Wednesday Reads: Government Shuts Down; Trump Plans To Use Military Against Americans.

Good Morning!!

I suppose the top story is the government shutdown that began last night at midnight, but I think Trump’s unhinged speech to 800 top military officers is even more urgent. The unprecedented gathering of military leaders, who were forced to travel to Virginia from all over the world, began with an insulting presentation by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and ended with an utterly insane speech by Trump. I watched quite a bit of it with the sound off. I’d much rather read closed captions than listen to Hegseth’s or Trump’s voices.

Let’s get the shutdown out of the way first. The government shut down at midnight last night. Here’s what’s happening now:

AP: Government shutdown begins as the nation faces a new period of uncertainty.

Plunged into a government shutdown, the U.S. is confronting a fresh cycle of uncertainty after President Donald Trump and Congress failed to strike an agreement to keep government programs and services running by Wednesday’s deadline.

Roughly 750,000 federal workers are expected to be furloughed, some potentially fired by Trump’s Republican administration. Many offices will be shuttered, perhaps permanently, as Trump vows to “do things that are irreversible, that are bad” as retribution. His deportation agenda is expected to run full speed ahead, while education, environmental and other services sputter. The economic fallout is expected to ripple nationwide.

“We don’t want it to shut down,” Trump said at the White House before the midnight deadline.

But the president, who met privately with congressional leadership this week, appeared unable to negotiate any deal between Democrats and Republicans to prevent that outcome.

This is the third time Trump has presided over a federal funding lapse, the first since his return to the White House this year, in a remarkable record that underscores the polarizing divide over budget priorities and a political climate that rewards hard-line positions rather than more traditional compromises.

Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket: Trump mandates all federal agencies send email blaming Dems for potential gov’t shutdown.

The Guardian is running live updates on the shutdown. Read it at the link if you’re interested.

Reactions to Hegseth’s presentation and Trump’s speech:

Here’s a summary of Hegseth’s speech by Heather Cox Richardson at Letters from an American.

Last Thursday, September 25, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suddenly announced he was calling about 800 of the nation’s top military generals and admirals, along with their top enlisted advisors, to meet at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia, today. Such a meeting was unprecedented, and its suddenness meant military leaders across the world had to drop everything to run to Washington, D.C., at enormous financial cost for the country. Under those extraordinary circumstances, speculation about what Hegseth intended to say or do at the meeting has been widespread.

Now we know. This morning, in front of a giant flag backdrop that echoed the opening scene from the movie Patton, Hegseth harangued the career military leaders, pacing as if he were giving a TED talk. The event was streamed live to the public, making it clear that the hurry to get everyone to Washington, D.C., in person was not about secrecy.

Pete Hegseth lectures top military leaders.

In his speech, Hegseth reiterated his vision of a military based in what he calls the “warrior ethos.” Ignoring the military’s mission of preventing wars through deterrence, its professional and highly educated officer corps, and its modern structure as a triumph of logistics, he told the military leaders that today was “the liberation of America’s warriors, in name, in deed and in authorities. You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong always in polite society.”

He claimed that “we have the strongest, most powerful, most lethal, and most prepared military on the planet. That is true, full stop. Nobody can touch us. It’s not even close.” But then Hegseth, who became defense secretary from his position as a weekend host on the Fox News Channel, complained that “our warriors” are not “led by the most capable and qualified combat leaders.”

He claimed that “foolish and reckless politicians” had forced the military “to focus on the wrong things” and that it had promoted too many leaders “based on their race, based on gender quotas.” “We became the woke department,” he said. “We are done with that sh*t.” He is loosening rules about hazing and bullying, changing physical fitness reforms with the idea that they will get women out of combat roles, and prohibiting beards, which will force Black men out of the service, for Black men suffer at a much higher rate than white men do from a chronic skin condition that makes shaving painful and can cause scarring.

He also said he was tired of seeing “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals,” and that he would institute a second physical fitness test every year.

“[I]f the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink,” Hegseth said, “then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”

Trump’s speech was largely incoherent and included many of his familiar gripes, but its basic purpose came through loud and clear. He doesn’t believe the U.S. military should be dealing with foreign threats. Instead, he plans to use active duty military troops to police the U.S. Southern border and also to attack “the enemy within”–protesters in Democratic U.S. cities.

