The Nation's Boys' Gym Teacher

I fear he may be trying to make it to vice principal

Image by Military Religious Freedom Foundation, god love them for their work.

Somebody who goes on twitter by @TheShallowState proposed an interesting argument with which I partially disagreed, to the effect that this morning’s big Hegseth event at Quantico must have been staged by Donald Trump as a TV reality show moment, but is apparently very serious about not being quoted at anybody else’s website, so I have reconfigured the following in respect to their desires.

At first glance at the idea proposed by @TheShallowState, sure, but I wasn’t convinced that there wasn’t something more behind it. For one thing, because the plan is just so extremely weird. It’s not something that has ever happened before, as NBC News (for instance) reported; it’s not so unusual to have two or three dozen senior officers gathering at the Pentagon, but more or less all the generals and admirals of the US armed forces, some 800 total, taken. away from posts where you’d think at least some of them should be ready to respond to real military. emergencies in sensitive spots around the world, together with aides, communications personnel, and their own security, which might up the total to as many as 3,000, so much too much for the Pentagon that they’re doing it at Quantico Marine Base instead, and it’s bringing on serious logistical problems even though it has supposedly been under discussion for months. (Somebody was pointing out that if the government shuts down today they could all end up stranded in Virginia for the duration, which would be a pretty funny comment on our current millitary readiness.)

And how many months, actually? This is something that has really been important to somebody for a while, and I don’t think it’s Trump, whose decision announced on Sunday to show up for the event was by all accounts sudden, adding a whole new order of magnitude of logistical difficulties, and he himself has been anxious to play down its importance:

“It’s really just a very nice meeting talking about how well we’re doing militarily, talking about being in great shape, talking about a lot of good, positive things. It’s just a good message,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News. “We have some great people coming in and it’s just an ‘esprit de corps.’ You know the expression ‘esprit de corps’? That’s all it’s about. We’re talking about what we’re doing, what they’re doing, and how we’re doing.”

---

I thought it must be “Secretary of War” Hegseth, popping off in a way he’s done before, in July, when he out of the blue announced a pause in weapons shipments to Ukraine without clearing it with the White House, or with special Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg or secretary of state Marco Rubio, apparently the third time he’d done it, under the prodding of undersecretary for policy Elbridge Colby, a China hawk who thinks focus on Ukraine is stupid, but the first time it rose to public notice, forcing Trump’s own people to scramble to restore the impression that Trump is in some sense in charge. Or maybe with the Pentagon’s crazy new media policy, imposing total department control over what reporters can report or who they can talk to in the building itself, which Trump seemed not to have heard of at all:

When a reporter asked, “should the Pentagon be in charge of deciding what reporters can report on?” the president replied, “No, I don’t think so. Listen, nothing stops reporters. You know that.”

It sounded like a pure Hegseth idea when the subject of his little talk was announced as the “warrior ethos” that he wants to see more of in the service, that it might be in response to increasingly public criticism by July of his terrible management, mishandling of security information, and paranoia, that he’d try to assert his authority over the generals and admirals who were murmuring about him to the press with a sermon on the need for “lethality” in the service, offering himself as a kind of national boys’ gym teacher, surprised and a little angered at being expected to deal with the girls as well—perhaps even vice principal—advising them to stop complaining and do more pushups, which is essentially what he did this morning.

And a very Trumpy idea on the part of the president to limit the damage by coming to the party himself, to contrast Hegseth’s gloomy message with a more cheerful Norman Vincent Peale message of his own.

Though he derailed himself from that plan with a frightening declaration of war on American cities:

“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 one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he told military leaders. “That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.”

Or if he was hoping to distract attention from Hegseth’s bold moves (repeating his well known proposals to have US forces reject the Geneva Conventions and commit more war crimes, threatening to throw all the women in the service out of combat roles if they couldn’t demonstrate the most rigorous standards of gym exercise as men did, because three-mile runs, deadlifts, and timed pushups play such a key role in modern warfare, and telling the generals and admirals in the audience that they’d better not be overweight or the military wouldn’t want them any more), he probably managed that with the fairly clear suggestion that he was planning to send American soldiers and sailors and marines on combat missions in Chicago and Portland, using American cities as “training grounds”.

