Trump hijacks Hegseth's meeting of generals to demand military acts of treason

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held his promised meeting of top military leaders on Tuesday morning, but with a twist. Over the weekend reporters made the mistake of asking Donald Trump about the meetup, for which Hegseth was dragging in top commanders around the world for the apparent purpose of giving them a Whiskey Pete's Guide To Warfare lecture despite Pete provably knowing not a damn thing about military command other than how to do war crimes.

Having heard that the meeting was going to take place, of course Trump decided that he wanted to be in on it. So Pete's plans were scrambled, and Pete no longer was the star of the show; he would share the spotlight with the man who is currently deploying the National Guard to American cities based on stock footage he saw on television.

So then, what was the historic impact of this unprecedented gathering of top commanders for the sake of listening to these two chucklefucks drone on for a while? It depends on who you ask. On one hand, Trump and Hegseth explicitly rallied the U.S. military to support violence against American civilians, war crimes against the rest of the world, and (rather pointedly) reduced penalties for commanders who engage in domestic violence.

On the other hand, there was not a word spoken that these two men had not spoken before. There was no hidden agenda unveiled, because Pete and Donald have been all about violence against Americans, committing war crimes, and wife-beating since they were sworn in.

Announcing those things to the collected commanders of U.S. military forces around the world, with the expectation that those commanders will follow such orders rather than "accidentally" tying one or both men to the screws of the U.S. Nimitz—that part is new. And that is how we find ourselves nudged even closer to an authoritarian flash point that, at this point, threatens to unleash large-scale violence inside the country.

We can dispense with Pete's speech first, because it was exactly what critics expected. For about 40 minutes, Hegseth rambled on, stream-of-consciousness style, with all the grievances that he's been sputtering about since being appointed. Hegseth wants war crimes. He wants maximal violence with minimal rules. That is his only belief, whether sober or drunk, and he calls it "masculine" because the man is a day-drinking Fox News idiot with white nationalist tattoos and the brain of a rabid squirrel.

Pete is a useful stand-in for MAGA thinking because he's just an enormous, pathetic buffoon; a one-note fake warrior who couldn't find a strategy if someone shoved one up his nose, and whose entire notion of "warfighting" is feckless abuse. The speech was geared primarily towards insulting the assembled commanders while promising new anti-reforms meant to reward violent troublemakers.

Now, anyone with enough military experience to rise to the level of one-star general or equivalent, the career choice that landed each of these commanders a non-optional seat to Pete's performance, knows that everything Drunky McGee up there is saying is insane. It is implausible to suggest that end-of-career Pentagon jockeys maintain the same fitness standards as raw recruits; age is not so kind. Violence inside the ranks and refusals to obey orders are not admirable mistakes, but catastrophic; the entire point of military "discipline" is to subdue such instincts even during times of maximum stress, instilling instead the reflexes to execute commands rapidly and without question.

I promise you that no matter how much of a bumbling fool Hegseth appears to be to you, to the commanders gathered in that room he appears to be five times as stupid. Coupled with the natural resentment of having to fly across six or eight time zones because a drunken howler monkey wants a live audience for his hooting, and there's likely not a military leader in the building who doesn't think even less of Pete than they did a day before.

That's not to say his brand of grunting caveman-afraid-of-fire schtick doesn't have some fans, among the thicker necks in the room. But even they probably feel worse about it now that they've had to suffer through it in person.

Ordinarily, that would have been the end of the meeting, everyone could have nodded respectfully at Captain Jack there and gone on with their lives. Hang on, here's what that bit looked like.

Oh, he's rattled. Ha.

But since Donald Trump decided he wanted a piece of this, the meeting was only half over. And here is the thing: Donald Trump has dementia. Donald Trump is rapidly losing the ability to discern between fantasy and reality, the circuits in his brain related to self-control and situational awareness are burning out exactly as they do for most dementia patients, and Donald Trump is now blurting out horrific and impeachable things on the regular.

So this new, unplanned-for half of the meeting quickly became an absolute shit-show, because Trump and shit-shows are synonymous at this point.

After rambling on about the "Gulf of America," the "two N words" that you're not allowed to say, and a few other things, Trump got down to serious military business.

Jeebus, this absolute putz.

We're all going to die. That's what every commander in the room was thinking at this point: We're all going to die. Somebody's going to insult this guy's signature or hand him a sheet of not-gold-enough paper and he's going to launch the nukes.

We're all going to die, and our pilots are going to die flying planes individually named after each of Trump's children, mistresses, and sex trafficked minors.

This. Is. A. Speech. To. Top. Military. Commanders.

Finally, after that went on for approximately infinity minutes, Trump got to the (impeachable) point. Pete Hegseth wants commanders willing to do war crimes. Donald Trump wants commanders willing to commit treason.

