, but another in the room reporter.

They stood in some not all lightly applauded when he concluded. So, as you say, the officers reacted as we might hope. And here's the, so here's the tension, I think. If you were expecting a scene from Triumph of the Will, that's not what you got. You've got Fat Elvis. So this is, I mean, Trump was rambling and slurring. He was, I mean, I have to admit, at the very, very beginning, he was actually fairly charming in the way that he can be for like 90 seconds. And after that, it really sort of went off the rails.

And it was, you know, there were, you could tell when he. He snapped onto the teleprompter version of the actual prepared speech because there were like seven sections like that. And they were like they were the only sections in which he spoke complete sentences that formed coherent thoughts. But it was, I mean, I mean, I have to ask, you know more, you know more high level military officers than I do. If you are a professional military officer and you've devoted your life and career to studying the art of war, understanding logistics, understanding. military transformations and those sorts of things and the commander-in-chief comes in

and is just pinging around and talking about how we're reconsidering the concept of battleships because those big guns are so I mean the classic military thing is always you don't want to be led by civilian leaders who are idiots do you think the people there sat and thought

yeah I feel good about the decision-making Acumen, the mental, just cognitive abilities of Commander-in-Chief? Do you think they were able to, I guess this is what I'm saying. Do you think that they were able to be like, oh, this is just Trump doing the Trump thing. It's all actually okay in the way that like the Wall Street Journal editorial board does? Or do you think that they were looking at this performance in some alarm, not even on a content basis, you know, but just on a, geez, he's out to lunch.

I mean, there were several hundred people there, so I obviously have some different points of view, I'm sure, and I don't know that many that well, but I know I think alarmed. I think if you're a serious general officer and you hear that speech from the President of the United States that when you've all been assembled there in an unprecedented way, suddenly kind of almost, not almost, an emergency canceling all other meetings, travel, so forth. And this is what the President thinks it's appropriate to do, which is to give the prepared parts were, you know, mediocre and not that. many of them. Most of it was rambling, repetitious rambling, and goofy and foolish in many cases. And just lie. I mean, insane exaggerations of lies, as he always does. And no, I think you were worried. No, I would say, and I put Hexeth in this thing, too. I think if you come away from it, to say, from my point of view, from the public effect of it, I was not as, I'm not as alarmed by that outcome as I thought I might be.

If you are a serious military officer, you, I had the exact thought of what you just implied. most of the way through the speech that he's three and three and a third more years of this and are we going to make it through and you know is anyone there telling him hopefully general k and the chairman is telling him you shouldn't do this you shouldn't do that there's been some reporting actually divisions on military on the military strategy document that's due soon between all the general staff and on the one hand and heck seth and trump on the other but no i mean maybe you think he's goofy you know, maybe he reassure yourself by saying that he's goofy enough and distracted enough that he doesn't really cause any, you know, I don't know, that we're not in a nightmare

situation, but no, you'd be very worried, very worried, I think. That would you think, that you think? I mean, I think so, but I don't know if these guys have Fox News brain or not. I don't know what the consumption habits are, right? I mean, if you're in the military, do you have the luxury of taking him seriously, but not literally? I mean, so I was worried that some of them would have Fox News brand. I think some of them do, I'm sure. But the general officers, I mean, these are all people basically who've been in, well, at least, well, at least, mostly 30 years, but maybe 20 or 25 years.

So they predate a little bit, those who've totally and only been marinated in the stew of Fox News. And there's some, obviously, we don't have process, too. So it's a little different from going to a mess hall on a base and awful lot of young kids and junior officers who were kind of rah-rah for Fox. That's kind of all they've known. And unfortunately, they have been sort of student that. So Mark Hurtling was right. He and I discussed this.

He's written two excellent pieces, I think, twice two for the bulwark in the last three or four days. He was pretty confident that senior military would be behaved appropriately, but not be at all influenced or moved by this. I was a little more nervous. So I think in that respect, he's right. Does that mean that, but on the other, so having said all this, that they understand how ridiculous it is that he's Commander-in-Chief and President of the United States, what do they do about it?

