The Silence of the Generals

And the searing words of a veteran on the bench.

Well, here we go: The federal government has shut down. Senate Democrats have vowed to oppose any spending measure that doesn’t restore some of the health care cuts of this summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act; meanwhile, Republicans are refusing to negotiate point blank, while continuing to lie that what Democrats are really after is free taxpayer-funded health care for illegal immigrants. And Donald Trump has pledged to use the shutdown as a pretext slash and burn the federal government to unprecedented levels.

We’ll be watching it all closely as it unfolds—and if you’re a federal worker with a story you want to get out there, please feel free to drop us a note on our secure line. Happy Wednesday.

Senior military leaders look on at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Qualms From Quantico

by William Kristol

There was little that was surprising in yesterday’s speeches at Quantico from President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. We already knew that Trump is a demagogue whose clownish solipsism shouldn’t mask the danger of his authoritarianism. We already knew that Hegseth is a Fox & Friends personality whose pathetic desperation to appear tough shouldn’t overshadow the damage he can do to our military.

Their speeches were predictably depressing and dangerous. My fellow Bulwarkians and I discussed them here and here. And JVL analyzed some of the implications of Trump’s speech here.

So I won’t dwell today on how alarmed we should be by Trump’s wish to deploy the military to fight a “war” against the enemy “within.” And I won’t dwell on how repulsed we should be by Hegseth’s apparent yearning for armed forces that resemble the Soviet military more than the American.

Instead, I want to mention a couple of aspects of yesterday’s news from which we can take some hope.

First, the general and flag officers at Quantico rose to the occasion. They listened in dignified and even stone-faced silence to Hegseth and Trump. Retired Army Gen. Mark Hertling wrote ahead of the gathering that he hoped “the loudest message” the senior officers send “is no message at all—only that they have the quiet, disciplined silence of professionals who know their oath is to the Constitution, not to a man.”

That was the message they sent. It was impossible not to see it. And it was impressive.

I was also impressed by the many younger veterans who stepped up afterwards on social media to express disapproval of what Hegseth and Trump had to say. I was particularly struck by this post from a leader of the group Veterans for Responsible Leadership, reacting to Hegseth’s boast that “America’s warriors . . . kill people and break things for a living.”

This is a disgraceful message. There was a soldier that I served with in the army that later was killed in Mosul, Iraq that said the reason he joined the military was because he believed that it was the greatest force for good that the world has ever known. He said the military not only taught its soldiers to be lethal, but it also taught us to be compassionate and empathetic and care about not only the American people but also freedom-loving and -seeking people from all over the globe. This is the true warrior ethos that so many of us veterans know and love. I’m thinking about him a lot tonight and will be damned if sons of bitches like Trump and Hegseth will transform our great military into something resembling the Russians’. His memory and service must not be in vain.

Obviously, there are post-9/11 veterans who have been sympathetic to Trump and Hegseth. But I’m confident that many understand, especially after yesterday, that Trump’s vision of America—and Hegseth’s of the military—is not what they and their comrades-in-arms signed up and sacrificed for.

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Yesterday also saw a notable contribution to our public discourse from a veteran of a different generation, a man who served a tour in the Army over six decades ago and then continued his public service with a distinguished career as a U.S. federal district court judge. William G. Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the federal bench in Massachusetts and now a senior judge, wrote a long and careful opinion in American Association of University Professors et al. v. Marco Rubio, finding that in one of the early ICE arrests this year the Trump administration had trampled on the free speech rights of an immigrant.

But Young chose to go beyond his important legal analysis of free speech jurisprudence to discuss the larger meaning of “our magnificent Constitution.” And so he addressed the practice of ICE agents wearing masks:

Can you imagine a masked Marine? It is a matter of honor—and honor still matters. To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.

This remark was especially striking in the context of the speeches by Trump and Hegseth. For what they want, in a way, is to turn the U.S. military into an institution more like ICE: an internal police force, unconstrained by many laws or norms, bullying and intimidating people here at home on behalf of the current administration in Washington.

I have considerable confidence that the current crop of general and flag officers do not want a kind of a military that looks like or behaves like ICE, and that they would resist it. But what of the military leadership three years from now? The Washington Post recently described efforts by Hegseth to shape the next generation of senior officers. “Even at the one- and two-star level, the secretary’s team is scrutinizing old relationships and what officials have said or posted on social media, as they determine whom to send forward for a higher rank or assignment,” the paper reported.

What will the officer corps look like in three years? Can we be confident that Trump and Hegseth won’t succeed in turning the U.S. military into something more like ICE? The thought seems incredible. But that ICE would be doing what it is now doing on our streets would have been shocking just a year ago.

