Donald Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg on Tuesday was a disgrace—full stop.
It’s not just that the sitting president spoke to the soldiers at the Army base as if he was holding a campaign rally, because Trump always speaks as if he’s holding a campaign rally. It’s not just that the speech contained a ton of lies, because Trump always lies.
But the specific content of this speech supposedly celebrating the Army’s 250th anniversary—and the troops cheering him on as he said would “liberate” Los Angeles from the “animals” and “a foreign enemy”—was sickening. He got the troops to boo former President Joe Biden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. This is bad by any metric, but feels much worse against the backdrop of the administration illegally deploying active duty troops on American soil.
Trump also bragged about restoring the names of Confederate leaders to seven Army bases. Yes, this has long been a Trump talking point, but hearing the soldiers cheer for Robert E. Lee was … not great! Of course, the administration is officially pretending that these bases are no longer named after men who committed treason in order to preserve their ability to enslave Black people and sparked a civil war. No, now they’re named after random nontreasonous soldiers who just happen to have the same last names as Confederate leaders.
But Trump didn’t brag that he was going to name an Army base after Pvt. Fitz Lee, who fought in the Spanish-American War, which is his administration’s official stance. No, he got the troops to whoop and shout for Robert E. Lee, the leader of the defeated Confederate forces. Poor forgotten Fitz.
And Trump was guaranteed an enthusiastic partisan audience sitting behind him, just like at his campaign rallies. Military.com reported that troops were sent a note saying, “If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out.” Another note? “No fat soldiers.” It’s a direct violation of the longstanding prohibition on soldiers engaging in partisan activities while in uniform.
And the partisanship wasn’t limited to those cheering soldiers. There were two stands hawking Trump political merch, like hats and T-shirts, on the base during Trump’s speech.
On. The. Base.
To understand that the right really does see this as not just acceptable but delightful, look at how the speech was covered by Fox News. Trump did his YMCA “dance”! Some troops did too!
It’s also grim that no commanding officers have stepped forward to condemn this behavior and to remind everyone that soldiers are literally forbidden from this sort of thing. But Trump’s generals remain completely silent. During Trump’s first term as president, he mused that he needed “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” and while he doesn’t quite have that, he appears to now have the kind of generals who will sit by as Trump turns the military into his own personal police force.
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Also notably silent is the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine. Trump has said he picked Caine specifically because he defied the military’s prohibition on partisan displays by being a huge dork and wearing a MAGA hat to impress him. Caine has denied the MAGA hat story, but that’s not really the point. It doesn’t matter if Caine did or didn’t do this—it matters that Trump chose him for that reason.
And Caine appears to be sitting on his hands while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to ask if he could just let the military arrest protesters in Los Angeles, as a treat. She also asked for graduates of “an advanced intermediate level school, like the Marines’ School of Advanced Warfighting” to develop procedures and tactics for when the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense set up a joint operation center.
This was such a yikes! letter that although DHS flack Tricia McLaughlin initially enthusiastically confirmed it was sent and ran through a laundry list of lies to justify the request, she turned around 40 minutes later and asked the paper to ignore that response and use McLaughlin’s new one instead. The new statement said Noem’s letter was sent days ago, before Noem had met with Hegseth and Hegseth had met with the president. The new statement included platitudes about how “the posture of our brave troops has not changed” and “this is a whole-of-government approach to restore law and order.”
That actually doesn’t disclaim anything in the letter, but it’s clear that someone, somewhere, understood this needed to be walked back a bit. However, an explanation that is basically “Kristi Noem felt emboldened to ask Hegseth for military arrests, but she jumped the gun because Pete hadn’t asked Trump yet” is not beating the charges that the whole of the administration is trying to shape the military into a weapon against the American people.
It’s beyond certain that this is Trump’s goal. There’s no reason to hedge or waffle, or qualify that statement. Trump wanted a military that was in thrall to him and willing to do whatever he wants, even if that flies in the face of the foundations of American democracy. Hearing troops cheer him on while he does this makes it all the worse.