I apologize for the wall of video clips, but it is necessary in order to emphasize two things:

1. The President of the United States is demonstrably unfit for office and getting worse by the day.
2. He is now stating, directly, that he intends to use the U.S. military to wave "war" against Americans in cities led by his political adversaries.

Once again, during any other point in U.S. history, one of two things would now happen. The most likely would be impeachment; the other was the Civil War. And we can all see just how far the Republican Party has slid into support for outright treason in their willingness to remain silent even as an obviously unfit and traitorous Trump announces these things.

We could simply impeach him. It would be the obvious thing to do. It has been a given, since forever, that dispatching the military against American domestic opponents is a grotesque constitutional violation and grounds for immediate impeachment.

So yes, the Trump administration is explicitly fascist. It is taking explicit steps to subjugate Americans with military force; it has now literally assembled the uppermost ranks of military leaders to assure them that violence against Americans is justified and criminality is both expected and will be approved of. That is a dramatic escalation.

But it's also not clear whether Trump, a dementia sufferer who rambles about insane things every single day, even knows what he himself is suggesting.

That is what military leaders now have to contend with. And that, no matter what the eventual outcome might be, is already a national catastrophe.

There are not many ways to undo a fascist consolidation of power after it reaches this stage. The worst of all possible options, however, is military coup. If some significant portion of military leaders believe that their commander is ordering them to commit treason against their own nation, there is no way to know in advance how far the resulting violence will spread.

Right now, every American institution is engaged in a game of chicken with all the others. The Supreme Court has been granting Trump extraordinary and, until each of their new rulings, plainly illegal powers; they have been doing so in part because the court's far-right Federalist Society-backed majority truly believes that the executive should hold near-authoritarian powers, and in part as reverse-justification for illegal acts that they may reasonably expect Trump's aides would keep doing even if the court demanded they stop.

Congress is now, bluntly, a criminal enterprise. The corruption of the Republican-led House and Senate is absolute; there has been no act of Trumpian corruption that both groups have not soundly backed. Many of these same figures backed Trump's 2021 attempted coup; at least dozens of them directly participated in it. It would take only a handful of defectors to pluck Trump from office, but there has been no "libertarian," no "moderate," no "statesman" willing to take on the role.

We have seen a great many "moderate" Republicans turn tail and flee Washington rather than challenge Trump's power. None of those currently in office have lifted a finger, however.

So now we are at the last step, the one and only institution that has the power to oppose the collapse of democracy into a cult of feeble-minded personality, the United States military—and that is the worst outcome of all. There is no doubt that the members of each institution, whether in the Court or Congress or top Pentagon commanders, has been sitting with their thumbs in their asses this whole time in the hopes that anyone, anyone at all will put a stop to this madness before they themselves have to lift a finger.

And so we keep teetering, each incremental crime and act of sedition putting more weight on the crumbling democratic structures. It is a game of fascism Jenga: Mike Johnson, John Roberts, and the commanders willing to execute random fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico all pulling out structural supports under the assumption that their complicity will not be the missing block that makes the rest of it finally collapse, unfixable and violent and to all of our eternal shame.

We would do very, very well to have a few conscientious objectors in the Republican congress willing to muster the courage to act so that we do not have to ask ourselves whether there is anyone in the military willing to do the same. Yes, it is personally dangerous for Congress to oppose Dear Leader. That is the fucking point; that is what we have been saying, this whole time; the longer authoritarian fetishes are allowed to fester and the more illegal acts are brushed off for the sake of partisan power the more personally dangerous it becomes for others in power to act.

We know. That is what we've been trying to say, as assassinations begin to claim lawmaker lives, mass violence ratchets up and gunmen ram their trucks into churches under the literal banner of Donald J. Trump. Every week that passes raises the chances of truly horrific violence breaking out.

Now Trump himself is vowing, outright, to bring such violence to his American detractors. Is this not the time to act? Susan Collins, where are you? Giant of opportunistic libertarianism Rand Paul, have you checked your messages? Is there nobody left who isn't a sedition-backing goof, a cowardly pretender, a begrudging backer of treason if treason preserves power and conscience threatens to diminish it?

Now would be a very good time, because the United States military has just been summoned to a display in which the sitting president rambled inanities at length before promising the assembled commanders that they would be fighting in American streets, that just after an alleged secretary of defense urged them to consider war crimes a necessity in this new era of burping, strategy-averse violence for the sake of violence.

Step on up, any of you pathetic assholes. Don't you dare put this on the U.S. military to "finish the job" by backing either their oaths or the demented crackpot. You are all hopeless cowards, half of you are traitors, the other half couldn't find your own shoes without a focus group guiding your way, but this is very close to the last chance. For all of us.