Hegseth wants our troops to run amok. Trump says, against ‘the enemy within.’View this email in your browser [link removed]

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**Hegseth plus Trump equals unrestrained state violence—here, in the USA**

**Hegseth wants our troops to run amok. Trump says, against ‘the enemy within.’**

President Trump’s speech to our generals and admirals on Tuesday has rightly generated headlines and buzz for his telling them to refocus on “the enemy within,” and that deploying to American cities would provide valuable training for their troops. But it’s only when you combine Trump’s directives with the further directives that Secretary of Defense (excuse me, Secretary of

**War**) Pete Hegseth gave those generals and admirals in the **talk** [link removed] following Trump’s that a more rounded view of Trumpworld policy emerges.

Hegseth’s lessons could be boiled down to a few simple points: The department will drop restrictions on “bullying and hazing” in order “to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second-guessing.” Similarly, he added, “We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”

Leaders sensitive to such rules of engagement were out. “Out with the Milleys,” he said, referring to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, who began to question Trump’s adherence to the Constitution after he’d ordered the military dispersal of Black Lives Matter demonstrators on 16th Street, near the White House. “In with the Stockdales, Schwarzkopfs, and Pattons.” To this, Hegseth appended a further general rule for generals: “It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”

I’d say that Hegseth’s instructions were dangerously backward-looking, but for the fact that he also completely misstated our military norms all the way back to January 1776. It was then, in the first decisive victory for the American cause, that Washington’s army compelled the British to end their occupation of Boston when a force commanded by Henry Knox brought cannons from Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York across mountains in the dead of winter so that Washington could train them on the redcoats in Boston. Knox, who went on to command Washington’s artillery throughout the Revolution and then became our first secretary of war, was a genuine fatso. So, for that matter, was 300-pound Gen. Leslie Groves, who directed the Manhattan Project during World War II.

All members of the military should be combat-fit, Hegseth demanded. As Paul Krugman has noted, however, such standards were never enforced on mathematically gifted code-breakers such as Alan Turing and Joseph Rochefort (and, point of personal privilege, if in a lesser role, my father), who were indispensable to the Allies’ victory in that conflict even as they sat behind desks far from the guns.

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Hegseth, that is, is completely oblivious to the division of labor, and to the noncombat divisions, that have been essential to our military since our inception. And as warfare increasingly becomes a battle of drones and cyber strikes, of AI and quantum computers, the infantry whose standards and roles he universalizes for all military personnel will one day become more an auxiliary than the point of our spear.

But combine his directions with Trump’s, and a more complete and accurate picture of Trump policy emerges. It’s Trump’s war against “the enemy within” that is already defined by the absence of “rules of engagement.” The kind of thuggery that Hegseth called for is practiced daily by ICE agents—Trump’s shock troops against those he has deemed “enemies” so they can be deported. As for holding out George Patton as a model, I suspect that for Trump and Hegseth, now that “bullying” is good again, it’s less for his sweep across France and more for his slapping around soldiers suffering from PTSD—for which the politically correct Dwight Eisenhower had to relieve him of duty for several months.

But desk warriors and math majors have no place in the military as Trump and Hegseth reshape it. As they see it, our military future will be more like the MMA match Trump plans to hold on the White House lawn.

There is a serious political undertone to this kind of posturing. The real fear stalking the working class—the male working class most particularly—is the replacement of manual labor with machinery, something that’s already well under way and only likely to increase. It’s a totally legitimate fear, blighting their economic prospects and their ability to support and form families. In response to which, Trump, Hegseth, and their ilk offer performative displays of what they consider compensatory hypermasculinity, defined in their view by unrestrained violence against people they don’t like. A more corrosive definition is all but unimaginable, but it’s not as if the left (whether center-left or left-left) has developed a real-world solution for the diminishing need for manual labor, either.

**– HAROLD MEYERSON**

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