The military audience sat through these speeches in stone-faced silence.

Reactions to Hegseth’s presentation and Trump’s speech:

Sarah K. Burris at Raw Story: ‘Disbelief’: Pentagon reporter can’t find one military official who liked Hegseth’s speech.

Longtime Pentagon reporter Helene Cooper said that she can’t find any military officials who attended the meeting in Virginia with President Donald Trump and Secretary Pete Hegseth and liked what they heard.

“I have yet to find a single military official who was in the audience today who thought that this was a good presentation,” she told MSNBC on Tuesday afternoon.

“All I’ve had from them so far, from the people I’ve talked to, is a combination of disbelief that some of them were made to fly from, some of them, Asia, from all over the world … all the way to Quanico to listen to the same familiar type of culture war complaints that we’ve been having since Trump was reelected,” she added, calling Trump’s remarks a “campaign-style stump speech.”

“Nothing that was said today could not have been put in an email or in a directive. So there’s that, to begin with. There’s also the fact that so much of this was partisan, and this is a military that is supposed to present itself as nonpartisan. So you didn’t hear the kind of cheering that we usually get, because President Trump is used to playing for the type of crowds that favor him,” Cooper explained. “And so he’s not very used to performing in front of an audience that’s just giving, looking back stone-faced. But that’s what you were getting from these generals.”

The other thing she noted is that she’s gotten “so many emails from women in the military” who are seeing this as a message “that they are not welcome.”

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic (gift link): The Commander in Chief Is Not Okay.

The president talked at length, and his comments should have confirmed to even the most sympathetic observer that he is, as the kids say, not okay. Several of Hegseth’s people said in advance of the senior-officer conclave that its goal was to energize America’s top military leaders and get them to focus on Hegseth’s vision for a new Department of War. But the generals and admirals should be forgiven if they walked out of the auditorium and wondered: What on earth is wrong with the commander in chief?

Trump seemed quieter and more confused than usual; he is not accustomed to audiences who do not clap and react to obvious applause lines. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he said at the outset. (Hegseth had the same awkward problem earlier, waiting for laughs and applause that never came.) The president announced his participation only days ago, and he certainly seemed unprepared.

Trump started rambling right out of the gate. But first, the president channeled his inner Jeb Bush, asking the officers to clap—but, you know, only if they felt like it.

Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank; there goes your future.

Laughs rippled through the room.

Trump addresses top military leaders.

Trump then wandered around, lost in the halls of history. He talked about how the Department of War was renamed in the 1950s. (It was in the late 1940s.) At one point, he mentioned that the Atomic Energy Commission had confirmed that his strike on Iran had destroyed Tehran’s nuclear program. (Iran still has a nuclear program, and the AEC hasn’t existed since the mid-’70s.) He whined about the “Gulf of America” and how he beat the Associated Press in court on the issue. (The case is still ongoing.) The Israeli-Palestinian conflict? “I said”—he did not identify to whom—“‘How long have you been fighting?’ ‘Three thousand years, sir.’ That’s a long time. But we got it, I think, settled.” [….]

And so it went, as Trump recycled old rally speeches, full of his usual grievances, lies, and misrepresentations; his obsessions with former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama; and his sour disappointment in the Nobel Prize committee. (“They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing,” he said.) He congratulated himself on tariffs, noting that the money could buy a lot of battleships, “to use an old term.” And come to think of it, he said, maybe America should build battleships again, from steel, not that papier-mâché and aluminum stuff the Navy is apparently using now: “Aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away.”

Ohhhkayyyy….

As comical as many of Trump’s comments were, the president’s nakedly partisan appeal to U.S. military officers was a violation of every standard of American civil-military relations, and exactly what George Washington feared could happen with an unscrupulous commander in chief. The most ominous part of his speech came when he told the military officers that they would be part of the solution to domestic threats, fighting the “enemy from within.” He added, almost as a kind of trollish afterthought, that he’d told Hegseth, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.”