I mean, they do solve like a practical problem. They have to obey legal orders. There's a limit to how much they can educate up, so to speak. Hegsteth is a big problem if they had. Again, I do think, just this for me is the core thing. Trump is worse than he was in the first term, obviously. The authoritarian move behind him is. much more dangerous than it was in the first term. But there were Madison Esper to cushion all

this in the first term. And I think that's one thing. A lot of these officers must have thought to themselves, geez, if they were there already in the officer corps, the senior officer corps, five, six, seven years ago, they remember all these moments when people in the Pentagon were able to cushion the effect of Trump's idiocy. And they can't have confidence that that's happening today. So here, I want to get to now to the important policy part, because in the broadest possible sense, this was a policy speech. And the policy was about the deployment of the military domestically. And we're going to listen to three clips from it to start. Jared, can we get clip two, then seven, and then eight?

In our inner cities, which we're going to be talking about, because it's a big part of war now. It's a big part of war. But the firemen go up in ladders and you have people shooting at them while they're up in lattice. I don't even know if anybody heard that. But and I said, don't talk about it much, but I think you have to. A firemen are incredible. They're up in one of these ladders. It goes way up to the sky, rescuing people.

And you have animals shooting at them. American citizens are animals. All right. Go to seven and then eight for me, here. America is under invasion from within. We're under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don't wear uniforms. At least when they're wearing a uniform, you can take them out.

These people don't have uniforms. But we are under invasion from within. We're stopping it very quickly. And people other than politicians that look bad, do they think, you know, the Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape, too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places, and we're going to straighten them out. It'll be a major part for some of the people in this room.

That's a war, too. It's a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can't let these people in. you know we had no people enter in the last four months zero even i can't believe that you know we had millions coming in pouring it 25 million all told and of those 25 million many of them should never be in our country they would take their worst people and their people from prisons in jail and they put them in a caravan and they'd walk up CNN was interviewing one person yeah so

i don't know that's enough jared and later on he says uh i told pete HECSIF, we should use some of these cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, we're going into Chicago very soon. And he then, and this is just final one, a very short one, clip number nine, where he attempts to lay the predicate to his audience that this, what he is saying, is not exceptional, but stands in a line of things. that American presidents have done. Clip nine.

But these service members are following in a great and storied military tradition from protecting frontier communities to chasing outlaws and bandits in the Wild West. And our history is filled with military heroes who took on all enemies, foreign and domestic. You know that phrase? Very well, that's what the oath says,

foreign and domestic. Well, we also have domestic. George Washington, Abraham, Lincoln, Grover, Cleveland, George Bush, and others all use the armed forces to keep domestic order in peace. Many of... Okay, so that's enough. So I think that's the heart of the speech.

And this was, again, it is a theme he returned to over and over. He attacked various types of Americans. He attacked Democrats specifically. he called, he referred to people as animals, enemies. He wouldn't speak about Putin this way. He didn't mention Xi at all. Again, he really doesn't have a lot to say about America's foreign adversaries. It's his domestic enemies that he's really, really focused on.

And I don't know. I mean, I guess my question, Bill, is it seems to me that this is a warning. to everybody in that room, that at some point in the future, they're going to be forced to choose between their oath and Trump. And the question is, is that room filled with people like Mike Pence, or is it filled with people like Pete Hackseth? I mean, I hope Mike Pence, and I'd rather think Mike Pence in this case. Here's what I guess I totally agree with, I mean, how it really is just so beyond deplorable that a president of the United States would give this kind of speech to military officers. We shouldn't. I'm not.

I'm trying to reassure myself that the officers aren't buying it and that there are maybe a few other obstacles in the way for the next three years. But I want to totally endorse your both, I'd say, outrage and alarm that the President of the United States is giving this speech in this setting. I mean, even to say it not to military officers is bad enough, right? Right. So it's really, that is horrifying. And then also just the lies of Portland's, you know, it's unbelievable. It's a war zone. and then it turns out he's watching clips from five years ago.

And I think there's enough of that in there to make it a little incredible, if I can put it that way, to the general officers. There was not a lot of, you know, data that made it seem like it was the situation Washington faced early on or Lincoln or even, incidentally, President George H.W. Bush in 1992, went for a week. He mobilized the guard with the approval and encouragement to the governor of California to take care of the, to deal with the L.A. riots. and then they were unmobilized, and that was that.

