The Friday Brief

The Silence of the Generals

Inside

The Silence of the Generals
RIP CBS?
Good News From Moldova
AI “Actors” Aren’t…
Eating the Rich
Red Court, Unitary Executive
Dying for Qatar
Stem Cells and Stroke Cures
The Shutdown Is About Epstein
What I’m Reading
Scenes From The Home Front

The Big Picture

The Silence of the Generals

Here’s the thing, and you know it in your bones: that speech was insane. Not “politician riffing” insane. Not “grandpa got a little too stoked on Adderall” insane.

It was the kind of rambling, aggrieved, slack-jawed performance you get when a man has fused his ego to a teleprompter and still can’t find the plot. Donald Trump shuffled out, tried to grunt his way through a “speech” that was really just a slurry of “Sir” stories, self-fellation, and absurd lies… and then inevitably fell back into the only narrative he’s truly capable of sustaining: grievance, fantasy, and the endless autobiographical fan fiction where he alone is hero, martyr, and field marshal.

And the room knew it.

This wasn’t the county GOP Lincoln Dinner; this was a forced assembly of America’s senior military leadership, men and women who manage more complexity before breakfast than Trump, Pete Hegseth, and their entire MAGA cosplay corps could comprehend in a lifetime.

They lead in real danger, in real time, in real space, against real adversaries. They run multivariate operations across the globe that would leave the weekend cable-host-turned-pretend-Patton drooling into his third morning cocktail. Instead, they had to sit for two hours and watch Hegseth try to swing his rhetorical broadsword before Trump wandered onstage and word-vomited all over the carpet.

The silence was deafening. The smatterings of polite applause? Mercy claps from Hegseth and Trump’s staffers. You could feel the oxygen getting sucked out of the room as the Commander-in-Chief proved what all of the Flag officers in the room knew already: he is utterly unqualifed, mentally unfit, and below the standard of leadership they’d expect from a green 2nd LT.

Let’s start with Pete. His speech was the cinematic trailer for an ’80s straight-to-VHS war flick: sweaty machismo, fantasy heroics, and the intellectual depth of a shot glass. His theory of the military: fewer adults, more door-kickers; less infrastructure, more chest-thumping. More worries about haircuts and beards than about military personnel and their missions.

In reality, the tooth only bites because the tail is vast, disciplined, and maddeningly detailed. For every SEAL who breaches a door, there’s an orchestra behind him: intel, logistics, medical, legal, comms, training cycles, family services, and a bureaucracy that—yes—can be trimmed, but cannot be wished away without amputating capability.

Hegseth wants to turn basic training into a contact sport and calls that readiness. It’s juvenile. It’s performative. And his little homily about drill sergeants “putting hands on” recruits was…let’s call it awkwardly eager. Warfighting isn’t a fetish club. It’s a trade that requires discipline, law, and the boring, blessed grind of preparation.

He’s a dangerous clown…but still a clown. The danger lies in the job title and the proximity to a president who seeks loyalists, not leaders; performers, not professionals.

Trump’s performance was pure Trump: the greatest hits album no one asked for. Patton, MacArthur, Bradley, names he can remember because he saw them in movie portrayals or History Channel docs. He knows only a wax museum of heroes invoked by a man who “learned” naval warfare from Victory at Sea reruns.

For younger readers: think Chauncey Gardiner from Being There. “I like television.” That’s your Commander-in-Chief’s historical method.

He droned through the vendettas: Biden, “the woke left,” Democrats, governors, cities he hates, the perennial “enemy within.” He painted Portland and Chicago as war zones worse than Afghanistan.

Sure, Don.

Let’s see you walk ten blocks in Kabul and ten blocks in Chicago and we’ll compare notes. The man is obsessed with proving that America is weak and at war with itself, then insisting only he can save it.

He sees the military not as an institution bound by law and tradition but as a personal guard to be pointed inward at domestic political foes. He has said the quiet part out loud so many times it’s deafening.

Here’s what matters: every foreign adversary watched that speech and laughed. If you’re Xi Jinping, you saw an unserious man, a Cabinet of courtiers, and a military leadership forced to watch the king lurch around the throne room, muttering to ghosts. You saw a country’s military leadership deeply divided…and the divider-in-chief gloating about it.

The lack of real applause wasn’t a production glitch; it was a temperature check. Those were not roaring ovations. For Trump, a man who needs crowds like a shark needs blood, that quiet had to sting. For Hegseth, it had to land like a brick. The fantasy of “I summoned the warfighters and they all swooned” died right there, under the fluorescents of that auditorium at Quantico.

