The Social World

Tag: Pete Hegseth

  • The desperation of the ‘Seditious Six’

    The desperation of the ‘Seditious Six’

    Two weeks ago, six US lawmakers, all military or intelligence veterans, released a cryptic YouTube video where they spoke directly to American service members. They were Senators Mark Kelly (Arizona) and Elissa Slotkin (Michigan), and Representatives Jason Crow (Colorado), Chris Deluzio (Pennsylvania), Chrissy Houlahan (Pennsylvania) and Maggie Goodlander (New Hampshire) “Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home,” one of them said. “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders,” said another. “You must refuse illegal orders,” said a third. “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

    The video seemed to come out of nowhere and took anyone who was paying attention by surprise. What “illegal orders” were they talking about? Regardless, President Trump didn’t like it. On social media, he declared that the six lawmakers were traitors who should be “arrested” and “put on trial.” He called the video “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR … punishable by DEATH.”

    After Trump threw oil on this kitchen fire, the White House had to walk things back a bit. The press office said that Trump didn’t mean it literally, but that the lawmakers had “conspired … to defy the president’s lawful orders.” The fallout since has been minor. Most people agree that what the lawmakers did isn’t sedition, since all they said was that troops should only follow legal orders, which is true. Regardless, the Department of Defense has launched an investigation into Kelly, one of the “Seditious Six” and a retired Navy captain, citing “serious allegations of misconduct.”

    In recent days, the heat around the Seditious Six has died down, but that video hasn’t left my head. It was so weird and so out of place. What in the world were they talking about? One possibility is the presence of the National Guard in Washington D.C. In November 2025 Slotkin introduced the No Troops In Our Streets act, and said on a Sunday talk show that the military “should always remain apolitical and should never be used as a domestic police force.” Then an Afghan National shot down two Guardspeople unprovoked, so suddenly Slotkin was on the very wrong side of history.

    Another possibility is the shooting down of Venezuelan drug boats, and, in particular, the “second shot” on one of the boats that currently has Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in the media and Congressional crosshairs. But while the drug-boat attacks did seem to come out of left field, they’re not particularly inconsistent with the Administration’s policy of aggressive action toward drug cartels, so it hardly seems to constitute “illegal orders.”

    Some more paranoid commentators on the pro-Trump right are saying that the Seditious Six are trying to foment a “color revolution,” a mass protest movement aimed at overturning a government or forcing mass political change. Threatened governments use this term derogatively toward protesters, indicating that the impetus behind the revolution comes from foreign entities or politically-motivated NGOs. In other words, the Seditious Six are a thinly-disguised branch of No Kings, Inc.

    There may be some truth behind the conspiracy theories, but it’s also true that this particular color revolution isn’t particularly colorful. Trump’s D.C. National Guard deployment and drug-boat attacks have their loud detractors, but are actually quite popular with the majority. Trump and his Administration enjoy broad support in the new “no fatty” Armed Forces, which seems more willing than ever to carry out the wishes of the Commander in Chief. Anyone who thinks that there’s a platoon of Manchurian Soldiers out there ready to carry out the whispered wishes of Elissa Slotkin, Mark Kelly and Maggie Goodlander is just being a nutter. The troops are listening to Trump and Hegseth and their generals, not Representative Jason Crow.

    In reality, the Seditious Six’s audience isn’t actually the US military, but what remains of the anti-Trump “Resistance.” It’s a video to be played on loop in the social-media feeds of the likes Rick Wilson and Randi Weingarten, and for the millions of permanently terrified Heather Cox Richardson readers. It’s an MSNBC special report.

    The US military isn’t behaving any more illegally than it ever does, and Trump’s usage of it isn’t unusual. As the Trump era enters its fourth quarter up 24-0 with the ball and all of its timeouts, the Resistance’s plays are getting loopier and riskier. That very odd video from a couple of weeks ago may not have been seditious. But it was certainly desperate.

  • Trump’s cabinet is a liberal’s nightmare

    Trump’s cabinet is a liberal’s nightmare

    “Some people will correct me. They love to correct me. Even though I’m right about everything,” President Trump was saying, but no one was about to correct the President at this December cabinet meeting, the last in a series of extremely long such affairs that TV has carried this year. At this point, YouTube might as well set up a 24-hour livestream from inside the White House, like the sorts of stunts that were popular at the dawn of the personal video era. Trump is always with us, and talking at us.