Didn't go into five different cities because there were crime problems and so forth. So I think in that respect, it wasn't the most, I mean, his base, I suppose, Trump's base is fine with it. But I think if you're a slightly Fox News viewing, maybe voted for Trump privately, you know, general, just didn't convince you that, yeah, I guess I really have to focus. We really need to be used our guys for this local, you know, for local law enforcement, I guess, to protect the firemen on the law. ladders, you know, not to minimize any attacks on them. That shouldn't happen either. So I guess I'm slightly reassured. And I thought here the contrast with Hath, and they don't want

this. I think even if you're a non-bullwork type military officer, you know, you didn't join to do policing at home. You have been taught from the very beginning that is not your role. You don't train for it. You don't want your troops to be exposed to it. I don't think there's much enthusiasm for that. I think in this respect, Hegseth's speech, which was cartoonish and like you know, dope, you know, like a cartoon version of patent or something like that, probably spoke to them a little bit more. Some of them don't like the rules of engagement. Some of them don't like women in combat.

Some of them don't like, you know, various other things that have happened in the last 5, 10, 15, 30 years. I guess Hexeth wants to go back to 1990, 35 years of, you know, reforming of the military. There's probably some market for that. But Hexeth put it in the context of war fighting, actually, which was, I think, intelligent of him in a way. I mean, that was the more conventional, we need to be tougher, more warrior-like. A lot of it is total bullshit, in my opinion, and some of it is dangerous in its own way, incidentally, let's just forgive more crimes abroad and so forth. But I think that is a little more resonance.

I really wonder, I just don't know, how much resonance does the Trump attempt to turn the military into a domestic, giant domestic police force? How much residence does it have in the military? How much resonance does it have with the country? And I guess we just, I don't know. you think? I think we're going to find out. I mean, that's at some point we're going to find out the answer to this question. And I'm not looking forward to that. You mentioned the lies. There's one lie that really jumped out of me as Joe Biden's last quasi-defendant in America. Can you play

clip 10 for me, Jared? I'll brag it about that. I said, we have the strongest military anywhere in the world. I say, you never heard Biden say that. You never heard him say, anything but you never heard him say did he ever hear him say we have the strongest military he doesn't say that i say it we have the biggest economy in the world the strongest military in history of the world we have the strongest military in the history of the world this is you know like Biden said that all the time this is the guy who you know who's the big most famous applause line was like general motors is alive and osama bin latin is dead Anyway, just a small thing.

So I want to talk a little bit about the Heg-Seth aspect of it because there is a real tension between Heg-Seth's macho cosplay and the heart of Maga. And the mantra cosplay is warrior, warrior, warrior, warfighter, we need all of our drill sergeants to be like R. Learmy in that movie I saw once because otherwise, you know, we were turned into a bunch of pussies. And, but at the same time, we're not going to get into any more wars, right? Which is this weird, like the whole idea of America first is we're not going to get into wars.

We are not going to send troops anywhere, but we've got to be all butch. And I think that really, the only way to resolve that tension is to focus on using the military as domestic. enforcers, right? I mean, so what is the, why do we need to expand the size of the military? Why do we need all this? Why do we need everybody doing butch pull-ups and stuff like that? Because this is, I mean, there's another, he, he, uh, there was a line in there where he said, and we don't need the clips on it, but talked about how he says, uh, it all

starts with physical fitness and appearance. If the secretary of war can do regular hard PT, so can every member of our joint forces. blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And again, like, I'm sorry, but right now we are undergoing a transformation of military affairs on the battleground of Ukraine, and it is all related to drones and the use of drugs. This is like the largest transformation of military affairs, at least since guided munitions and maybe since air power. And it has fuck all to do with doing pull-ups.

Like, but you know, do you know what? does have a lot to do with doing pull-ups is busting heads on the street now i take that point i mean i'd say hexath actually gave an example of what he likes in fighting wars post 1945 i guess uh and that was the gulf war i was struck that he sort of put that in it's as if someone read an early draft which was entirely nostalgic for the pre-1947 world of the department of war and said to him what i think we've all commented which is you know what when we were the department of war we got dragged into two massive world wars in which tens of millions of people were killed.

