Remember: They Are Not His Generals.
Tomorrow’s gathering of hundreds of general and flag officers has an ominous tone about it. Attendees should go in prepared.
Yesterday morning, hundreds of parishioners were worshiping at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Grand Blanc, Michigan when a gunman crashed his pickup truck into the building, setting it ablaze, leaped out with a rifle, and started shooting. At least four people were killed and others were wounded before police shot and killed the attacker. The church burned to the ground, and authorities expect to find other victims in the wreckage.
Only disjointed fragments of personal information have surfaced so far about the shooter, who was a veteran of the Iraq war and had a son with a rare disease. Reported photos from his Facebook show him wearing a Trump campaign shirt in 2019 and a Google Street view of his home shows a “Trump-Pence” sign outside as recently as this year—facts which do nothing to demonstrate a motive, but certainly cut against the narrative of right-wing posters who rushed to social media yesterday to declare the crime the latest attack in the radical left’s war on Christianity.
As usual, in these moments, there is no harm in waiting for facts to emerge before settling on your narrative. And yet there’s no question that many religious Americans are feeling anxious right now, particularly after the attack at a Minneapolis Catholic school a month ago and this attack yesterday. We’re praying for our nation. Happy Monday.
Questions Around Quantico
by William Kristol
Tomorrow, hundreds of general and flag officers of the United States military will gather at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. Marines everywhere may well take a minute to relish the sight of officers from the fancier, dare one say pampered, branches of the armed services (as Marines see it), crammed into their rather modest auditorium. For some, the occasion might even bring to mind the half-in-jest boast that concludes the Marine Corps Hymn:
If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven’s scenes;
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines.
Inter-service rivalries! All part of the esprit de corps of the U.S. military!
And the whole point of this unprecedented assembly of all our generals is, it turns out, according to President Donald Trump . . . precisely to strengthen their esprit de corps.
As he said to NBC News yesterday, “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.”
Or as he told Reuters, “I want to tell the generals that we love them, they’re cherished leaders, to be strong, be tough, and be smart, and be compassionate.”
One might think there are far less expensive ways—ones with fewer inconveniences and security challenges—to have a nice talk with generals and show them some love, if love is all they need.
One might think that if it’s all about esprit de corps, the easiest thing to do would be to notice that his secretary of defense has done more than any of his predecessors to damage the military’s esprit de corps, and tell him to stop.
One might think that if the gathering is about “talking about a lot of good, positive things,” as Trump also said yesterday, he might want to apologize for his repeated public and private denigration of military leaders.
Indeed, one might think that this would be an occasion for President Trump to explain that he understands that general officers in the United States military cannot and should not be—as he’s called them before—his generals.
Trump could even state that he regrets saying, in a conversation in the White House in his first term that, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” He could apologize directly to retired Marine general John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, for asking petulantly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?”
Trump could also vow not to continue making up fictitious praise that he likes to ascribe to generals, such as the claim he made in 2023 at a speech to a group of New York Republicans. Discussing the fallout from the release of the Access Hollywood tape, Trump said:
I went onto that [debate] stage just a few days later and a general, who’s a fantastic general, actually said to me, “Sir, I’ve been on the battlefield. Men have gone down on my left and on my right. I stood on hills where soldiers were killed. But I believe the bravest thing I’ve ever seen was the night you went onto that stage with Hillary Clinton after what happened.”
The general who said these words has, needless to say, never been identified by Trump or any Trump aide. I dare say he does not exist.
Trump will surely refrain on Tuesday from uttering such bald-faced inventions. But I very much doubt he will—in the spirit of Yom Kippur coming up the next day—atone for past sins or correct the record.
Rather, I expect he’ll praise himself for ordering the killing of civilians on fishing boats in the Caribbean that the administration insists, with no evidence or legal analysis, are drug runners engaged in acts of war. He may well defend his deployment of troops within the United States against “domestic terrorism.” He could seek approbation for other problematic policies or opinions.
