Pete Hegseth calls Top Military Leaders for Unusual Meeting

Last week, Pete Hegseth called an unexpected meeting with all the top military generals at Quantico. Soon after, President Donald Trump announced his plans to join the meeting, raising questions and concerns about his motivations.

While meetings like this are not unheard of, holding one on such short notice, at the same time as a possible government shutdown, is unusual and has left many Americans confused about the administration’s motivations for calling the meeting. Many politicians and commentators feared that Trump’s presence politicized the military, and Trump’s recent threats of deploying American National Guard troops to large U.S. cities did not help this concern. Another concern was the substantial cost of travel and security, which experts estimated ranged from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, especially considering the Trump administration’s promise to reduce government spending.

Many members of the military have come out and voiced their personal concerns for the changes the Trump administration is making in the military, claiming the changes cause division and threaten democracy.

Update: Due to Congress’s inability to agree on spending, the government has gone into a shutdown as of October 1st. On top of this, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s meeting has taken place in Virginia. Hegseth’s speech focused on removing “woke” military policies in order to restore the “warrior ethos” part of Trump’s political agenda. This confirmed some people’s worries about the administration’s politicization of the military. The speech received a mixed reaction with Democrats such as Senator Jack Reed calling the speech “an expensive, dangerous dereliction of leadership by the Trump Administration” while Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said the speech was “a breath of fresh air.”