Hegseth Declares War on “Fat Troops” in His “Urgent” Military Meeting

In a rare gathering Tuesday, top military leaders were summoned from across the globe to be lectured by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about new directives meant to uphold a “warrior ethos” in the military.

An issue on which the former Fox News pundit placed particular emphasis was the supposed crisis of “fat troops.”

“It all starts with physical fitness and appearance,” Hegseth told the seasoned commanders, being sure to pat himself on the back in that regard: “If the Secretary of War can do regular hard P.T. [physical training], so can every member of our joint force.”

“Frankly,” he continued, “it’s tiring to look out 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.”

Reacting to the remarks, some social media users poked fun at the weight of the man at the very top of the armed forces’ chain of command: President Trump. Among them was California Governor Gavin Newsom, who frequently trolls the president online—this time posting an unflattering photo of Trump during a 2024 campaign stunt at McDonalds with the caption: “I guess the Commander in Chief needs to go!”

During his address, Hegseth also laid out a bizarre no-beard policy (that will disproportionately affect Black service members): “No more beards, long hair, superficial individual expression. We’re going to cut our hair, shave our beards, and adhere to standards,” he said, adding, “We don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans. At my direction, the era of unprofessional appearance is over. No more beardos.”

President Donald Trump ranted Tuesday that U.S. warships don’t look tough enough anymore.

Speaking in front of a meeting of hundreds of U.S. military officials whom War Secretary Pete Hegseth had summoned to Washington, Trump said that his administration was reviewing the way that the U.S. builds warships.

“It is something we’re considering, the concept of ‘battleship.’ Nice six-inch side, solid steel. Not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. Starts melting as the missile’s about two miles away,” Trump said.

But Trump made it clear that his complaints actually have nothing to do with efficiency or safety. “I am a very aesthetic person. I don’t like some of the ships you’re doing aesthetically,” Trump said. “They say, ‘Oh, it’s stealth.’ That’s not stealth. An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you’re stealth.”

The U.S. Navy has been a particular sticking point for Trump, as the agency that is consistently behind schedule and over-budget flies in the face of his gestures at efficacy. In June, Navy Secretary John Phelan said Trump’s priorities for the military branch could be summed up as “shipbuilding, shipbuilding, shipbuilding,” a bid that sent defense contractors foaming at the mouth. Shipping experts have said Trump’s dream will likely cost billions of dollars—others say it is destined to fail.

Unfortunately, Trump doesn’t actually know anything about warships. U.S. warships are constructed using some aluminum to reduce weight and improve fuel efficiency, according to Wieland Diversified, a metal supplier. Aluminum is also resistant to corrosion and durable against the ocean waves.

Trump repeated a nonsensical criticism from his executive order that the U.S. once built one ship a day, and now they barely build one a year—which is obviously false. The president has also previously falsely claimed that magnets stop working when placed in water, and therefore were a stupid thing to put on a boat.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House plans to give Americans the chance to buy drugs directly from the government, via a website dubbed “TrumpRx.” Whether the drugs will actually be cheaper or more accessible than Medicare and Medicaid is still very much up in the air.

This announcement is timely, as Trump’s 100 percent tariff on pharmaceutical products is set to hit the market this week, and will very well likely cause the prices of medicine for millions of Americans to skyrocket. This “TrumpRx” scheme seems to be an attempt to offset that.

This also comes just days after Trump declared that he would reduce drug costs by 1,000 percent, a claim as shaky as TrumpRx’s chances of providing a wide enough range of options to actually help Americans with the incoming potential price inflation that his policies have already caused. Pfizer has already pledged to lower its own prices to help Trump, according to sources who spoke with the Journal.

“President Trump is leveraging the power of the federal government to drastically cut drug prices for everyday Americans,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told the paper. “Democrats talked the talk for decades about drug prices, but only President Trump is actually walking the walk.”

Desai brings up an interesting point here. This is essentially Trump exerting state control over the pharmaceutical industry, superseding private business so that the government can sell drugs directly to the people at prices it (supposedly) determines. If a Democrat tried that, or even talked about it, they’d likely be harangued as an anti-American Communist. But it’s Trump, so he gets tough guy points from his base instead.