Trump dipped back to the prompter at times, and you could hear the speechwriter’s syntax trying to herd the cats. Those brief islands of coherence only made the rest of the glossolalia more obvious. He is not all there.

And yes, I know the screaming match this invites. Spare me. We’re beyond “he’s just riffing.” You could see the diminished bandwidth, the greatest-hits autopilot, the repetition that comforts a failing narrator. The man who once ran rings around the media with shamelessness alone now struggles to keep his story straight for five minutes.

He still holds the title. He still holds the levers. That’s the bad news.

There is a bedrock in American civil-military life: the military is apolitical, bound by law, and obligated to refuse illegal orders.

That’s not a “norm.”

That’s not “ guidelines.”

That’s the Constitution. Presidents ask; the law decides. If the President says, “Nuke Buffalo,” the legal machinery isn’t supposed to say, “Let’s talk targeting options.” It’s supposed to say, “No.”

Trump’s entire project is to blur that line, to make the uniform a loyalty test, the chain of command a personal chain. He wants a fascist military: not jackboots and banners (though he wouldn’t mind the banners), but a force that treats the president’s domestic enemies as the nation’s enemies. When he says “the enemy within,” read your 1930s German history. The slippery slope here is greased with words like that.

Could he succeed? Not today.

The upper echelons, including the four-star and most three-star generals, grew up in a culture older than Trumpism. They understand the law. They understand the tradition.

But Trump and Hegseth aren’t targeting the top alone. They’re cultivating a generation, brigadiers and below, who’ve marinated in MAGA’s authoritarian aesthetics and might mistake obedience for patriotism.

The test isn’t theoretical.

He will ask for illegal things. He will push the boundaries. He will demand “full force” against Portland, or Detroit, or whichever city he’s hate-watching that week. Airstrikes? Drones? Don’t laugh. He won’t use the words. He’ll use the vibe. He’ll seek to make the unimaginable administratively inevitable.

The question after today is simple: how many in that room looked left and right and wondered, “Who follows the illegal order?”

Trump doesn’t understand strategy, acquisition, alliances, or the grotesque arithmetic of logistics.

He thinks you can resurrect battleships because they looked cool in a documentary. He imagines that cruelty is a substitute for capability; that America only loses when we fail to be mean enough.

It’s Colonel Kurtz cosplay: the horror, the horror, as a political program. This is the country that hammered Nazi Germany to dust, firebombed Tokyo, and used nuclear weapons twice; cruelty is not our missing ingredient. What makes us formidable is not theatrical violence; it’s the sober alignment of law, power, logistics, and purpose.

Without that, you don’t get “lethality.” You get body counts without victory.

Dragging every senior flag officer into a ballroom to feed the President’s fragile ego and Hegseth’s cable-news brand isn’t just dumb; it’s expensive, operationally disruptive, and corrosive to the very culture that keeps our warfighters lethal and lawful. It says, “The point of all this is me.” It says, “Institutions exist to flatter the leader.” That’s Putinism, not patriotism.

Trump has always needed an internal war. The wall never got built, but the fortress in his head is tall and wide, and it requires a constant siege to justify itself. The “enemy within” line isn’t accidental. It’s the thesis. So are the stories “Sir Stories” where unnamed generals cry, where battlefield legends nod approvingly at his genius, where the tough men of history whisper, “At last…a real leader.”

They’re fiction, as you know.

The tragedy is that the spectacle is the point. The White House is now a performance venue dedicated to keeping one man’s self-image upright. That’s how you get this fiasco: no State Department sanity check, no National Security Council scrub, no sense that maybe, just maybe, when you address the entire senior leadership of the American military, you should…perhaps…prepare something worthy of the moment.

Instead, we got the usual rambling trash-talk with the chilling subtext: “Obey.”

There’s a sliver of hope in that silence.

Power hates quiet. Cults need chanting, cheering, the crowd hoarse and eager. Trump didn’t get his roar. He didn’t get the mass ritual of allegiance he wanted. That matters.

And if you read the transcript (and yes, for my sins, I did), you’ll feel something else too: pity trying to elbow past anger. He is smaller than he was a year ago. He is nowhere near the brute novelty of 2016. The bandwidth is shrinking. The obsessions are intensifying. Epstein lives rent-free in his skull; vendettas eat the remaining square footage.