This farrago of fantasy, menace, and autocratic peacocking is the kind of thing that the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan evocatively called “boob bait for the Bubbas” and that George Orwell might have called “prolefeed.” It’s one thing to serve it up to an adoring MAGA crowd: They know that most of it is nonsense and only some of it is real. They find it entertaining, and they can take or leave as much of Trump’s rhetorical junk-food buffet as they would like. It is another thing entirely to aim this kind of sludge at military officers, who are trained and acculturated to treat every word from the president with respect, and to regard his thoughts as policy.

David Kurtz at TPM Morning Memo: The Test of Our Time: Even the Military Can’t Resist Trump on Its Own Forever.

In targeting the military’s professionalism and nonpartisanship, Trump laid the groundwork for further lawless domestic use of the military, including illegally in law enforcement. It was a harbinger of a more muscular and oppressive authoritarianism than Trump has mustered so far.

As I watched the flag officers flown in from around the world sit uncomfortably for absurd speeches by the president and his callow defense secretary, I came to see it as the closest Trump could get to a mass firing of the officer corps.

Imagine the other groups of federal workers that Trump has targeted sitting in those seats: government scientists, foreign aid experts, prosecutors and investigators, inspectors and regulators, human resource professionals. They were summarily fired, often in violation of the law, but the generals and admirals are more untouchable than that. Not entirely off limits, as we already seen with some Pentagon terminations, especially of officers who are women or people of color. But for a variety of practical and political reasons, a sweeping purge of generals isn’t feasible.

Audience of 800 top military officers sat stone faced through Hegseth’s and Trump’s speeches.

What is feasible is is to begin to erode the military culture. To emphasize loyalty over merit. To prize fealty over competence. To punish truth-telling and reward convenient fictions. Trump touched on all of those things in a long, rambling speech that could be confused with incoherence.

Trump, as commander in chief, already had constitutional power over his captive audience of flag officers. What he proceeded to do yesterday, with Hegseth’s assistance, was to assert the power of his cult of personality over them. If that made your stomach turn, Hegseth told them, then you should resign.

As a group, this is not what the officers corps signed up for. They are steeped not just in military tradition but in civilian control of the armed services, the chain of command, laws of war, rules of engagement, and the proper role of the military in a free society. These each consist of sets of guardrails, expectations, and values that, if not anathema to Trump, are entirely foreign to him. He is indifferent to them at best, but more likely he is threatened by them because they stand outside of his own power base.

Trump has checked off the list of independent sources of political power that authoritarians typically target: the courts, law enforcement, the press, universities, and civil society organizations, amon  others. The military remains a key holdout. But none of these institutions can resist alone, and even together they can’t resist forever without broad-based cultural support for them. That is going to be the real test of our time.

George Chidi at The Guardian: Veterans react to Hegseth’s ‘insulting’ address to generals and admirals.

Naveed Shah, a veteran and activist who served as an enlisted public affairs specialist – an army journalist – uncharacteristically found himself searching for words to describe the address of the newly styled secretary of war to flag officers on Tuesday.

“A lot of the words that are coming to me aren’t fit to print,” said Shah, policy director for Common Defense, a veterans advocacy organization. “The people in that room who have served for 20, 30-plus years in uniform do not need Pete Hegseth to tell them about warrior ethos.”

Hegseth’s hour-long Ted talk-style address touching on physical fitness, the doctrine of lethality and the perils of DEI certainly drew more attention than a policy memo might have, and perhaps more than Donald Trump’s rambling, politically charged hour-long speech that followed.

But the attention came at the cost of respect, said Dana Pittard, a retired army general who commanded soldiers in Iraq and co-author of Hunting the Caliphate.

“I thought it was insulting,” Pittard said of the address, rejecting Hegseth’s assertion that senior officers of color – like himself – had benefitted from a non-existent quota system for promotions.

Online chatter in military groups ahead of the unprecedented, secrecy-shrouded meeting of 800 generals and admirals called to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia had revolved around a demand for some loyalty oath to the administration, or public firings or a declaration of war. Some described it as karmic revenge for decades of mandatory hour-long safety briefings held by unit commanders before dismissing troops for the weekend. Many also wondered if the expensive challenge to security could have been an email.

“Certainly, addressing the troops could be useful or beneficial, but to call 800-plus generals and senior enlisted advisers from around the world into this room just before a government shutdown? It’s not just bad optics or strategy,” Shah said. “A bad cold could have threatened our entire chain of command.”