    Before the roundtable of cabinet members listing their accomplishments and kissing the boss’s butt, Trump talked for nearly 30 minutes. Some highlights: “affordability” is a “fake narrative that Democrats talk about”; Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is “incompetent,” a “real dope” and “a stubborn ox who probably doesn’t like your President, your favorite President”; prices have come down substantially for “the fat drug for fat people”, and, stop the presses, “at some point in the not-so-distant future you’re not going to have income tax to pay.”

    And lest someone test Donald Trump’s mental acuity, he put all doubt to rest by saying, “I sit here and do four news conferences a day and answer questions from very intelligent lunatics, you people. I’ll let you know when there’s something wrong with me. There will be some day. It happens to all of us. I think I’m sharper now than I was 25 years ago. I took a cognitive test. I asked “is it hard?” Biden didn’t have a news conference for eight months and you said he was fine. I went one day without doing a news conference and you all went back and wrote “what’s wrong with the President?” I read in the New York Times, ‘Is Trump sharp?’ Trump is sharp. They’re not sharp.”

    The cabinet meeting was a liberal’s nightmare, with all their villains taking turns speaking. War Secretary Pete Hegseth used the word “lethality” several times, saying, “We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting terrorists at the bottom of the ocean.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick extolled the virtues of the tariff regime, while Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that people were no longer wearing pajamas and slippers on airplanes, to which Trump said, “We’re saving our country. I don’t want to be braggadocious. Our country was down and it was never coming back.”

    Attorney General Pam Bondi said her department was keeping men out of women’s sports, fighting DEI, antifa and sanctuary cities, and helping free J-6 rioters from prison. Over in Homeland Security, Kristi Noem said Joe Biden “used this department to flood the country with terrorists. It’s our job to get them out. We’re going to send more home for the holidays, to make sure they can spend the holidays with their families.” Meanwhile, the head of the Small Business Administration invited everyone to join her in daily Bible study, and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said “the Green New Scam is dead.” RFK Jr. said the Trump administration is defeating “the mercantile interests of Big Pharma and the medical-industrial complex” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this was “the most transformational year in American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War.”

    That all took more than an hour, after which Trump said, “I hope it wasn’t too long but it was very concise.” Then came everyone’s favorite segment, Q&A. An early question was about Elon Musk, whose hyperactivity was often a focus of the early-year cabinet meetings, before Trump tossed DoGE into the dustbin of history. A reporter asked if Trump and Musk were still friends. Trump said, sort of, he guesses. “We had one problem, I didn’t want everyone to have an electric car. And he makes electric cars.”

    Of the attacks on Venezuelan boats, Trump said, “I want those boats taken out, and if we have to we’ll attack on land as well, just like we attacked on sea.” That was sort of ominous, and Hegseth added that even though he didn’t witness the “second strike” on a boat that’s creating controversy and congressional investigations, he hardly apologized for the action. He said, “We will eliminate that threat, and we’re proud to do it… these white bales are not Christmas gifts from Santa.”

    “This is what’s called the fog of war,” Hegseth said, even though, technically, we’re not at war. “This is what you the press don’t see. You sit in your air conditioned offices or on Capitol Hill… while we’re doing dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people.”

    The gathering ended with Trump talking about Minnesota welfare fraud to benefit Somali terrorist groups, which had him incensed, as it does all right-thinking people. “When I see what’s happening in Minnesota, the land of a thousand lakes, I don’t know how many lakes, they got a lotta lakes, it makes me mad. Our country’s at a tipping point. We could go bad. We could go one way or another. We’re going to go bad if we keep taking garbage into our country… if they come from hell and they complain and they do nothing but bitch, we don’t want ‘em in our country.”

    Around the room, people pounded the table at that piece of closing rhetoric. The President had spoken on behalf of the American people. Trump, leading the greatest cabinet the world has ever seen from “the most transparent administration in history,” was very sharp indeed.

  • Dog Man Vs. Antifa and other kids’ books to ‘own the libs’ with

    Dog Man Vs. Antifa and other kids’ books to ‘own the libs’ with

    Liberals are in a tizzy as usual over Pete Hegseth, our slick-haired Secretary of War. And in particular over his nonchalant attitude toward blowing Venezuelan drug boats out of the water, acting like the US is attacking the Old Man and the Sea or some bachelorette party boat instead of some highly organized narcotraficantes. That said, Hegseth did issue a bizarrely immature meme yesterday, tweeting out a fake cover of the children’s book character Franklin the Turtle called “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists.” In it, Franklin, wearing a helmet and a gunbelt in addition to his usual protective carapace, fires an RPG and blows up a drug boat near some sort of tropical shore.