Was that the right attitude? Maybe being the Department of Defense, where you have international alliances, where you understand that it's not just about super mobilization, but it's about having troops deployed in many places to preserve the peace, to deter war. Maybe that's a better, the world has been a better place

since we became the Department of Defense compared to when we were in the Department of War with all due respect and to have the deepest respect, obviously, for what we did actually once we were in World War I and World War II. So I think he probably heard that criticism, someone there did, and they thought, you know, we have to have a moderate instance of the kind of thing we're in favor of. We're against Iraq and Afghanistan, a nation building, and obviously all endless wars and all that. So we're for the First Gulf War. Now, his little account of that is that's something someone should look at.

Maybe I'll write about this for tomorrow morning. It's sort of mildly interesting in a way that it's correctly credits Reagan's buildup, the Cold War buildup, which provided us the huge military we were able to use, large military were able to use in the first Gulf War. And then we had a clarity about ends. He slides over the fact that the people who ran that war that he likes so much are precisely the Republicans, he hates so much. And to the degree that they're still alive, hate his boss, Donald, or despise Donald Trump, and probably don't think much of Pete Heggsath. And who was Secretary of Defense during that war that was so well-run Dick Cheney?

Who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell? Does anyone embody war? And incidentally, well, that is just. what could go on. Obviously, George H.W. Bush himself, Jim Baker, Secretary of State, etc., etc. So he mentioned Schwarzkoff, and Schwarzkoff, you know, sort of had that image as more of a, I don't know, did he patent type? I don't even know if that was really true. So, yeah, I think that would be his way, I guess, why you need to be so tough. But as you say, the truth is, Schwarzkoff, I don't know how much PT he did. And he was, I'll stipulate a very good

general, I think. And as you say, anyway, it's all childish. I mean, but so that, I think would be the way they in their own mind that's how you can reconcile the the the toughness and the uh i guess you know and then the sort of war fighting we're warriors warfying there's a tension between the warrior stuff and the policing at home i guess that's maybe a different way of putting what you just not really well i mean i don't think there right i don't think there is i think that the way you resolve that tension well that is a very real enemy or the enemies within i think it's going to be tough to get the U.S. military to buy into that, but I don't quarrel with your assessment that that's a very dicey, you know, it's going to put a lot of people if it gets serious in

very tough positions and about their, you know, in terms of their oath to the Constitution, I just think that, I don't know, the military, I know, and this goes down to the junior ones too. They do not. I mean, fine, if they get deployed for two weeks somewhere to help out at a flood or if they're in the guard or even if they are active duty maybe for a week in some real emergency, where they don't think that's their job and i don't know i don't know so i'd say the way they want to but the go-for thing you know the commander chiefs they get orders right i mean i'd say incidentally greenland panama uh venezuel are sort of the in-between middle ground that's hexsaint's version of the current first golf war right right you overpower inferior enemies it's western

hemisphere so it's vaguely america first i mean sort of and uh a lot of it could be done by just blowing up tiny little fishing boats and killing them all and so you feel good and you know to be they feel good about that and there's no risk of actual you know difficult combat honestly so that's their vision and i suppose we could go through three more years of things that you and i do not approve of obviously uh in in terms of fishing boats and in terms of blustering against uh denmark as as you know in terms of their control of greenland and stuff and hopefully avoiding either stumbling into a real crisis abroad, which is entirely possible in Asia or Europe,

or we're already facing real challenges, obviously, or the deployments at home. But I take your point that when you really think it through, will Trump be content, content to have, you know, occasionally use force and, you know, very, very in limited ways, pinprick, you know, bombing the Iranians, super successful, obliterated, wow, those patriots.

The whole thing is so incoherent, though. It doesn't it may be full of its own way? The military has been woe and horrible for the last 30 years. Also, these weapons we have? Fantastic. Well, how does that? And also, the people who carried out all these strikes that he liked so much, they are people who were in the military for the last many years.

I mean, you know, what are we talking about here? How do we get these excellent pilots? I mean, it wasn't because Trump suddenly promoted them all in January of 2025. So, I don't know. The incoherence, I think, is sufficiently deep that maybe it makes it a little hard to sustain as an authoritarian or quasi-fascist project, but maybe it doesn't. I mean, that really is the question, isn't it? Maybe it doesn't.