The opinion of Judge Young and the silence of the generals at Quantico offer some grounds for hope. But military officers and district court judges alone won’t save us. And it’s perhaps worth noting that neither the judge nor the senior officers were elected to their offices. At the end of the day, free government can’t be preserved without the commitment and courage of elected officials. So the question is: Can more of our elected officials rise to the occasion? Which means, can more of the American people rise to the occasion? That’s the question with which Judge Young concludes his opinion:

I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected. Is he correct?

Is he correct?

Doing Vlad’s Business

by Will Saletan

The rants delivered by Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth to America’s military brass on Tuesday weren’t just childish and ignorant. They were also dangerous, advancing the strategic interests of our nation’s enemies—particularly Russia—by stoking domestic conflict.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence.

Two months ago, Gabbard held a briefing at the White House to discuss Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. She didn’t deny that Russia had interfered. What she denied was that in doing so, Russia had sought to help Trump. Instead, she argued, “the intelligence reflects [that] Russia’s motives were to try to sow discord and chaos” in the United States.

She wasn’t wrong to say that fomenting discord was—and still is—the main objective of Russia’s meddling. That conclusion matches the original 2017 U.S. intelligence report on Russia’s election interventions, as well as reports by the Rand Corporation in 2020 and the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center in 2024. The Rand report said Russia had “four main objectives.” The first was to “polarize and disrupt societal cohesion by exacerbating important and divisive issues, such as race, social class, and gender.” The second was to “undermine public confidence in democratic institutions and processes.”

That’s exactly what Trump and Hegseth tried to do on Tuesday.

Hegseth used race and gender to taunt the assembled officers. He derided “diversity,” “DEI,” “racial quotas,” “males who think they’re females,” and “females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men.” For good measure, he ridiculed “beardos” and “fat troops.”

“We’ve promoted too many uniformed leaders . . . based on their race, based on gender quotas,” said Hegseth, implicitly targeting the female and nonwhite officers in the room. In a pointed reference to retired Gen. CQ Brown Jr.—the black former chairman of the Joint Chiefs who was ousted in February—Hegseth bragged:

I have fired a number of senior officers since taking over: the previous chairman, other members of the Joint Chiefs, combatant commanders, and other commanders. The rationale, for me, has been straightforward: It’s nearly impossible to change a culture with the same people who helped create or even benefited from that culture.

That sounded like a threat to women and minorities in military leadership. And to anyone who didn’t like what he said, Hegseth continued: “If the words I’m speaking make your heart sink, you should resign.”

Trump, following Hegseth to the podium, sought to divide the brass, the troops, and the American people by party. He insulted Barack Obama (“He did a lousy job”), Joe Biden (“He had no clue”), and Democrats generally. “The past administration . . . did not treat you with respect,” Trump told the generals and admirals. “They’re Democrats. They never do.”

The president called his domestic critics—in particular, journalists whose reporting he didn’t like—“vicious people . . . that we have to fight.” In fact, he suggested, the military would soon be enlisted to fight domestic troublemakers literally:

Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. . . . 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. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.

In the most chilling line of the speech, Trump suggested that the military use cities “as training grounds.”

“We’re going into Chicago very soon,” he added, scorning the governor’s opposition to this move. And he implied that troops, like ICE officers, should feel free to use violence against unruly protesters. “If it’s okay with you generals and admirals,” he proposed, “I say: They spit, we hit.”

This inflammatory rhetoric provokes exactly the kind of strife Russia wants. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Trump cited Vladimir Putin as one of his admirers. After boasting that America was “a dead country” under Biden and had been revived only under Trump, the president crowed: “Putin said that to me.”

Trump did express disappointment that Putin hadn’t ended the war in Ukraine. But while doing his part to weaken American social cohesion, he also delivered on Putin’s second objective: undermining American confidence in our democratic institutions. “If the election weren’t rigged” for Biden in 2020, Trump told his military audience, the Ukraine war “would have never happened.”

So cheer up: Trump and Hegseth did serve important national interests on Tuesday. It’s just that the nation whose interests they served wasn’t ours. The spectators in the Kremlin must have laughed when they heard Hegseth mock “diversity” and proclaim that “unity is our strength.”

Trump and Hegseth clearly hate diversity. But they wouldn’t know unity if it bit them in the ass.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• How To Beat Middle Finger MAGAism... Pete Hegseth blasts the military and plugs his book, while Charlie Kirk’s assassination fuels debate over confronting MAGA. TIM MILLER talks with DAVID JOLLY about his campaign and with VAN LATHAN on what’s missing in conversations about beating MAGA.

• A Government Shutdown Is Looming So Hard Right Now Here... Negotiations completely fell apart with hours left on the clock. JOE PERTICONE on what happened in Press Pass.

• What Will Happen to Health Care in a Shutdown? On Just Between Us, JONATHAN COHN joins MONA CHAREN to discuss Trump’s and Hegseth’s speeches to the generals and admirals, as well as the health care angle of the government shutdown.

• The GOP’s Shutdown Argument is a Big Lie... No, Democrats aren’t trying to fund health care for “illegal aliens,” writes JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.

