A Lovely Day for a Loyalty Test

Tuesday would have been a good day for it, with the National Guard illegally in multiple cities, the government poised to shut down and 800 U.S. military flag officers summoned unexpectedly to meet in one room with the president. But no coup came, in either direction. No matter. As with every other illegal thing it’s currently doing, if the Trump administration needs it to happen, it will just act as if it has, wait for media framing to passively accept it, then let the presumption trickle down until it becomes the sort of thing that everyone, wearily, already knows. 

As with the increasing number of intractable wars Donald Trump has “ended,” when you can’t win, you declare victory until everyone else shrugs and grants a celebration. (It’s how he’s winning an illegal war against a crime wave going in reverse.) One strain of thought suggests that the Trump team has taken a look at the numbers — underwater everywhere — and decided to speedrun the establishment of Fully Fascist America now, under the assumption that everyone will give up and concede the point this way. Another school of thought goes: Yes, but that is the only thing these people can do.

Americans who were anxiously scrolling their news feeds on Tuesday morning should be forgiven any anxiety. Trump’s people, after all, once organized a mass demonstration of political violence to overturn an election, and the president’s idea of what to do with them was to tell them that the person they were looking for was his vice president and, oh, it’s such a lovely day, let’s all march over to where he is. It did not take a panicky imagination to envision one of Trump’s handlers peeling away 20 loyalists for a quick colloquy, directing the remaining admirals and generals to admire a view for a moment and — when they turned back — having a machine gun waiting for someone to flick the safety off and recreate the ending to “The Great Escape.”

Such an ending would at least meet a moment conducted under extraordinary circumstances and deliberately sold as being a moment. Summoning 800 flag officers from overseas created needless expense and security risks, so Americans could be forgiven for expecting something. As such, discovering that Tuesday’s meeting almost certainly began as an excuse for Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth to deliver the kind of TED Talk whose YouTube views never exceed its in-person audience came as a completely unexpected relief. These are the stakes that can make the apex example of a meeting that “could have been an email” seem pleasant, even if the boss has already sent that email and forwarded it to you weekly since February.

The actual substance of Hegseth’s speech could not have been more useless for its audience. He used wisdom gleaned from a reservist experience commanding a group of people about the same size as an average high school to lecture people used to strategically planning for 100,000 troops or more on what staff sergeants will be policing in terms of dress code. In terms of the actual strategies and logistics that make up generalship, it was on par with the third key at a McDonald’s being promoted to global head of inventory, then yelling at everyone from the board to the VP level on how much they need to focus on improving their Units Per Transaction by upselling the McFlurry at the register. It’s generally inadvisable to call a chicken salad meeting to serve chickenshit sandwiches to people with stars on their helmets, but it takes some real balls to do it while wearing a suite of flag code violations as accents on the sort of light blue suit you’d wear to audition for the lead role in a Billy Donovan biopic.

The speech offered the usual dog’s breakfast of MAGA whining, posturing and self-contradiction. Woke DEI broke our military. The appearance of overweight troops undermines military effectiveness, but the interventions of our obese Oval Office generalissimo are making us strong. We are tightening the rules on shaving — definitely not because that will see Black troops disproportionately cashiered for noncompliance they can’t help. And our troops and their advancement will no longer be curtailed by “mistakes.” 

The quick read on that last statement is that it is of a piece with Hegseth’s focus on the warrior ethos of our warfighters in the war department; we keep losing wars like Vietnam because we keep asking ourselves unnecessary questions before shooting like, “Can I be sure the child running away from me is a noncombatant?” That we dropped twice as much bomb tonnage on Vietnam as we did in every theater in WW II combined, covered up what amounted to surely dozens of My Lais at a minimum while conducting a warfare of “non-selective terrorism” — that, in short, we tried it his way — doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. But why would it? Pete Hegseth’s only skill besides leaking war plans, keeping the polygraph warm, denying accusations and bankrupting things is being on television, and you have to admit that he was on television when he gave this speech. And to be fair, “warfighting” doesn’t necessarily mean war winning, and the Spartans have owned the trademark on  “warrior ethos” for 2,400 years despite having a golden age that lasted for all of maybe 12 minutes.

Conspiracism might still have carried the day at this point, and truly the resistance mind reeled at the possibilities in the hours leading to Tuesday. Trump and cronies might not have been planning a coup but instead arranging a gathering to see who talked to each other, like arranging the menu for a coup. Maybe whatever comms traffic between flag officers erupted in the aftermath would provide a short list of people to distrust. Maybe Trump was planning to declare certain things and make a note of who nodded. Maybe there was some plan. If there was, no one told the president; or maybe they poured the words into the leader’s ear, but, when they reached his brain — Oops! All soup!

Alas, Hegseth’s strategic chops failed him. Despite having a boss who could be distracted for up to a quarter of a day with a picture of 1990 Cindy Crawford and the words “I heard you had a shot at her one time, Mr. President,” Trump found out about Hegseth’s very, very exclusive gathering with very, very important people and cameras and nonconsensually inserted himself. It was like watching a Make-A-Wish kid crash another Make-A-Wish kid’s last party. It sounded like it, too. Despite a surprisingly frank awareness of his diminished mobility, Trump’s message was the same as usual: I am Trump. The world is a Trump World, and all of you are my Trump people, except for our enemies. About them, he was very frank about the necessity of some of his generals to fight a war from within. 

If Hegseth’s message was to test the loyalty of Trump’s flag officers and to give them and their subordinates permission to commit crimes, Trump delivered the perfect counterargument. Leave aside his obvious contempt for the military and insults to its personnel going back decades, as well as his perpetually preteen conception of warfare. Leave aside the offense of subjecting people who have risen to the apex of detail-oriented careers managing risks to America at staggering expense to two hours of whining self-congratulation from two spendthrift airheads. No matter what Trump or Hegseth said, the message each officer heard was this: Do you want to risk your freedom, your legacy and your sworn code to commit crimes for a leader who is coming to you live from death’s door? Do you think his new order has the power to last as long as a greeting card that plays music?

That the answer should be obvious to a comfortable majority of the officers present will likely not be considered a setback to Trump and his people. You don’t need to be results oriented when you can cook the books in most cases and always have Karoline Leavitt repeat “We’re on to Cincinnati” until everyone gives up. Aside from changing the subject, that last part is really the only move when the leaders involved are functionally only good at posting on the internet or appearing briefly on TV. Shameless repetition unto submission. Maybe it comes in the form of more or less plagiarizing Goebbels, or maybe it’s Trump’s inability to do much of anything but repeat himself. 

Beset by disapproval on all fronts and clamoring ever louder about their phantom triumphs, Hegseth and Trump called on a group of people whose jobs require them to confront a brutal flesh-and-bone reality and demanded they start pretending. The rows of stone faces showed how far that got them, and should ask the leaders of most of our other institutions an important question: When will you stop?