    You could ask what Franklin, usually depicted running off to school or going to the pharmacy with grandpa, has to do with the War on Drugs. But we now live in an era where you can be a cabinet secretary and also a shitposter, so let’s just roll with it. Like Pete Hegseth, I also enjoy using AI to make children’s book parody memes. Here are some other suggestions for Republicans who want to lightly troll their opponents.

    Amelia Bedelia Rides The Bus For Free In New York City

    Everyone’s favorite ditzy housekeeper learns to navigate the realities of Zohran Mamdani’s New York.

    The Unfortunate Case of the Sinister Six

    We’ll call them the “Sinister Six” instead of the “Seditious Six” because, well, frankly, I mistyped it into ChatGPT. But it definitely sounds like a Lemony Snicket book. Mark Kelly is a Count Orloff type for sure.

    Nancy Drew: The Mystery of the Stolen Social Security Numbers

    The teen girl sleuth – and her chums – investigate the shadowy world of immigration fraud.

    Choose Your Own Adventure: You Are a Somali Warlord In Minnesota

    Speaking of immigration fraud, don’t think Tim Walz is getting out of this meme-free. I’ve chosen my favorite 1980s childhood book series for this story. Will you save the princess? Or will the Yeti eat you?

    Dog Man Vs. Antifa

    Let’s not forget our favorite domestic terrorist organization. Maybe Kash Patel or Kristi Noem can tweet out this Dav Pilkey-style book cover.

    This doesn’t have to be limited to Republicans. Maybe someone from Gavin Newsom’s savvy social-media team can join in on the fun and give Pete Hegseth a taste of his own medicine with Where’s Waldo In The Pentagon?

    Really, why does this have to be partisan at all? Let’s close this magical journey back to childhood with a book riffing on the Olivia Nuzzi/RFK Jr. relationship, which people of all ideological stripes love to hate.

    It’s Olivia and the Bear In Central Park.

    This American Canto will bring us all together.

  • Is America at war?

    Is America at war?

    President Trump’s undeclared war on Latin America’s drug smugglers escalated dramatically on Tuesday when US air strikes destroyed four more boats allegedly carrying narcotics – this time in the eastern Pacific Ocean 400 miles south of the Mexican coastal city of Acapulco.

    At least fourteen crew members died in the attacks, and one was rescued alive by the Mexican navy, bringing the total number killed by the US campaign in the last two months to 57.

    Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum condemned the attacks as a violation of international law, and said Mexico’s ambassador in Washington would lodge a protest and demand an explanation from US officials.

    The latest strikes were personally authorized by Trump and announced by War Secretary Pete Hegseth. Videos were released showing the boats hit and bursting into flames. One of them appeared to be laden with large parcels which Hegseth claimed were drugs bound for America’s cities.

    Although the nationality of the vessels was not disclosed, the location of the strikes in the Pacific suggests that they were Colombian. The left-wing Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, has been engaged in a war of words with the Trump administration who accuse him of ties to the drugs cartels. During a recent visit to the UN in New York, Petro called the strikes a war crime, and Washington responded by sanctioning him and his family members.

    The previous US air strikes hit Venezuelan vessels in the Caribbean, and were aimed at another leftist regime – Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro. Eight Venezuelan vessels have been sunk by the strikes since August , and dozens of their crew members killed.

    Maduro responded to the attacks by accusing Trump of planning to overthrow his regime, and mobilized his defense militia to resist. Trump has made little secret of his desire to be rid of the socialist President, whose rule has plunged the oil rich nation into economic chaos and has led to one in three Venezuelans fleeing their country, with many heading towards the America. Trump has openly ordered the CIA to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela aimed at deposing Maduro, whose reelection last year is widely thought to have been rigged.

    The Trump administration is shaking a very big stick against its Latin American neighbours. The Gerald Ford carrier group, whose eponymous flagship is the world’s biggest warship, is currently sailing from the Mediterranean to join the Naval task force already patrolling the Venezuelan coast.