If not necessarily with one of his 70-minute comedy routines sandwiched between a couple of Stephen Miller sentences, from “from the cavalry that tamed the Great Plains to the ferocious, unyielding power of Patton Bradley and the great General Douglas MacArthur” at 9:54 to “The men and women in this room inherit the legacy built and won by Washington and Jackson, Grant and Pershing, Eisenhower and Patton, Nimitz and LeMay, these were all great men in this effort” at 1:10:40—practically the whole thing was his improv that some of those audience members had traveled ten or more time zones to hear, to the mixed Miller-Trump peroration:

Nobody does it like you. Now we are discovering American muscle, reasserting American might, and beginning the next story [storied?] chapter in American military legends and lore. That’s L-O-R-E. It is lore. When it comes to defending our way of life, nothing will slow us. No enemy will stop us. They’re not — they cannot stop us. And no adversary will stand in our way. They won’t stand in our way. We don’t want them to stand in our way. We don’t want to even put them in that position, but they’re not going to stand in our way ever again. You’ll never see four years like we had with Biden and that group of incompetent people that ran this country that should have never been there... (1:12:49)

I’m sure those generals and admirals were grateful to have had the opportunity to hear this material with the immediacy of live theater instead of mediated through Zoom.

P.S.

If you haven’t yet heard of Elbridge Colby, who may be who’s actually running the leaderless Defense War Department at the moment, here’s some text I’ve been sitting on for a while:

Apparently we now know who’s running the Department of Defense—you knew it couldn’t be Hegseth and there had to be some kind of equivalent over there to Russell Vought at Office of Management and Budget and the more flamboyant speechwriter Stephen Miller at DOJ and DHS. It’s a guy I happen to know something about from reading some really dumb things: Elbridge Colby, familiarly known as Bridge, who used to be roommates with now Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd St. Monsignor Ross Douthat and his philosophical associate (I think they’re the origin point of Josh Hawley’s fraudulent populism) Reihan Salam, when the three of them were 26 years old, in what The Observer’s Jason Horowitz referred to as

the preferred party house for some of Washington, D.C.’s brightest young conservatives: rising government stars, journalists, intellectuals and other overachievers.

The article had one of the great headlines of history, “The Smarmies of the Night”. The Observer belonged to a socialite called Jared Kushner, who we may assume had never read an article in his paper unless it mentioned somebody he didn’t want to offend, like his father-in-law. The party was an after-party from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner of April 29; putting the evidence together, it had to be the one of 2006, at which the featured entertainer was Stephen Colbert. That’s not mentioned anywhere in the piece, though the presence of guys in tuxes is, along with a bit of color on the snack and drink options, and the music playlist to which. Salam dances, by himself: Ghostface Killah, we’re told, the Libertines, the Clash, the New Pornographers. And the bookshelf, heavy on Allan Bloom, David Brooks, and the young Monsignor.

Douthat, following the success of a first book, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Working Class, was already writing for The Atlantic; Salam, recently graduated from a Times job as research assistant to David Brooks, was doing stuff with National Review. Colby, grandson of Gerald Ford’s CIA director, was doing some mysterious job for the director of national intelligence. He and Matthew Continetti are both observed flirting decorously with female guests on (I guess) the off-chance they might get laid, for which I for one will not criticize them. The next generation of the ruling class is being born. The smell of entitlement—it’s just a bunch of regular boys you’d probably get along fine with in a neutral field, playing pickup soccer or something, but they know they’re on this glide path into money and power, destined for it—is what made me remember the article.

Nowadays, Douthat’s as firmly ensconced at The Times as Brooks himself, Salam is the president of the Manhattan Institute, Continetti holds the fort for Trump at the American Enterprise Institute while his father-in-law, Bill Kristol, runs his own never-Trumper shop, and Colby is the under-secretary of defense for policy, and he’s the one who apparently told poor Pete Hegseth to put a pause on weapons supplies to Ukraine last week. That’s because he has his own special foreign policy approach, which is neither isolationist nor neoconservative but “realist”...