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Quick Hits

COLLATERAL DAMAGE: This Washington Post investigation into some of the human costs of the murder of USAID will take your breath away:

Fever ravaged the body of 5-year-old Suza Kenyaba as she sweated and shivered on a thin mattress in a two-room clinic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pigtailed girl who liked pretty dresses was battling malaria and desperately needed medication that could save her life.

That medication, already purchased by a U.S.-taxpayer-funded program, was tantalizingly close—a little more than seven miles away. But it hadn’t reached the clinic where Suza was being treated because President Donald Trump’s suspension of foreign aid had thrown supply chains into chaos.

The injections Suza needed had traveled thousands of miles to the Central African nation, USAID and other records show, only to be stranded in a regional distribution warehouse in the same city where she was gasping for air.

Less than a week after her symptoms began, Suza was dead. Congolese government data shows that in Suza’s province, deaths caused by malaria nearly tripled in the first half of this year.

Pure cruelty. Pure waste. We’ve repeatedly written this year about the staggering damage done by DOGE’s clownishly arrogant annihilation of USAID: children starving to death in war zones while already-purchased food aid rotted on shelves because the people in charge of distributing it had been fired; babies dying of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa because Elon Musk’s crack team of geniuses decided treating them for pennies a day was too much bother—or, what might be worse, just callously turned off their spigot of money without bothering to figure out what it was for. The toll is unimaginable. We owe it to the dead to remember. We owe it to their loved ones to fix it.

DRUG PRICES GO DOWN: These days, it’s usually not a good sign when Donald Trump gets together with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a big public-policy rollout. But some of the initiatives announced at the White House event yesterday arguably weren’t so bad, even if they’d have been denounced as pure socialism if they’d come from a Democratic president. Trump, Kennedy, and a number of other administration health-policy figures announced several developments aimed at making prescription drugs cheaper for Americans. Pfizer, they said, had agreed to sell its drugs to Medicaid patients at the same lower prices it charges in other developed nations. Additionally, new products Pfizer brings to market would be priced similarly across the developed world for everyone as well. And the federal government would soon be rolling out a direct-to-consumer platform for discounted medications—albeit with the eyeroll-inducing name of “TrumpRx.”

There’s a certain unsettling tension here. Trump’s willingness to wield the might of the federal government against private companies that displease him has resulted in a lot of cowardly behavior from giants of the private sector this year. In this case, however, that business solicitousness seems likely to actually benefit Americans, at least in the short term.¹

Trump, for his part, seemed yesterday to have little sense of what was going on. That he had been badgering his underlings to go figure out how to lower prescription drug prices was clear. But he seemed to be laboring under the completely mistaken belief that the recalcitrant party wasn’t U.S. drug companies but foreign nations:

My administration is also taking historic action to investigate the unfair and discriminatory trade practices of other countries that extort our pharmaceutical makers to shift costs onto the American consumer. They say, ‘no, give us a very low prices and just charge the American consumer, charge it to the U.S.’ . . .

By taking this bold step, we are ending the era of global price gouging at the expense of American families, and we’re making America healthy again, which is our little theme for the people behind me.”

This is a really big announcement. This is something most said was not doable. And other countries are going along because we told them, if you don’t go along—you know, they didn’t have to go along—but if they didn’t go along we were going to put extra tariffs on those countries and we were going to charge them the amount of money they should be paying for the reduction in costs. And so I think we had a pretty good negotiating position.

Again: The changes announced today had zero to do with the decisions of foreign nations and everything to do with the decisions of Pfizer. Other than that, he’s doing great.

<SARAH MCLACHLAN VOICE> I WILL REMEMBER YOU. WILL YOU REMEMBER ME?: EJ Antoni, Trump’s controversial nominee to head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a man who dressed oddly like a magician, has seen his nomination withdrawn. What to make of the Trump administration’s surprise decision?

It would be nice to think the White House backtrack had something to do with the many valid criticisms of his nomination: his thin resume as an economist, his track record of online conspiracism and bigotry, or even his—ah—unusual interest in Nazi-related imagery and alternative historical narratives of World War II.

But of course, there are other possible explanations. Trump fired the last BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, on the heels of BLS’s shaky July jobs data report, which he fumed she had “rigged in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” But this month, the August report came in very lackluster too, which suggested one of two things: Either Trump had been wrong to think McEntarfer had been cooking the books, or the plot to make Trump look bad went even deeper than he realized. Maybe, having realized he’d underestimated the scope of the Deep State’s treachery, Trump wondered whether Antoni was really up to the job of whipping them back into shape.

Cheap Shots

1. The argument for the Americans-pay-more status quo has always been that pricing drugs at whatever prices each country’s market can support lets drug companies push the greatest amount of money into new R&D, which speeds the development of new and better pharmaceuticals, which ends up benefiting everybody in the long run.