    Although the aggressive US air war against drug smugglers has been denounced by several Latin American states, Trump is gambling that it proves popular in the US where cities have been ravaged by drugs like cocaine and fentanyl that have their origins south of the Rio Grande.

    Mexico, which has historically fought several shooting wars with America, is in the front line of this latest conflict. However, President Sheinbaum is constrained in her protests because she is currently engaged in delicate trade talks with Trump to try and moderate the tariffs that he is imposing on this, the most populous and powerful Latin American nation.

  • In Georgetown, the scariest part of Halloween is the virtue-signaling

    In Georgetown, the scariest part of Halloween is the virtue-signaling

    Halloween has never been my favorite holiday, but as I was warned when we moved here last November, in Georgetown it is a serious affair. For the entire month of October, giant spiders scale the rowhouses, ghosts and cadavers dangle from trees, cackling animatronic witches guard the cemetery and the local bed and breakfast, parking spaces are “reserved” for ghostbusters and on every other block there’s a 12-foot-tall skeleton waiting to send my two-year-old into shrieks of delight.

    Then there are the pumpkins: every shape, size and color, stacked by the dozen in tasteful arrangements on every step of every stoop in town. How does everyone pull this off, I asked my real-estate agent, my one-stop source for all Georgetown-related trivia. There’s a pumpkin-delivery service, of course. For $1,300, you can “bring the full pumpkin patch experience right to your doorstep.” As one friend quipped when passing a particularly bountiful stoop, I’m pretty sure these pumpkins cost more than my monthly rent.

    Call me a Halloween convert: I confess I love it. I proudly spent more money than my husband needs to know on the pumpkins lining our driveway and the skeletons climbing our trellises. It’s a joy to see the season through my toddler’s wide eyes and to join in the silly traditions of our new neighborhood, where, it seems, everyone – not just the politicians – has a lot of skeletons in their closet. Indeed, as you walk the festive brick-paved sidewalks here, you could almost forget the political fights happening just across Rock Creek and the fact that half the neighborhood is currently furloughed. Almost.

    But a few stubborn neighbors won’t let you forget it. For them, it seems, Halloween isn’t about the children – it’s an opportunity to virtue-signal.

    “Elect a clown. Expect a circus.” Under blood-stained, striped banners in a front yard on a prominent corner, this sign sits amid a sea of clown-nosed skeletons, labeled the “White House of Horrors.” Each skeleton has been given a name and a costume. There’s Stephen Miller, dressed like a ghoul or Dementor. “Cosplay Kristi,” with a brown wig and camouflage vest (American flag upside down). Pete Hegseth, or “Secretary WhiskeyLeaks 👊🇺🇸🔥,” in an army jacket. Scott “Scottie” Bessent with a tee shirt expressing his love of tariffs. RFK Jr., “Secretary of Sick,” a monkey perched on his shoulder with a stethoscope.

    And, of course, skeletal Trump himself, with a blond wig and full clown regalia. “Carnival Barker-in-Chief. Don the Con. Tangerine Palpatine. Cadet Bone Spur. Commander-in-Cheese.” Gosh, so clever!

    A mere month after the biggest political assassination in decades, this Georgetown resident is living out a blood-soaked fever dream of dead political rivals. It’s crass, it’s incendiary, and it’s not particularly funny. Whatever it means to be in the Halloween spirit, this ain’t it.

    Nor is it neighborly. Scott Bessent and RFK Jr. both live practically within spitting distance of this house. They’re big boys, of course, and can handle some dark satire. They’ve seen worse: indeed, just weeks ago police responded to a bomb threat at Kennedy’s house. But what sort of message does it send to our children – who are, after all, the primary audience for these Halloween decorations – about how to coexist with those with whom you disagree?

    Remarkably, in a district with the highest percentage of Democrats in the nation (75.6 percent at last count), Georgetown is not a political monolith. On the contrary, it is the least politically predictable place I’ve ever lived. One minute, you’re commending a neighbor for lowering his flag to half-mast in honor of Charlie Kirk; the next you’re waving to Alejandro Mayorkas. At our avowedly apolitical local church, you can find yourself seated simultaneously behind a high-ranking member of the Trump administration and beside a woman carrying an Obama “Hope” tote bag. And in my (admittedly limited) experience, the people here who don’t work in politics – the butchers, the real-estate agents, even the consultants – are far less political than, say, your average New Yorker, presumably because to do good business in this town, you have to get along with everyone.

