What Donald Trump wants to escape from the “woke” is clear from the beginning of his mandate. That the testosterone is getting out of hand, too. In an extraordinary meeting with the highest-ranking generals of the US Army, coming from all corners of the planet, the president of the United States and his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseththey placed themselves above loyalty to the Constitution and the country to defend a direct relationship of fidelity to the Government.
That path, when taken in one direction, is difficult to turn back.
“If I don’t like them, I will fire them on the spot,” Trump told the cameras before entering the meeting held in Quantico, Virginia, headquarters of the Pentagon. Although the American president is the commander in chief of the Armed Forces, his powers are not those of an autocrat or a dictator. These types of decisions have to go through the Army leadership and be ratified by Congress with reasoning behind them.
“I don’t like it” does not count as a parameter for a measurement of that caliber.
In any case, once inside, as is usual, Trump showed another tone, more conciliatory… and much more diffuse. First it was Hegseth who criticized the fitness of some officers—“fat,” he called them—and demanded that the Army be governed by the “highest criteria of masculinity.”
In his inauguration speech, Trump has already attacked trans soldiers, promising that he would remove them from the Armybut it is not known what criteria of masculinity the tens of thousands of women who serve the United States around the world must follow.
More “nice” soldiers
From discretionally firing whoever he wanted, Trump went on to insinuate that he was going to increase the Army because “you are very nice people,” as he told the assembled generals. It is not a trivial statement, since it goes against the heart of the doctrine Steve Bannon to reduce the US debt. The ideologue of the MAGA movement has repeated numerous times the need to cut arms spending, including Armed Forces personnel.
Although Bannon grew up in a military school and served in the Navy for seven years, military cuts are one of his priorities, considering that the United States already has enough resources to defend itself as a country and does not need to help others with their territorial problems.
In fact, the irony of Trump’s statement is that it comes a few hours before the most likely shutdown of the federal government, which means that not only will he not be able to recruit more military personnel, but he will not even be able to pay those he already has.
It must be remembered that, in the last years of the Administration George W. Bush and the first of the Administration Barack Obama —that is, when the United States was still fighting two wars abroad at the same time, Iraq and Afghanistan—defense spending skyrocketed to 4.9% of GDP. However, currently, it only dedicates 3.4%, although it requires its NATO allies to reach 5%.
Target: Democratic cities
That said, it is obvious that there was a political intention and not just a demand for brute force in this unusual meeting that had never taken place before. Trump once again repeated his intention to deploy the National Guard in Chicago, a Democratic city par excellence and home of his archenemy Obama.
For some time now, the American president has been saying that it is a dangerous city and that all the blame falls on the Democratic governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzkerand in the mayor, also a Democrat, Brandon Johnson.
The data, however, and as usual, points to the opposite. During the first half of 2025, violent crimes have fallen by 21%, with special mention to homicides, which have reduced by 32.3%. It is a tactic that Trump has already used before in California and Washington DC: pretending a catastrophe that is not such in order to be able to take the territory with federal troops and thus impose his security measures above state ones.
This Tuesday, however, went further. Trump encouraged Army generals to use “the most dangerous cities as training grounds”. We don’t really know what he means by that, because he probably hasn’t even thought about it, but taken literally it is extremely dangerous.
If, on the one hand, the president is dedicated to deploying troops in the cities where his political rivals govern – he also mentioned New York and spoke of “internal war” – and, on the other, he gives carte blanche to said troops to do whatever they want, the problem is solved.
The boats “are ugly”
Following his aggressive rhetoric, Trump egged on the military and assured that, when someone spits on them in the street—he was referring to the troops deployed who in turn protect anti-immigration officers—they should respond with violence… and that, if someone threw a rock at them or something similar, they directly had permission to do whatever they wanted, something that, once again, is above the law.
Aside from flirtations with less subtle authoritarianism, Trump also had time for beauty. Apparently, just as Hegseth thinks too many generals are fat, the president thinks U.S. Navy ships are “ugly.” “I am a very aesthetic person and I don’t like the boats you are making”.
Presumably he could make them prettier. Or one of your companies. Prettier and more expensive, of course, that’s what it’s all about, much as Bannon may not like it.