Trump and Hegseth ripped by ex-Pentagon staff for 'condescending and insulting' America's top generals

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth were accused of 'condescending and insulting' America's top generals and admirals at a highly anticipated summit on Tuesday.

The president and Secretary of War hosted hundreds of military chiefs at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday, for a meeting they hoped would inspire the nation and revolutionize America's fighting force.

But ex-Pentagon chiefs warned that the political speeches, which meandered through various topics from fat soldiers to Joe Biden's autopen, risked alienating the top brass.

A former national security official told the Daily Mail that he found it 'incredibly condescending ... and a highly inappropriate politicization of the US military.'

'A charade,' was how another ex-Pentagon official characterized the televised meeting. 'To add insult to injury, [Trump] told four-star generals they could quit if they didn't like what he was saying.'

Hegseth set out a vision for troops and their commanding officers unencumbered by woke politics, DEI and 'dudes in dresses,' dropping four-letter expletives throughout his opening gambit.

Trump then followed, attempting to soften the stone-faced generals with anecdotes and quips — including joking about needing to avoid saying the N-word, referring to nuclear weapons.

The summit at Quantico, which was to the Press last week, involved hundreds of generals and admirals being summoned from around the world, including those from war zones.

The purpose of the meeting had remained shrouded in mystery — but speculation of any ominous portending was put to rest this morning, as Hegseth began his speech by lecturing about the need for a 'male standard' fitness test.

A former Biden defense official said: 'They spent tons of money to come here and talk about the direction of the department and 'culture'.

Those of us who are old enough to remember witnessing history on flickering, snowy, black and white television when Truman fired MacArthur have a sense that Hegseth and Trump are speaking about something more than fat generals' waistlines. This is more than that, this is an initial defining skirmish in the war against the deep state.

If politics is downstream from culture, can we not say that discipline and morale are downstream the military culture? Hegseth has rightly analogized the renewed culture of the military in the brand-new War Department to the broken windows theory of law enforcement. When small infractions are punished larger problems will simply not arise. If the culture will not tolerate bad haircuts, how much less will it tolerate sabotage along the lines of command? General Millie had more than an overgrown waistline, he was openly insubordinate and clandestinely subversive in a culture that permitted, even encouraged such behavior.

So Trump is staking out the boundary lines within which the military must play. In his speech Hegseth promised that more explicit rules will be forthcoming in follow-on addresses to the force. But the ground rules to resist those rules about how to wage war and prepare for war have now been firmly established: there is a new sheriff in town, the Commander-In-Chief.

Those who are acquainted with the literature will know that Lincoln had his travails with his generals, especially McClellan who subverted Lincoln's attempts to quell the rebellion and who even ran against Lincoln in 1864. McClellan found a thousand reasons to delay and subvert Lincoln strategy, and his example has only been magnified by the modern deep state.

In subsequent addresses, Hegseth will no doubt outline the president's strategy to overhaul our defense architecture. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that our present force is unprepared to wage war from under the sea to near space with entirely novel weapon systems, all controlled by artificial intelligence and involving battle scapes not always associated with terrestrial geography, but with cyberspace, for example.

This is a major undertaking, a revolution that will be resisted by those in uniform and out, for good reasons and ill, and with powerful elements of the military-industrial complex, who will be well-funded, willing to spend whatever it takes to shape our new military in ways profitable to them. There will be disagreements many in good faith from genuinely held beliefs.

An analogy is often drawn to the role of General George Marshall who, anticipating our involvement in World War II, rigorously thinned out over age generals to make room for merit promotions for the likes of Eisenhower. Marshall's role is often credited with helping us win that war. But an even greater challenge confronting the nation was the need to gear up industrial production to an unprecedented level that enabled us to win wars in Europe and Asia from an initial starting point of pitiful unpreparedness with minimal loss of life.

Winning that war was made possible because every element of America came together, not just the military but industrialists as well as citizens who flocked to the recruiting stations and willingly submitted to rationing etc.. In that massive undertaking, General Marshall was greatly aided by the Japanese who obligingly attacked Pearl Harbor and galvanized the nation.

Neither Trump nor Hegseth can count on any potential adversary committing another Pearl Harbor attack that even the Japanese came to recognize, "awakened a sleeping giant." Although, Putin's incursions of airspace in Europe and China's incursions at sea in Asia have taken small steps in that direction, the push to modernize must proceed against the deep state on the strength of its own logic. We cannot count on the enemy boosting our war for preparedness against the deep state but the administration is nevertheless responsible for winning that war if the enemy strikes in surprise. The world is turning over so fast that we cannot count on the time necessary to retool as we did in 1941, the restructuring is urgent and immediate.

One final word. It is not entirely a bad thing that competing interests will fight to shape our military destiny, this is the way of a democratic republic, as frustrating, even maddening, as the process has historically shown itself to be. It must be done this way, the hard way, involving the bottom up as well as the top down. Disparate interests must be able to make their case in a process that was originally conceived by the Founders to be subject to checks and balances among divided powers. Congress gets a say when it controls the budget, the military itself must be brought to belief, not just to obedience, the people ultimately must be on board. But out of this welter of competing claims and views the legitimate power of the commander-in-chief must prevail.

So Trump's war against the deep state is an initial stage only. Ultimately, Donald Trump's presidency will be judged on his ability to win this war against the deep state and that means winning it by bringing a deeply divided nation together, as Abraham Lincoln did in the face of monumental difficulties, to get us ready save the Republic while preserving the Constitution.

WHEN TRUMP & HEGSETH BLEW THE FIRST DRUG RUNNING BOAT OUT OF THE WATER-——— NAVY RECRUITMENT THE NEXT DAY WENT THRU THE ROOF... true or false

That claim—about Navy recruitment spiking the day after Trump and Hegseth authorized a strike on a drug-running boat—appears to be unverified and likely anecdotal or exaggerated.

Here’s what we do know:

🧠 What Actually Happened

In September 2025, President Trump authorized multiple military strikes against alleged drug-smuggling vessels, particularly from Venezuela.
These strikes were part of a broader campaign to designate cartels like Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations and use military force to disrupt their operations.
The actions were controversial, with some lawmakers questioning the legality and strategic implications.

📈 Recruitment Spike? No Confirmed Data

There is no publicly available evidence or official reporting that shows a direct, measurable spike in Navy recruitment immediately following the first strike.
While some online commentary and forum posts have celebrated the action and speculated about its motivational impact, that’s not the same as verified recruitment statistics.

So: False until proven otherwise. It’s a compelling narrative—decisive military action inspiring enlistment—but without hard numbers, it remains in the realm of patriotic folklore.

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