    So there’s a real opportunity here to have conversations across the aisle with the person living across the street from you. Conversations that could change minds and even change policy. As Henry Kissinger famously observed, “The hand that mixes the Georgetown martini is time and again the hand that guides the destiny of the western world.”

    But conversations are hard, and virtue-signals are easy. Ever since the Secretary moved in last spring, RFK Jr.’s immediate neighbor has staged a series of silent protests, devoting a prominent window display first to autism and then to DC statehood. Now, the house is decorated for Halloween, but a skeleton in the window holds a sign: “WISH I HAD TAKEN MY VACCINE!” And the house next to that one has followed suit, its front yard decorated with fake gravestones, one of which says, “I did my own research.”

    On the other side of the anti-vax skeleton, Kennedy’s neighbor has hung another sign in spooky letters: “WELCOME.” But who is welcome, exactly? Will Kennedy’s grandchildren be welcome if they ring the doorbell on Halloween? Will my daughter?

    The Gospel commands us to love thy neighbor – and not just the good neighbor who helps you with your recycling. Love the bad neighbor who blasts loud music into the night. And love the neighbor whose politics you abhor. This doesn’t mean you can’t criticize your neighbor: Jesus himself practiced tough love, and tough love requires criticism. But it does mean you should offer those criticisms respectfully and in good faith.

    Maybe that’s what it means to be in the Halloween spirit. This spooky season, ring a neighbor’s doorbell and have a conversation, even an argument. And welcome any neighbor who knocks at your own door, with a bowl of candy… and, for the grown-ups, a freshly mixed martini.

  • Don’t try to fight the new media

    Don’t try to fight the new media

    A word of wisdom for any of the old-guard reporters planning on picking a fight with the new media in the White House Briefing Room: Cara Castronuova, of Lindell TV, was once ranked second in the country at super-bantamweight and has won two bouts at Madison Square Garden.

    Mona Austin, of the “100% woman and Black-owned’ Slice, competed with the former boxer during a gaggle with Steve Witkoff by the Palm Room doors yesterday and refused to budge, saying “I don’t want to be on reality TV.” A brouhaha ensued. “There was lots of yelling, it was very uncomfortable,” one hack told Cockburn.

    Who needs UFC on the South Lawn when you can have boxing by the Palm Room doors? Seconds out…

    Feelings don’t care about your facts

    Back when Cockburn was doing his Master’s in Journalism at Columbia (the sportswear company), he was offered sage advice when it comes to covering national tragedies and potential mass casualty events. “These are high-octane times,” his assistant manager told him in the stockroom one morning. “You’d rather be second and right than first and wrong.” Other tips that came up when we was rotating in the fall-winter range were “double-check your sourcing.”

    In recent months, it seems that all of those lofty standards have gone out of the window, thanks in no small part to “internet sleuths” and media figures that favor an allegation that suits their preconceptions over a fact that challenges it. Recall for example how there were at least two different men misidentified as Charlie Kirk’s assassin before the arrest of Tyler Robinson – and how right-leaning accounts seized on how one of them was a member of Salt Lake City Antifa. Then consider how when Robinson was detained, left-leaning accounts were eager to show that he was a “groyper” or a Trump supporter. Text messages published subsequently by the FBI suggest that was not the case. Robinson said he had “had enough of his hatred.”

    This weekend’s shooting and burning of a Mormon church in Michigan – that killed four and injured eight – offers another chastening lesson for Americans. The shooter, who was killed at the scene, has been identified as Thomas Jacob Sanford, an Iraq War veteran. Social media photos surfaced in the aftermath of the attack showed that Sanford had a “Trump-Vance” sign outside his house. Some X users, obviously, falsely claimed this was an anti-Trump sign. Then other social media photos showed Sanford wearing T-shirts that bore the slogan: “Re-elect Trump 2020 – Make Liberals Cry Again.” Bear in mind it’s not clear what, if any, impact Sanford’s seeming support of Trump had on his decision to slaughter LDS worshippers.

    In the interest of taking down the temperature, Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell posted the picture on X, saying, “I’m sure @JDVance agrees with me that it doesn’t matter that the Michigan terrorist was a MAGA supporter. Because in America, regardless of your politics, violence has never been the answer.”

