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WASHINGTON — Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth hosted what seemed like a pep rally for themselves on Tuesday, dragging every top U.S. general and admiral from around the world at a cost of millions to hear the defense secretary attack obesity, beards and hot yoga, and the president spew an unusually eclectic mix of lies and boasts.
“It was called the Gulf of Mexico. I just had this idea. I’m looking at a map. I’m saying we have most of the frontage. Why is it Gulf of Mexico? Why isn’t it the Gulf of America? And I made the change, and it went smoothly. I mean, we had a couple of fake news outlets that refused to make the change, and then one of them, AP, took us to court, and we won,” Trump said during 70 minutes of remarks at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, that ranged from attacking The Associated Press wire service for using the correct name for the Gulf of Mexico to waxing poetic about his own handwriting.
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“I love my signature. I really do. Everyone loves my signature,” Trump said ― just weeks after his scrawl gained new attention for appearing on a lewd birthday greeting to his longtime friend, child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. (Trump claims he neither wrote the greeting nor signed it.)
Trump claimed that firefighters in “inner cities” are essentially at war because people shoot at them as they climb ladders to extinguish building fires. He lied that the United States is receiving $17 trillion in foreign investments and that his predecessor Joe Biden had given $350 billion in aid to Ukraine.
“I moved a submarine or two, I won’t say about the two, over to the coast of Russia, just to be careful,” he said, violating decades of protocol never to speak about the location of the Navy’s ballistic missile submarines. “It’s just lurking, but I’m sure we’re not going to have to use it, but it’s an amazing – it’s undetectable totally. Ours is, theirs isn’t. Theirs are totally detectable. We can detect them easily. We go right to the spot, but we have genius apparatus that doesn’t allow detection. It doesn’t allow detection at all by anybody above water or below water.”
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Trump said he is considering bringing back the use of battleships – which were proven obsolete during the Falklands War in the 1980s, when British battleships were sunk from a considerable distance by cruise missiles. “I look at the [USS] Iowa out in California, and I look at different ships. The old pictures I used to watch. ‘Victory at Sea.’ I love ‘Victory at Sea,’” he said. “Some people would say, ‘No, that’s old technology.’ I don’t know. I like this old technology when you look at those guns. But it’s something we’re actually considering. The concept of battleship.”
Trump, as he has done frequently in recent months, spoke again about using the U.S. military to maintain order in American cities, which is illegal under federal law.
“I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. So this is going to be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control,” he said. “We should view some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
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For his part, Hegseth told the assembled officers that he was imposing new rules on physical appearance, physical fitness and setting “male” standards for combat positions.
“This administration has done a great deal from day one to remove the social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department,” he said. “No more identity. No more dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction or gender delusions, no more debris; as I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that shit.”
He said he did not want fat service members, either in combat units or at the Pentagon, and that physical training would be part of everyone’s day going forward. “And we’re not talking, like, hot yoga and stretching,” he said.
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Tuesday’s gathering was called on short notice and required generals and admirals from every service branch, regardless of their deployment location, to converge at Quantico.
The Defense Department did not respond to HuffPost’s query about the cost involved. The travel expenses and lodging, however, will certainly total in multiple millions of dollars, at a minimum.
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The meeting, unprecedented in at least modern times, led to rampant speculation that Trump or Hegseth would use it for mass firings of officers deemed insufficiently loyal to them personally. Hegseth did remind them during his remarks that they serve Trump ― a break from traditional doctrine that officers’ first loyalty is to the U.S. Constitution.
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