This week, Senator Bernie Sanders’s office released a report revealing that the prices of nearly 700 prescription drugs have increased during Trump’s second term.

“Can’t wait to hear what GOP leadership thinks of TrumpRx. For years Dems wanted Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices,” one user wrote on X. “GOP balked and screamed socialism. Now Trump wants to sell drugs via a government-owned website.”

Trump told senior generals and admirals they will be going to “war” on U.S. soil.

In his address Tuesday before a rare gathering of hundreds of military leaders, who were summoned from around the world to Virginia, the president lamented “what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles”—cities where he’s threatened to send troops based on the baseless notion that Democratic officials have allowed crime to run rampant there.

Priming the top brass to conceive of forthcoming military operations in those cities as a “war,” Trump continued, “They’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

Trump later added that he’s told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military. Because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”

The declaration came just after Hegseth—whose department Trump is seeking to rebrand as the “Department of War”—told the group, “War is something you do sparingly, on our own terms, and with clear aims. We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.

“We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement,” Hegseth added, referring to rules that govern when, how, and to what degree members of the military are permitted to use force against foreign combatants. “We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.”

Nuclear is the new “n-word,” according to Donald Trump.

The president, sharp as ever, rambled at an assembly of America’s top commanders Tuesday morning about nixing “woke” ideology from the armed services and bringing “battleships” back. 

He also discussed the threat of nuclear war, telling America’s military leadership that the country’s nuclear capabilities were still far ahead of its enemies’. Trump’s rant on nuclear warfare, however, came packaged with an odd detail: that the term nuclear was, to Trump, akin to the “n-word”

“You don’t have to be that good with nuclear. You could have one-twentieth what you have now and still do the damage that would be, you know, that’d be so horrendous,” he told the crowd.

Trump used the hate-speech abbreviation to emphasize how dangerous it is to “throw around” the term nuclear, but the comparison didn’t land.

“I call it the n-word,” Trump said. “There are two n-words, and you can’t use either of them.”

He then attempted to assuage concern of potential fallout by recounting how he recently directed a nuclear submarine to counter Russian threats.

“We were a little bit threatened by Russia recently, and I sent a submarine, nuclear submarine, the most lethal weapon ever made,” Trump said. “Number one, you can’t detect it. There’s no way. We’re 25 years ahead of Russia and China in submarines.”

Trump further claimed that America’s arsenal was vast enough to make it the last man standing in any type of nuclear conflict. Exactly how America’s citizens would fare during such an event, however, was unclear.

“Frankly, if it does get to use, we have more than anybody else,” Trump said. “We have better, we have newer, but it’s something we don’t ever want to even have to think about.”

Nuclear war was at the epicenter of public concern during America’s Cold War face-off with the USSR. Around the height of the conflict in 1983, ABC aired a made-for-TV movie titled The Day After that intended to publicize the potential horrors of nuclear fallout. The fictitious film focused on the Kansas City area, showcasing the body horror and devastation wreaked by nuclear bombs.  

At the time, it was the most viewed television film in history, reaching nearly 39 million households. Its impact on the country—and U.S. foreign policy—was seismic. President Ronald Reagan viewed the film at Camp David, later writing in his journal that it left him “deeply depressed” and keen to reshape American nuclear policy. 

Four years later, the film was also broadcast on Soviet state television, influencing Soviet mindsets while Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

It has been speculated that Trump—a man of television himself—was also deeply influenced by the film. In a June interview with Engelsberg Ideas, former presidential adviser Fiona Hill (who served as a witness during Trump’s first impeachment inquiry) posited that the film could have played a significant role in the MAGA leader’s perception of nuclear armageddon, and how that fear could funnel into a nuclear arms race.

“Trump is very much a man who visualises things and sees everything in a television context,” Hill said. “I’m sure that he would have seen The Day After. I’m sure that such depictions and images, and others like them, left an impression on Trump. These depictions were the result of the War Scare and the standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States over the placement of SS-20 and Pershing missiles in Europe. 

“When all is considered, you get the feeling that this moment, in 1983 to 1984, is a turning point for Trump,” she continued. Trump, according to Hill, made his first visit to the USSR the same year that Reagan signed the nuclear treaty, all in an effort to “try to put himself into that kind of position where he becomes the guy who can negotiate the end of nuclear weapons.”