    A number of prominent users on X then began to allege that the photograph of Sanford in the “re-elect Trump” shirt was photoshopped. (It’s not; it remains live at the time of writing.) One accused Swalwell of “sharing fake photos of a murderer”; others said the congressman should resign “in shame.” Two outlets, Townhall and the Daily Caller, published pieces operating under the pretext that Swalwell had tweeted a fake photo. One is now retracted, the other deleted – and Swalwell is doing a victory dance: “Stay on offense. @DailyCaller only took this bullshit down once I threatened to sue.”

    You’d like to be able to say “wait for official confirmation before jumping to conclusions”… but when the FBI Director wrongly attested that a subject is in custody and faces no repercussions for it, what are you supposed to do?

    On our radar

    THREE MILES UP, THREE MILES DOWN Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fat-shamed hundreds of admirals and generals during a meeting at Quantico this morning. “Every member of the Joint Force at every rank is required to take the PT test twice a year, as well as meet height and weight requirements twice a year,” he said.

    LIGHTS OUT Congress is within 12 hours of a government shutdown, as Democrats are seeking an extension for Obamacare tax subsidies.

    SHE FINALLY WON SOMETHING? Kamala Harris’s book has been out for a week and is set to become the bestselling memoir of 2025, according to her publisher.

    The leader we deserve?

    Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman, has declared himself the rightful President of “New Constitutional Republic of the United States” and is suing the Donald Trump for $40 trillion – a touch excessive in Cockburn’s eyes – in a suit filed this week in an Arizona, court. The powerful list of co-defendants includes Trump, the Federal Reserve, the National Security Agency, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements, the state of Israel, Elon Musk’s X Corp., T-Mobile, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Warner Bros. Studios.

    Chansley claims, among other things, that the NSA has “catfished” him by pretending to be his “celebrity crush,” actress Michelle Rodriguez, and that the government has stolen $100,000 in cryptocurrency from him. “If a person were in the loop of what I had written on my computer a few months prior those details would stand out to a sharp mind,” the suit says.

    Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays.

  • The ‘Great Spiritizing’ of the top brass  

    The ‘Great Spiritizing’ of the top brass  

    “Today we end the War on Warriors,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, author of the book The War On Warriors, tweeted this morning. Today was the day that Hegseth really became Secretary of War, addressing, along with President Trump, a full gathering of top military brass in Quantico, Virginia. 

    “This is only an esprit de corps,” the President said, as he set sail from the White House for the event. “Do you know what that is, an esprit de corps? This is only a spirit. These are our generals, our admirals, our leaders, and it’s a good thing, a thing like this has never been done before, because they came from all over the world. And there’s a little bit of expense, not much, but there’s a little expense to that. We don’t like to waste it. We’d rather spend it on bullets and rockets, frankly. But this was the one time we had to do a great spiritizing.”

    The Great Spiritizing began with remarks from Hegseth saying that he had spent his early days at the War Department rooting out “toxic ideological garbage” of DEI and diversity. “We are done with that shit,” he said. “I’ve made it my mission to uproot the obvious distractions that made us less capable and less lethal.”

    From now on, Hegseth said, all military personnel would have to pass a twice-yearly “male-level” fitness test. “Frankly, it’s tiring to look at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look. It is bad, and it’s not who we are.”

    Hegseth, who has either not seen or disagrees with Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam film Full Metal Jacket, said basic training will be “scary, tough, and disciplined.” Drill sergeants can instill fear in new soldiers. “They can toss bunks, they can swear – and yes, they can put their hands on recruits.”

    Sir, yes sir!

    And now it was time to hear from the President of the United States, who doesn’t have to pass a twice-yearly military fitness test. Trump got to play good cop today, providing a warm fatherly contrast to Hegseth’s frightening telesoldier persona.

    “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” Trump said.

    “Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Because there goes your rank, there goes your future.”

    No one left the room. They spent most of their time sitting attentively, unemotive, ramrod-straight, as per their training. But why would you leave the show of a lifetime? Trump decided to use this moment to break the news that because he had felt a “little bit threatened” by Russia, he’d decided to deploy a nuclear submarine, “the most lethal weapon ever made”, off the coast of Russia. “I call it the ‘N-word,’” he said. “There are two ‘N-words,’ and you can’t use either of them.”

    Trump spent 72 minutes praising “the strongest military in the history of the world,” which is something, he said, his predecessor Joe Biden, “the autopen,” never said. Actually, “he never said anything,” Trump said. While addressing the Department of War – “I love the name, I think it’s gonna stop wars” – Trump also advocated for his newly-formed Board of Peace. If his Gaza peace plan works out, that would be the eighth war ended in eight months. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “Nobody’s ever done that.”