So this is the last thing, and then we'll get out of here. The fixation on the renaming of the Department of Defense and the Gulf of America, these things seem ridiculous until you start realizing that every time you have an authoritarian movement, one of the first things they do is start renaming shit. Totally. You know, whether it's the Khmer Rouge or the Nazis or the Soviets, like, it is a, they get in and the revolutionary spirit is that we are sweeping away the old and creating a new reality. And so they just start renaming things. That is one of the aspects about the Trump administration that I, like, you know, when he goes to actually rename the Kennedy Center, which I'm sure is like in the offing, it's going to be named the Trump Center.

I expect that the new ballroom complex, which is larger than the White House itself, will probably be named for him. They'll probably stick his name on it. Those things are important, right? I mean, the nomenclature does matter because that's part of the war for society itself, isn't it? Yeah, Stalin grad, Leningrad, right? I mean, no, I totally, I think you're absolutely right. And it's a side of where of their authoritarianism. and their disdain for the actual history,

which has given us a bunch of historical names, and their wish to impose their own cartoon version of things on society. I mean, I guess if I wanted to be, I know why I'm in my reassuring vote today since I'm usually... You have to counterbalance me. I guess, yeah, I give you credit for getting to my alarmist side and make me... I mean, I guess they're also third world dictators who rename things.

Some of them do horrible damage, obviously. So I don't mean, but they don't, some of them are very successful authoritarian's mistake just too, I don't know what, goofy and non, but this is where Steve Miller comes in, right? I mean, Miller scares me much in this respect. If Miller remains in that apex of power that he's in, Trump's goofiness does not save us from the authoritarian, does him in the quasi-fascism. Hegsseth's isn't as, you know, focused and serious as Miller, but he probably, I don't know. I don't know.

Hicks, that's a little bit in between these, but he's so incompetent inept. What are the, I feel bad for these senior officers. If I can just say that, though, you know, I've known a few of them over the years. I mean, these are serious people. They've had some sect deaths. They didn't think the greatest, they've had some chairman of the joint chiefs and some commanding officers, like everyone in the military will tell you stories about this, who weren't perfect.

Sometimes even they thought they did some real damage, but, I mean, they've never had a situation like this. And maybe we muddle through it for three plus years, but three plus years is a long time. I always come back to you and I discuss this so many times. I mean, people who think, well, we've seen the worst of it, you know, I think we'll make it through, maybe. If we're only, what are we, eight plus months in? Nine months.

We are nine months in. Nine months. I'm sorry, yeah. So it's a long time to continue juggling and balancing and hoping that our adversaries abroad don't really, really test us and hoping that there are various distractions and constraints on Trump. And I don't hoping HECSeth can spend a lot of time worrying about PT and it sounds like last point about the Hexs, I think I don't wonder. I seems like maybe I minimize.

He's going to do a lot of damage. I mean, the injustice of what he's doing and saying about women in the military and many other, you know, the people they fired, whom he sort of gave kind of liam excuses for. What's something personal? They just benefited from and grew up in a different kind of military. We had to kind of clean house. really disgraceful behavior by him. Didn't Hegsteth grow up in that military?

Like, maybe I'm wrong, but Hegseth didn't serve for four years just while Trump was president, right? And if He's proud of his service and he was a great officer and warrior, then, like, I don't, do you see what I'm saying? But he didn't like, one excuse, I think people like him, I'm excuse. One thing people like him didn't like with maybe 1% of justice, 99% of not justice was the rules of engagement, his senior officers were wimpy, the women. I mean, there weren't even women in combat, of course, when he was there in Iraq in 2006.

So it's all ridiculous. There wasn't DEI. There wasn't anything. There were gays in the military who were out of the closet in the military and so forth. But he was famously, it was face-striking when he mentioned three bad generals. One was Millie. I can remember who the second one was, and then one was Chiarelli. Kierrelli, I can remember how you say his name.

