American Generals Are MIA
"This We'll Defend!" Spineless Army Leaders Defend Nothing at Ft. Bragg
Donald Trump at Fort Bragg on June 10, 2025
Yesterday, President Donald Trump addressed thousands of soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Normally, a U.S. president addressing American troops at a U.S. military installation would be a minor story at best. However, as with all things Trump, there are no minor stories, especially regarding the U.S. military, his favorite pawns to feed his insatiable narcissism. But yesterday’s performance by the traitor-in-chief perhaps set a new and dangerous tone for the future.
Trump launched into his usual adolescent rants about how great he is and how not so great everyone else is. You know the song. We have heard it all many times before. But yesterday’s rant, set against a sea of maroon colored beret wearing troops in camouflage unforms may have introduced the end of any semblance of a non-political, non-partisan American military, and launched us into a new era of an American military loyal to and accountable only to the President of the United States, not the U.S. Constitution. Although this is something we feared and some, like myself, thought inevitable, it is still a shock to actually see it play out in reality.
Here are some quotes from an article in The Atlantic about this event:
“He mocked former President Joe Biden and attacked various other political rivals. He elicited cheers from the crowd by announcing that he would rename U.S. bases (or re-rename them) after Confederate traitors. He repeated his hallucinatory narrative about the invasion of America by foreign criminals and lunatics. He referred to 2024 as the “election of a president who loves you,” to a scatter of cheers and applause. And then he attacked the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, again presiding over jeers at elected officials of the United States. He led soldiers, in other words, in a display of unseemly behavior that ran contrary to everything the founder of the U.S. Army, George Washington, strove to imbue in the American armed forces.
The president also encouraged a violation of regulations. Trump, himself a convicted felon, doesn’t care about rules and laws, but active-duty military members are not allowed to attend political rallies in uniform. They are not allowed to express partisan views while on duty, or to show disrespect for American elected officials. Trump may not know these rules and regulations, but the officers who lead these men and women know them well. It is part of their oath, their credo, and their identity as officers to remain apart from such displays. Young soldiers will make mistakes. But if senior officers remain silent, what lesson will those young men and women take from what happened today?”
Indeed, where are the Army generals, colonels, post commanders, the military leaders who are supposed to uphold the U.S. Constitution and the Soldier’s Creed? https://www.army.mil/values/index.html
At Fort Bragg and other venues where Donald Trump has callously used the military merely as props to feed his ego and induce loyalty to him personally over their oaths to the U.S. Constitution, there has been only the deafening sound of silence from senior military leaders as another critical part of our democracy and its institutional protections is quickly eroded by this mindless and loathsome dictator who cares nothing for the service men and women he courts with empty words of praise. He only cares for the raw power they will bring him when he orders them to act as his hammer to smash the last voices of opposition to the destruction of our constitutional republic and the freedoms we used to have, freedoms that previous generations of American service men and women fought for and died to protect. Freedoms this generation of American service men and women, and especially their leaders have obviously forgotten.
David DeBatto