    “Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing. They’ll give it to a guy that wrote a book about the mind of Donald Trump… We’ll see what happens, but it would be a big insult to our country. I will tell you that. I don’t want it. I want the country to get it.” And one of the ways Trump said he’s going to win the Nobel Peace Prize is by killing foreign drug traffickers. “If you try to poison our people,” he said, “we will blow you out of existence.”

    But today wasn’t about Donald Trump, even though of course it was. It was about the Armed Forces. “Everybody wants to be in the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard, and our Space Force, our beautiful Space Force. A year ago you would have thought it wouldn’t have been possible. They were talking about making it smaller. Now we’re talking about making it larger. And that’s a beautiful thing. Everybody wants to be doing what you’re doing now. What a difference a Presidential election can make.”

    This went on and on, but the real news of the speech was that Trump announced to his soon-to-be non-fat top brass that the U.S. military would soon deploy to defeat “the enemy within.” “San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re gonna straighten them out one by one,” in a statement that will please some, infuriate others, and terrify those prone to feeling Trump-related terror.

    Thus Spiritized, America’s top military brass set forth to destroy the enemy within. They had their marching orders, to fight wars and also to not fight wars. Either way, the goal was the same. As Ricky Bobby once said, if you’re not first, you’re last.

  • The Bush shoe-thrower is jacked now

    The Bush shoe-thrower is jacked now

    Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the man who once threw a shoe at George W. Bush during a press conference, posted a gym selfie on X the other day. Cockburn is here to tell you that the man is yoked. “Have a nice day” indeed, Muntadhar!

    “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,” al-Zaidi shouted at Bush in 2008, before throwing his shoe. He subsequently spent nine months behind bars. After a release for good behavior, he said he intended to start a foundation that would “build orphanages, a children’s hospital, and medical and orthopedic centers offering free treatment and manned by Iraqi doctors and medical staff.”

    That doesn’t appear to have happened. Al-Zaidi also ran, unsuccessfully, for public office in Iraq in 2018. He now works as a writer and broadcast journalist, but appears to be spending a lot of time and effort getting swole, perhaps doing the “Pete and Bobby Challenge.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of al-Zaidi’s “journalism” these days appears to be of the “free Palestine” variety, but he did post a surprising tweet approving of the death sentence for Iryna Zarutska’s killer.

    But al-Zaidi has never forgotten his roots. Shortly after his workout pic, he reposted a photo of a T-shirt that reads, “Mentally I Am On The Timeline Where Both Shoes Hit George Bush.” Aren’t we all?

    On our radar

    IN THE ROUGH President Trump is currently watching Team USA undergo a testing start to the Ryder Cup in Bethpage, New York. They trail Europe 3-1.

    COULD THIS HAVE BEEN AN EMAIL? Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered hundreds of admirals and generals to attend a short-notice meeting in Virginia next week.

    JIM TIME Former FBI director James Comey posted a defiant video on social media after being indicted by a grand jury in Virginia.

    Get your ‘Stephen Miller, sexual matador’ poster here

    The Trump White House is notorious for producing its share of glorious quotes – but even by its high standards, this was a banner week. On Monday, when the President was alleging a connection between taking acetaminophen during pregnancy and autism, he said, “Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.” The next day at the United Nations, he dragged the organization for their technical difficulties: “These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.” Then when President Erdoğan of Turkey visited the Oval Office, Trump couldn’t help a joke about the leader of the NATO “democracy”: “He knows about rigged elections better than anybody.”

    It takes a lot to top Trump. Step forward Katie Miller, wife of White House aide Stephen and a former aide to Elon Musk herself. Mrs. Miller has a new gig podcasting, and appeared with Jesse Watters on Fox News. If she was after a viral moment to boost her numbers, she bagged it. After Watters said that, being married to Stephen, she was the “envy of all women,” Katie quipped, “the sexual matador, right?”

    If you’re not scarred by the mental image of that, don’t worry: Cockburn asked Grok to depict Stephen Miller as a sexual matador (and then told it to “make him sexier” twice):

    Now you can print him out and put him on your bedroom wall.

    Moscow fools

    Top brass at the Telegraph, a British newspaper, are more red-faced than usual this week after issuing an apology for wrongly accusing a State Department official’s wife of having Kremlin ties.