The point will be to force the generals to applaud such statements, to broadcast that applause—and thereby to signal to all their troops, and to the American public, that the military brass is on board with Trump’s authoritarian agenda. The message would be that this is not simply the United States military but that it is Donald Trump’s military.
It would not be good to send that message. Indeed, it would be good not to send that message.
And so it would be good if all the general and flag officers present could quietly agree ahead of time not to let themselves be used as pawns for political purposes. It would be useful if they could agree not to applaud, not to cheer, but to sit silently and respectfully as the president speaks. Or if they feel they have to applaud, to do so for uncontroversial statements of praise for the courage and dedication of those under their command, and not for political rallying cries. (For more on this point, see Gen. Mark Hertling’s piece on the homepage this morning.)
Is this too much to hope for? I don’t think so. The United States military is justly respected. It holds itself to high standards. It should do so tomorrow at Marine Corps Base Quantico.
AROUND THE BULWARK
What to Expect at the Meeting of the Generals… This is not the kind of military audience Trump has addressed before, argues GEN. MARK HERTLING.
Trump’s DOJ Revenge Scheme… could shatter the country, ELIE HONIG argues on How to Fix it with JOHN AVLON.
Trump Went Too Far? On a George-less episode of George Conway Explains, ANDREW WEISSMAN joins SARAH LONGWELL to discuss how Jimmy Kimmel and James Comey could galvanize Americans.
The Bulwark’s Secret Weapon… On FYPod, TIM and CAM introduce you to JARED POLAND, who helps run The Bulwark’s rapid response team. If you’ve ever wondered ‘how do they do all that?’, this episode is for you.
Poetry, Patriotism, and Truth… On The Bulwark on Sunday, HANNAH YOEST joins BILL KRISTOL to explore Marianne Moore’s poem “Like a Bulwark.” They trace its language and imagery, what it reveals about strength and patriotism, and expand the conversation to other poets and the place of poetry in our time.
How to Debunk Republicans’ Shutdown Talking Points… Their main argument is about health care, and it shows how desperate they are to dodge blame when prices spike for millions of Americans, writes JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.
Why Dems Don’t Have Their Own Charlie Kirk Network… The conservative activist built a political empire before he was assassinated at 31. Why haven’t his opponents built one themselves? LAUREN EGAN reports in The Opposition.
The Hack Is Coming From Inside the House… On Shield of the Republic, ELIOT COHEN and ERIC EDELMAN welcome ANNE NEUBERGER to discuss her latest article in Foreign Affairs, Salt Typhoon, the Chinese hack of U.S. computer systems, and China’s ability to target key nodes of U.S. domestic infrastructure in a crisis or conflict.
Quick Hits
MEDBEDS FOR ALL: The president’s personal Truth Social blog is a deeply surreal place. Saying “he lies a lot” in his posts there doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s a place where the very concepts of “truth” and “lies” are smashed into pulp by the relentless barrage of type-shouting, random capitalization, and claims that are not merely untrue, but crazily, dadaistically so.1 But even in this environment, it’s hard to think of anything Trump’s posted that’s been wilder than a video he put out on Saturday night.
The post looked like a clip from a Fox News broadcast, in which Lara Trump—the president’s daughter-in-law—was reporting the existence of a new White House initiative: a national rollout of shiny new cutting-edge “medbed” hospitals. The clip then cut to apparent video footage of Trump in the Oval Office: “Every American will soon receive their new medbed card. With it, you’ll have guaranteed access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation, equipped with the most advanced technology in the world.”
But the whole thing was AI slop. No such announcement had been made, and no such broadcast had taken place. The whole thing was just a forgery, a riff on the B-tier QAnon-adjacent “medbed” conspiracy theory, which posits that dastardly elites are hoarding a miracle technology that can cure practically any ailment.