I've met him, actually. I met him in Iraq, who was a very good general. Tried to remove, unfortunately, someone who was a. bad apple, maybe there's a one star beneath him. They didn't, they overruled him very foolishly, I think. Haxeth thought that was an instance of political correctness. The guy was, war crimes were being committed on this guy's watch and they weren't being disciplined. At least that's what Kirelli, I think, thought, and I think others thought. So anyway, Hengsteth has grievances from way back then. As many people who served in the 2000, the tough wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

have, and I say there's some germ of truth in some of them. But so that's sort of maybe what what's driving him, but it does lead him to have a contempt for everything that's happened over the last 35 years in the military, which is a little nuts, very, I mean, more than a little nuts. I mean, are we, you know, and I do, that's why I kind of wonder, you're a senior military officer, you looked up to General Dunford or whoever you did, or General Pace, or Millie or whatever, and others much less well-known, one and two stars, and you think those people were all just, you know, DEI promoted because of DEI or woke people who didn't care about actually having an effective fighting force. I mean, a lot of these people were in actual combat,

obviously, in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think they cared about having an effective fighting force, and I think they were pretty good at it, whatever our problems in those wars were. And I don't know, I feel like they've put themselves in a position where there, Hexeth is maybe a little more than Trump, where he's, but both of them really, where they have contempt for everything that's been done for the last 35 years. Is that really a tenable position? I don't know. Is it?

Well, I think it is because that contempt is a statement of that the only legitimate authority is us, right? And this is, okay, real last thing. That's a very good point. You should elaborate on that point. That's a very important point. Have you ever seen a commander in chief denigrate to the military in public by name his two predecessors in office

and say that they were bad and incompetent because he said he mentioned by name Biden and Obama talked about how terrible they were how incompetent how they were never fair to the military and he did most alarmingly he said that Biden was only president because the election had been rigged so he said that Biden had been an illegitimate commander in chief, and the 800 or so general officers had to sit there

and just accept that? I mean, they didn't have a choice. But this is what I'm saying. This is, he is, he is making cases for the person of Donald Trump being the only legitimate authority to hold the power of commander in chief. No, I think that's really, and I thought you were going to say, yes, I very much agree about attacking Biden and Obama, but also, attacking previous generals who served by name, who have never been accused or convicted, obviously, of any crimes or anything like that or misbehavior. I mean, they were served honorably. They were discharged honorably.

Some of the rose to the very top. So that's never been done, whatever privately people might have thought about some general for four years ago or 15 years ago. No, it's really appalling. So Trump was as bad as we would have expected. I thought, but though, I don't know. Did you think he was showing his age a little bit, repetitious, and maybe therefore not quite as, in terms of the public,

I don't think it was a commanding performance. Hexeth is bad and dangerous. Hopefully most of the stuff is just stupid physical training stuff and all that. And the military officers, I'm somewhat reassured by, but look, they'll be under huge pressure. And again, final, final point, if I could just, he could fire a lot. They could be a lot of turnover.

This is what I, I believe this, Those people in that auditorium would do the right thing if confronted with the choice that you mentioned earlier, Constitution or Trump. Two years from now, three years from now, kind of an important moment, fall of 2020, 28. Were the people who have been promoted to replace many of the people in that room do the right thing? We don't know. And those guys are spending a lot of time looking apparently at promotions and to go as, I think one of them, the next time was say this. We've gone through the files.

We've done a deep dive on all you. everyone in the military, we're carefully selecting people. He also said in passing that all their loyalty is to the president of the United States. You serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States. I do not believe, and that may literally be true in terms of the, I guess the general officers, but not true of the whole military, it's only. But even so, I don't think previous secretaries, the defense would have put it that way, or they would have quickly said, but of course, the key is your professionalism,

your self, your discipline, your loyalty to the Constitution, none of that, of course. So anyway, three years of politicization, of politicized promotions and firings, of rewarding people who go along with the MAGA agenda, even if the military is holding for now, will it hold in three years? That, I think, is extremely worrisome. Did I get alarmed enough to you here at the end? I think so. We're going to find out. Guys, thanks for sitting with us. It's a pretty bad moment.

It is a dangerous moment for America. unprecedented. Of course, if things are unprecedented every day, are they ever really unprecedented anymore? It's hard to say. Hit like and subscribe, follow the channel, and stay with us as we all hope we can make it through this with our democracy intact. Good luck, America.