Why Trump’s Quantico Gathering May Be Evidence Hegseth Is Preparing for 2028 Presidential Run

AMT Let me ask you about what happened in Quantico, Virginia yesterday with Pete Hexeth and Donald Trump gathering the top leaders of the military and basically, I don't know, giving them, depending on your perspective, a pep rally or a lecture. What were your thoughts?

MG As with the big parade Donald Trump wanted, I think Trump and Hexeth don't take seriously that, you know, the people in the military have jobs, very difficult jobs. And especially the senior levels of the military, they're under enormous time pressure. So it's not, and they're not working for just for the president and the secretary of defense, they work for the country. And if you're subtracting their time for something stupid, you're burdening them, and you're also burdening the taxpayer,

because we don't pay their salaries for them to do stupid things. They were being there as props. I think the behavior of the generals and admirals was really admirable. They were polite.

And I'm sure some of them support the president, but they all understood we are not political. We are not a prop for your rally. So when you tell us about your big victory, we sit on our hands, we do not clap. Because we are, as a military, we had no opinion on any of those elections.

We fought whoever is the legal commander in chief, we follow. We have as individuals our own opinions, of course, but as an institution, we don't. And so we will not applaud you, you're going to be fired. But there's safety in numbers. None of them applauded. Now, the danger is that Hegseth and Trump took the measure of what they saw there. And they also in the

first term saw that the military didn't want to do illegal things. And they're thinking, how can we transform this officer corps to make the upper branches of the military as political as we want them to be. As malleable really, right David? Right. So that's a process that starts, you know, let's pick colonels who share our ideology, make them one stars. Let's find one stars who share our ideology and make them two. You can't do it overnight, but I think that's going to be a big Hegseth goal. What we also saw I think was Hegseth trying to position himself as the biggest jerk in the Republican Party, remembering that in the last cycle,

the biggest jerk in the Republican Party won the Republican nomination. And while Vice President Vance can often behave in kind of loud mouth ways, he's not by nature as big a jerk. And so I think we may be watching the beginning

of an anti-Vance drive for the Republican nomination of an anti-Vance drive for the Republican nomination in 2028.