wrote in the Atlantic that the question on the minds of the top military commanders after listening to Donald Trump yesterday must have been how can I know that an order I received to launch my missiles came from a sane president?
I mean when top military officials are announcing their retirement just days after a speech filled with ideological pressure and threats to military dissenters, you know
things aren't exactly going in the right direction. Our job, my job, has been to determine which leaders simply did what they must to answer the prerogatives of civilian leadership and which leaders are truly invested in the woke department and therefore incapable of embracing the war department and Executing new lawful orders. That's it. It's that simple So for the past eight months, we've gotten a good look under the hood of our officer Corps
We've done our best to thoroughly assess the human terrain We've had to make trade-offs and some difficult decisions. It's more of an art than a science. We have been and will continue to be judicious, but also expeditious. The new compass heading is clear. Out with the Shirelles, the McKenzie's, and the Millies, and in with the Stockdales, the Schwarzkopf's and the Patton's.
More leadership changes will be made of that I'm certain. Not because we want to, but because we must. Once again, this is life and death. The sooner we have the right people, the sooner we can advance the right policies. Personnel is policy.
But I look out at this group and I see great Americans. Leaders who have given decades to our great republic at great sacrifice to yourselves and to your families. But if the words I'm speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign. We would thank you for your service.
In the past few days since Trump's rare gathering at Quantico where he addressed nearly 800 senior military leaders, generals, admirals and top advisors and basically told them that US cities were to be treated as training grounds for the military unless of course you spoke with Mike Johnson in which he'll tell you that those exact words that you're mentioning that Trump said he didn't really mean them right? Hold on a second
a speaker of the house do you believe it's appropriate to use American cities as training grounds for the US military, calling those people in the American cities the enemy within? I'm asking you, as Speaker of the House, do you think that's appropriate?
I'm not gonna comment on your characterization of what the President said.
I didn't get to see that speech
because I was a little busy yesterday. Well, you can take his quotes out of context, which you often do and I don't think that's fair to the president. I'll tell you what he's done though, he's put National Guard troops here in DC and cleaned up the crime problem. People can walk safely to and from work today because the president takes crime seriously. Some of the big mayors in some of these big blue cities are not and I think that's probably what he was addressing there."
Well after it there's been a slew of sudden retirements. Interesting. You see Trump framed domestic unrest as a battlefield, declaring a war from within and naming cities like San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles as targets in that fight. He urged that the military should be a quote major part of restoring
order. Important mission and I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military. National Guard, but military.
Meanwhile Pete Hecht says, well he did his best to get a rise out of the silent crowd, but instead it turned out to be more of a Jeb Bush please clap moment.
Move out and draw fire. Because we are the war department. Godspeed.
Room! Attention!
I think the next president needs to be a lot quieter, but send a signal that we're prepared to act in the national security interests of this country, to get back in the business of creating a more peaceful world. Please
clap.
But in a recent example General Thomas A. Boussier, commander of Air Force Global Strike Command requested retirement citing quote personal and family reasons. Boussier once was nominated by Trump to become Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, but he had that nomination revoked.
How many flashes of insanity from a president should we tolerate? That sounds like something that deserves a zero tolerance policy. And we have never seen public flashes of insanity from any president other than Donald Trump and we now see them every day. A president who has failed to get his funding plan passed by a Congress completely controlled by his party, then spends the day creating public versions of his hallucinations about
the Democratic leaders of the House and the Senate. The president gives every indication that you could possibly ask for, that he has lost his mind, and every single elected Republican official in Washington excuses it. Most of them run away from it. They don't even want to talk about it. And the highest ranking elected Republican in Washington says it's funny."
Now of course this could just be a coincidence right? Except it's not the only high level exit recently, let alone this week. I mean earlier General David Alvin announced that he would retire midway through his term as Air Force Chief of Staff, a move that many had described as forced. Trump's administration has reshuffled and dismissed multiple top commanders, the chair of the Joint Chiefs, the Navy's head and the Coast Guard Commandant, as well as the Air Force
Vice Chief. Now some of these departures have been framed as part of a broader military purge or repositioning according to the Daily Beast. But when senior military leaders leave voluntarily around a moment of political pressure that was unprecedented, I mean we've never seen a speech given to leaders like that, it suggests more than personal decisions right? Especially when the commander-in-chief is saying things like this on stage, a speech that was so filled with falsities that had to be fact be fact checked in real time on CNN.
He also repeated his usual lie that the 2020 election involving him and Biden was rigged. Of course, he lost fair and square. He repeated this lie that he tells over and over that the Congo and Venezuela both emptied their prisons to somehow allow prisoners to come to the United States as migrants. There was no evidence that any of that happened. President Trump's own team has never been able to offer any corroboration.
And I've spoken to independent experts on both the Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Venezuela who have seen, who have said they've seen nothing to support any of that. President Trump again repeated this claim. We've been hearing from him that Biden let in 25 million migrants. That's up from President Trump's former claim of 21 million.
Even that was false. So the actual number is less than half of that, even if you count the millions who were rapidly expelled from the country under COVID-era immigration provisions. So not even close. President Trump again said that President Biden provided
$350 billion worth of aid to Ukraine. That's also not even close, even generously, by independent expert estimates. The actual number is about half that. And we also heard President Trump repeat this claim he made at the United Nations the other day,
that he has settled seven wars. But even the examples that President Trump cited himself show that that claim is not true. For example, he mentioned the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. Well, the war involving those two countries has not actually been settled. Despite a peace agreement signed under President Trump, hostilities continue. We have good reporting from the ground. CNN
was there last week showing that the fighting continues. And the peace agreement that was signed under Trump did not involve the rebel coalition, allegedly backed by Rwanda, that's doing much of the fighting. He also mentioned Kosovo and Serbia
as a supposed war he has ended. Well, they have not actually been at war under President Trump. He previously claimed that he prevented a new war from erupting. There's thin evidence even for that,
but the claim that he ended an actual war between those two entities is just not correct. So tonight one less general in
uniform means more question marks in the Pentagon as a whole because in an era where politics is pressing into every corner of command and the military is where politics is pressing into every corner of command and the military is being touted as a weapon to clean up our streets, we need to be paying attention
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