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SeSeptember 302025
By Marc Cooper
"If you were expecting something from Triumph of the Will, you instead got the Gong Show," said the Bulwark's Jonathan V. Last (JVL) about Tuesday's lecturing of America's 800 top military brass by Dumb and Dumber.
The cognitively shrinking Donald J. Trump and the drunken Christian Nationalist Secretary of War [sic] spent millions of dollars to fly in the U.S. military's top leadership from around the world so they could sit for a couple of hours and listen to two idiots who are their civilian commanders babble and watch them make asses of themselves in front of the entire world.
The web is flooded with hair-raising accounts of what was said, so no need to add much to the clutter except a few words.
Trump babbled for 70 minutes, appearing so subdued and numbed out it was like he loaded on lithium…which might be the case. He almost slurred through the whole performanc,,e which was at once senseless rambling paired with nonsensical paragrap ands, lies. Distortions and blatantly partisan exhortations. In short, he showered the brass in his routine insults of Obama and Biden, he declared all his opponents to be Radical Left Democrats, had nothing to say about our foreign adversaries, and instead mumbled about "the war within" that he is waging and hoping the military will win for him. He nominated himself again for the Nobel Peace Prize but remembered to refer to phantom urban criminals as "animals."
The big takeaway, however, that will be making headlines over the next 24 hours was this blockbuster: Trump said we should use "American cities as [military] training grounds." He did not specify if the current ground incursions should also include, say, practice air strikes against Seattle or nuclear bomb tests over Memphis.
As they damn well should have, the supposedly non-partisan professional officers sat stone-faced through the whole affair and ignored Trump's invitation to applaud. I assume most of the brass present voted for Trump, just as I assume they had deep regrets after watching this undiagnosed psychiatric patient up close and personal. Any remote chance for a pro-Trump military coup lessened today because a lot of these officers would have second, thir,d and fourth thoughts about breaking the democratic order to keep this moron fossil in power.
Then there was ouclean-cutut, heavy-drinking, ass-pinching, undereducated, inexperienced, all-American Secretary of War Pete Hegseth lecturing officers twice his age with decades of military experience as if he was some sort of blockhea9th-gradede P.E. teacher.
He promised them no more hassle with bothersome "rules of engagement," ignoring international law, vowed that fighting troops "warriors" must all meet "male physical standards," that women who wanted combat service must meet the same standard, but left unclear if they also had to grow a set of hairy balls (details forthcoming). He spoke as if the U.S. Armed Forces had been as weak as the Swiss Navy over the last 30 year,s and now it was time to man up and learn to ruthlessly destroy and kill the enem,y and as a sweetene,r he lifted the ban on hazing new recruits. I’m not sure if kegstands have become mandatory, though.
Indeed, sounding exactly like my own 8th grade P.E. teacher in 1963, a sawed off, buzz cut, Korean war vet and thinking of himself a sort of drill sergeant commanding 12 year old boys, he would line us up in formation to make sure our sideburns weren't too long and would snap open our gym trucks to make sure we wearing jocks straps and not civilian underwear. This all came back to mind when I saw Hegseth today order mandatory daily physical training and twice-yearly fitness tests. (it's gonna be a bear to carry that out as it is estimated that 20% of active duty troops are obese).
"It's tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops," said Hegseth. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals in the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world.”
He also ordered all troops to have short haircuts and be clean-shaven. “No more beardos,” he thundered.
It was all really phantasmagorical as he sounded like a 1969 hard-hat berating “peaceniks, hippies and weirdos.”
I’m inclined to offer no more details as this was a show that is getting universal horrific reviews across all media platforms so you will be drowning in them. I am not even going to try and guess what the overall impact of this charade will be other than it appears Trump will continue sending in troops to American cities.
I do offer you this excellent reaction conversation between JVL and Bill Kristol of The Bulwark. It’s calm, reasoned and on point. It’s 35 mins so u might want to save it for later. But it’s worth it. On the other side of this video, lower down, some thoughts on the government showdown. See the video after you read that part of this post.
About That Shutdown: Donald Trump WANTS a shutdown. He’s done everything possible to avoid negotiating for the 8 Democratic Senate votes he needs to ratify his horrific BBB.
Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, should be sued for political malpractice. They have been weedling and begging Trump and MAGA to negotiate and make a deal to give over those 8 votes. They are demanding that Trump erase the part of the bill that will not extend Obamacare subsidies for those with marketplace health insurance and that will expire at the end of the year. It’s a good cause because the BBB cut off of those subsidies will dramatically raise premiums for 22 million ACA users, perhaps as much as doubling them.
But why focus on only that? And why be a supplicant to the worst, most indifferent, dishonest president in history? He wipes his ass with such “deals” and there is no reason to trust him or the MAGA congress if some sort of last miute breakthrough is reached by midnight Tuesday.
Some Democrats have been fooled by the tough no-give rhetoric of Jeffries and Schumer. It’s bullshit. They and every other legislator knew six months ago that this showdown was coming on this date and what exactly did they do to lay the political and outreach groundwork for a balk on the votes? Nothing. Zero. Zip.
Even if a last minute deal on the subsidies is reached in the next few hours and the Dems sign on, it means they also become enablers of everything else in the execrable BBB: the trillion dollar cut to Medicaid affecting 15 million of the most vulnerable Americans, the slashing of the food stamp program taking aid from millions of others, it makes them complicit with a $1.2 trillion military budget, with another tens of millions dedicated to making ICE bigger than the Marines. The Democrats would be saving the ass of an increasingly dictatorial regime in which the Republicans control the three branches of government. If they can’t put together a rational budget that can pass, it’s their frickin’ problem, not anybody else’s. Not to speak of the crippling tariffs, the dismantling of once-independent federal agencies and so on. The Democratic stance could have been this budget shortfall should serve as a declaration of war against MAGA, which has been relentlessly waging war against the Republic for the last decade.
The Democratic position, after Schumer caved on the first round of this a half year ago, should have been a stern, inflexible warning to Trump that the Democratic answer this SeSeptember 30as going to be a flat no, no no to such a lopsided, cruel and un-American funding proposal and, hey, you guys go figure it out.
This crisis also starkly reveals the yawning chasm between the political class and the electorate — both of whom share responsibility for fecklessness albeit not in equal shares.
Not only did the Democratic leadership know a half year ago that today would be the showdown but so did the liberal NGO’s and community organizations that have been organizing the big No Kings demos. The next one is set for almost 3 weeks from now on October 18th.
Call me a dreamer, but would it have been impossible for the Democratic leadership and groups like Indivisible and its ilk to actually COORDINATE so that the they could all converge on the budget D-Day and make this a much larger confrontation with the regime other than one concession on health care? Again, maybe I’m naive to even muse about it, but this week could have been—but will not be— the opening of the first serious offensive against this whole ghastly regime, a battle fought non-violently in the streets and suites?
To answer my own rhetorical question: No, I don’t think Jeffries and Chuckie would be comfortable in such a coalition with the civilian-based protest groups. But those groups did not need the permission of the Democrats to protest the whole damn budget just as the Democrats were holding some, shrinking leverage over Trump.
I find this an ominous sign that our opposition is much weaker and non-strategic than I thought. As I write this at 5:15 pm EDT, I would not be surprised if the groveling Democrats capitulate, accept some half-baked Trump promise and sign onto the bill that funds an increasingly authoritarian regime. If the don’t. they mostly likely will some days or weeks into the shutdown.+++
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