Presumably Donald Trump knows he is not in the process of rolling out a brand new nationwide medbeds-for-all healthcare plan, and that he has made no Oval Office speeches to that effect. So why did he share the video? As a calculated effort to throw red meat to the conspiracy theorists? Just because it made him look good, and that’s all the thinking he did? Is there any universe in which he thought it was real? These are the sort of questions you can drive yourself insane trying to answer. Reminder: This guy has the nuclear codes.
RAKE STEP AT THE STARTING GUN: Donald Trump has made it perfectly clear by now: When it comes to filling the top jobs at the Justice Department, his overwhelming priority is picking lawyers who are deeply, personally loyal to him. Little things like ethics, professionalism, even basic competence are way down the list. Sometimes this approach solves problems, like getting his enemies indicted more quickly. Other times, however, this approach creates problems of its own.
Lindsey Halligan, whom Trump installed this week as an acting U.S. attorney for the explicit purpose of bringing criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey, has never tried a criminal case before. Which might explain how she somehow managed to step on a rake in her very first filing of the Comey matter Thursday evening, submitting to Judge Lindsey Vaala two different and contradictory versions of the same grand jury indictment—one that suggested a grand jury had agreed to bring two charges, the other of which suggested they had brought three. “This has never happened before,” the judge said, puzzling over the documents. “I’m a little confused as to why I was handed two things with the same case number that are inconsistent.”
“So I only reviewed the one with the two counts,” Halligan said. “I did not see the other one. I don’t know where that came from.”
“You didn’t see it?” the judge replied. “It has your signature on it.”
A small hiccup at the outset—and an interesting illustration into what is likely to be a fascinating study in legal learning on the job.
BEAN DREAMS: In Friday’s newsletter, we mentioned briefly how U.S. farmers had been an early casualty of Trump’s first-term trade war with China, how the same was likely to be true this time around, and how Trump was talking about oiling up the ol’ farm-bailout machine again. Over the weekend, Politico reported some good details about Beijing’s pullback:
China has not purchased any U.S. soybeans since May, according to the American Soybean Association. Beijing has pivoted to suppliers in Brazil and Argentina — logging huge orders for Latin American beans and leaving U.S. farmers in the cold and panicking.
The dramatic shift echoes China’s response to the tariff war during Trump’s first term when the value of U.S. soybean exports plunged to $3.1 billion in 2018 from $14 billion in 2016.
“How can we be surprised? It’s a repeat of Trump 1.0,” said Marc Busch, who has advised both the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Commerce Department from 2012 to 2018 on trade and is a professor of international business diplomacy at Georgetown University. “They didn’t need Liberation Day or fentanyl tariffs to get them to rush to this playbook—it had been well worn in the first Trump administration and to great effect.”
The latest hit to farmers isn’t just a repeat of the first-term crisis—it’s a compounded version of the problem. When China pulled back from U.S. agriculture last time, it created a huge opportunity for South American farmers to pick up the slack. The resulting windfall allowed those farmers to beef up their emerging-market operations further—putting them in an even better position to capitalize immediately when Trump arrived back on the scene to pick a more aggressive version of the same trade fight again.
Any bozo could have predicted this outcome. But certain bozos appear not to have done so. Politico again:
A person close to the administration said it was “ruffled” and “completely caught off guard,” by the outcry from soybean farmers warning of the potential for financial ruin. That prompted a rush to brief senior officials as well as the president in recent weeks. “There was an information gap. But that was a learning opportunity,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
The learning opportunities are coming thick and fast, it seems. Read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
According to our president, world leaders “freak out” when they see the “quality and beauty” of the Oval Office’s new redecoration, featuring “some of the highest quality 24 Karat Gold”! Democrats, meanwhile, want “transgender operations for everybody!”
Imagine a group of highly educated, decorated, and experienced military commanders being lectured on their loyalties, duties and professional conduct by Pete Hegseth.
He ABSOLUTELY thought it was real. He also thought Portland was on fire because Fox (the actual Fox this time) re-played clips of the 2020 George Floyd response and pretended it was current. This is terrifying because, as you say, this is the guy with the nuclear codes.