    The article in question, by Benedict Smith “erroneously stated that Mr. Sergei Chernikov – and, by association, his niece, Ms. Yulia Kirillova – had current ties to the Kremlin and to President Putin personally. This is false,” the apology reads. “In fact, neither Mr. Chernikov nor Ms. Kirillova has any association with the Kremlin or Mr. Putin. Mr. Chernikov has lived away from Russia since 2008 and has not returned since 2020.”

    Kirillova is married to Darren Beattie, a senior State Department official who currently serves as the under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Before his role in Foggy Bottom, Beattie was a speechwriter for the first Trump White House and for then-congressman Matt Gaetz – as well as founding the New Right-ish news site Revolver. Presumably that was enough for the British media to try to depict him as a Kremlin stooge. What is the charge? Having a wife, a beautiful Slavic wife?

    Cockburn hopes Team Telegraph won’t be Russian to conclusions quite so fast next time…

    Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays.

  • Why I am never doing the ‘Pete & Bobby Challenge’

    Why I am never doing the ‘Pete & Bobby Challenge’

    A terrifying thing appeared on my Twitter feed this morning. Secretary of Health and Human Services and bear-fighter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he’s “teamed up” with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for the “Pete & Bobby Challenge.” This, unfortunately, is a fitness challenge. Even more unfortunately, it involves doing 100 push-ups and 50 pull-ups. Most unfortunately of all, they want us to do it all in five minutes or less.

    You might take heart that in the gym-based, sweat-soaked motivational video that accompanies the Tweet, RFK Jr. takes a whole five minutes and 25 seconds to complete this challenge. However, keep in mind that he’s in his seventies, and does the entire challenge in jeans. SecDef Pete, who, if he’s an alcoholic, is the healthiest alcoholic who’s ever lived, completes the under-five-minutes no problem, doing pull-ups like he’s God playing games with dice.

    The odds that I’m going to do this challenge are equal to the odds that I’ll take up needlepoint, start liking mayonnaise, or watch an episode of Virgin River: Zero. I’m all for health and fitness, but this version of Bowflex America isn’t for me. My US passport doesn’t mean I need to crawl through mud like a Marine. I’m the one the Marines are supposed to be defending.

    I preferred a previous generation’s fitness plan: Michelle Obama’s program of growing your vegetables and engaging in some peppy light multicultural Sesame Street dancing. I mean, I didn’t do that, either; I had a reputation as America’s coolest dad to protect. But it was more accessible than RFK’s roided-out brotastic exercise nightmare.

    It’s a matter of exercise perspective. I don’t treat my life like a high-intensity interval. I treat my body like I treat my barbecue: low and slow, with the occasional wet rub. The latter part means I enjoy a good schvitz. Get your mind out of the sewer.

    My fitness program is this: 30 to 45 minutes of low-to-moderate intensity yoga at least five teams a week, and at least a half hour of at least semi-brisk walking a day. And I don’t eat every meal like someone just dumped a barrel of fried chicken tenders into a trough. It might not seem like a lot, and I don’t exactly look imposing, but when I have to duck under a rope in airport security, walk up four flights of stairs, or hump for miles around Chicago with a 30-pound suitcase on my back (which happened last weekend, for reasons that I’ll tell you at dreary length if I see you sometime), I can do it without collapsing.

    I’m all for a renewed Presidential Fitness challenge, and can get behind the MAHA healthy eating program. But I reject this idea of treating life as though it were Basic Training that we must complete every day. The goal should be to get through your routine with minimal stress and strain. They call it Functional Fitness, and unless you are an Olympian, a professional surfer, (or, apparently, a Cabinet member), it’s all you need.

    I treat every day of my life like I’m recovering from a medium-intensity injury or a mild illness. Sure enough, it helps prevent medium intensity injuries and mild illness. I can hold a five-minute plank without even trying, but it’s not because I’m jacked. It’s because I do light, boring, mild exercise every day. My abs aren’t a six-pack, but a solid pony keg in the middle will do the job as well.

    Whose fitness example would you follow: RFK Jr. and SecDef Pete, who look like they’re training to defend Thermopylae against the armies of Xerxes, or President Trump? That man is 79 years old, and his fitness routine involves a weekend round of golf and furious midnight thumb-typing. You can do it, America. It’s an achievable goal.