QOTD: "The Silence Was Deafening"

 

Political strategist and never Trumper Rick Wilson gives the Whiskey Pete / Malignant Fascist shit show in front of our nation's top military leaders a good acid bath in Substack. A couple of excerpts, but please read his whole piece:

"It was the kind of rambling, aggrieved, slack-jawed performance you get when a man has fused his ego to a teleprompter and still can’t find the plot. Donald Trump shuffled out, tried to grunt his way through a “speech” that was really just a slurry of “Sir” stories, self-fellation, and absurd lies… and then inevitably fell back into the only narrative he’s truly capable of sustaining: grievance, fantasy, and the endless autobiographical fan fiction where he alone is hero, martyr, and field marshal.

And the room knew it.

This wasn’t the county GOP Lincoln Dinner; this was a forced assembly of America’s senior military leadership, men and women who manage more complexity before breakfast than Trump, Pete Hegseth, and their entire MAGA cosplay corps could comprehend in a lifetime.

They lead in real danger, in real time, in real space, against real adversaries. They run multivariate operations across the globe that would leave the weekend cable-host-turned-pretend-Patton drooling into his third morning cocktail. Instead, they had to sit for two hours and watch Hegseth try to swing his rhetorical broadsword before Trump wandered onstage and word-vomited all over the carpet." (our emphasis)

Wilson notes that the silence of the room reflected not only on military tradition, which shuns political events, but to the performative and imbecilic speeches by Whiskey Pete and the MF: 

"The silence was deafening. The smatterings of polite applause? Mercy claps from Hegseth and Trump’s staffers. You could feel the oxygen getting sucked out of the room as the Commander-in-Chief proved what all of the Flag officers in the room knew already: he is utterly unqualifed, mentally unfit, and below the standard of leadership they’d expect from a green 2nd LT."  (our emphasis)

Illegal orders issued by the day drunk Defense Secretary or his cult leader -- and they will be issued -- are much more likely to be refused after the performances at Quantico.