It was supposed to be an appearance of a routine, a visit to the commander -in -chief to rally the troops, strengthen morale and celebrate the ArmyThe 250th week of the day of the day, which culminates with a parade of Washington, DC, scheduled for Saturday.
Instead, which took place Tuesday in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, has little like the usual visit of a president and a defense secretary. There, President Donald Trump unleashed an interrupted speech with the tunes in invective partisan of a crowd of soldiers positioned behind his podium – blurring the long -standing line and sacrosancting between military and partisan politics.
While Trump viciously attacked his perceived political enemies, he whipped the hooks of the gathered troops directed against Californian leaders, notably Governor Gavin Newsom – in the midst of the president’s controversial decision to deploy the National guard And Marines against the demonstrators in Los Angeles – as well as the former president Joe Biden and the press. The soldiers laughs at laughing and applauded Trump’s diatribe in a shocking and rare public demonstration of troops participating in the naked political partisanry.
For this story, Military.com contacted the office of the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, as well as the army and the 82nd airborne division directly with a series of questions which went from the optics of the event to publications on social networks showing the sale of the merchandise of the Trump campaign on the basis, to the apparent violation of Pentagon policies on uniform political activity.
Internal communications of the 82nd airborne division examined by Military.com reveal a closely orchestrated effort to organize the optics of the recent visit of Trump, in particular the soldiers of picking for the public on the basis of political trends and physical appearance. The troops finally selected to be behind Trump and visible by the cameras were almost exclusively male.
A message at the unit level said without sure “no big soldiers”.
“If soldiers have political opinions that oppose the current administration and they do not want to be in the public, they must speak with their leadership and be exchanged,” another note told troops.
Service officials refused to comment when they were asked for the extent to which the troops were projected, that the soldiers displaying partisan acclamations on television – a violation of longtime pentagon rules – are disciplined or if soldiers who opposed to participate in the event, citing disagreements with the administration, would be disciplined or admoned in any way.
“It was a bad week for the army for all those who care that we are a neutral institution,” a commander of Fort Bragg said in Military.com on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. “It was shameful. I don’t expect nothing to know, but I hope maybe we can learn from it in the long term.”
Experts quickly released And to say that the public silence of the military leadership is a failed opportunity to strengthen the non -supporting nature of the army. Meanwhile, the political leadership at the head of the Ministry of Defense was Far from being apologetic.
“Believe me, no one needs to be encouraged to huer the media,” said Sean Parnell, a spokesperson for Top Pentagon, in a statement at Military.com. “Look no further than this request, which is nothing more than a shameful attempt to ruin the lives of young soldiers.”
Adding to The Spectacle, a pop-up boutique operated by 365 Campaign, a Tulsa retailer, based in Oklahoma which sells pro-Trump memories and other conservative codes, was created on site with campaign style goods on the property of the army. Soldiers were seen buy clothes and tchotchkes, including channel necklaces “Make America Great Again” for false credit cards labeled “White privilege card: everything”.
Allowing the sale of openly partisan goods on an army basis is probably numerous regulations of the Ministry of Defense aimed at preserving the long -standing commitment of the army towards political neutrality. The army has historically done a lot of trouble to avoid even the appearance of the partisanry.
Parnell did not answer follow-up questions on the sale of campaign equipment Maga directly to the troops, but Colonel Mary Ricks, spokesperson for Fort Bragg, said that “the seller’s presence is being examined to determine how it has been authorized and to prevent similar events in the future” in a statement provided after the publication of this story.
Trump used a large part of his speech to slam the Democrats of California and praising his in progress and unprecedented climb of nearly 5,000 soldiers of the federalized guard and the Marines to repress immigration demonstrations.
“We will free Los Angeles and make him free, clean and safe,” he proclaimed the soldiers, adding that Newsom and the mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass are “incompetent” and have falsely told that they helped “insurrectionists” while acting troops in the Huets.
“I bet that none of these soldiers who even knows the name of the mayor or could identify them in programming; they are nonexistent in the chain of control Military.com. “Thus, any opinion they could have could only be attributed to express a political point of view in uniform.”
Trump is far from the first president to use troops as a backdrop for a speech that had political notes. But experts say that this speech has reached a line and has shown that army ethics can be vulnerable.
“What I think is so remarkable about Bragg is that it is really a break on the military side,” said Risa Brooks, a Civil-military relations expert at Marquette Universitysaid military.com.
“This shows that it is possible-that the professional ethics of the army can fail,” she said.
In 2022, Biden was criticized for having delivered a speech outside of independence in Philadelphia which aimed to warn the public of the authoritarian impulses of the president of the time, Trump and his supporters.
He was flanked by two navies in dressed uniform.
Republicans and journalists He immediately jumped on Biden, the snack to politicize the army.
“The only thing worse than the speech of Biden ransacking his fellow citizens is to roll up in our flag and the Marines to do so,” said representative Darrell Issa, R-Calif. wrote on social networks at the time.
Another Trump administration manager James Hutton said Biden “used navies as accessories” And criticized the movement as “contemptible conduct by attacking more than half of the Americans”.
Ari Fleischer, a conservative commentator at the time, said that speech was not only “inappropriate”, but that the Sea body had “explained to do” to allow the speech to occur.
Neither Fleischer, Hutton nor Issa seems to have made messages criticizing Trump’s speech to publication.
Going back decades, the presidents all used troops as a background and placed themselves for the addresses and appearances which sometimes turned the line between the non-partisan nature of the army and the presidency policy.
The press secretary of the White House of Biden, Karine Jean-Pierre, Noted to journalists after Biden’s speech In 2022, “it is in fact normal for the presidents on each side of the aisle to say speeches before the members of the army, including the president … Ronald Reagan and President George HW Bush”.
“It is not an unusual spectacle or it is not an unusual event that occurred,” she added.
Brooks also agreed and noted that many of the cases of troops used as accessories “are mainly caused by the civil side”.
However, many of these examples were presidents who chose the framework to speak to the troops of military policy and the problems which affected them personally, and with the exception of polished applause and laughter of presidential jokes, the troops were not particularly vocal or reactive to the rhetoric offered.
“Trump went further than any other politician in the tenor and the content of his comments, openly dealing with events with troops in the public as campaign gatherings, and openly criticizing his opponents,” said Brooks.
Long before the unprecedented speech at Fort Bragg this week, Trump blurs the boundaries between politics and military events. At the start of his first mandate, he spoke to the troops at MacDill Air Force Base In Florida and said to the troops gathered “We had a wonderful election, right?”
“And I saw these figures, and you loved me and I loved you. That’s how it worked,” he added.
Trump also used the Pentagon hero room to sign a travel ban on Muslim majority in his first mandate. The navies appeared in a 2020 Video of the National Republican Committee he turned to the White House. The same year, the president of the chiefs of the time, General Mark Milley, appeared alongside Trump at Lafayette Square outside the White House after federal officials erased a street of peaceful demonstrators for a photo opportunity in front of a local church.
Many apologized later for his presence.
Despite the silence of military brass this week, Other experts,, military observers And a handful of former leaders, condemned the speech or the silence that followed.
Lieutenant-general of the Russel Honore retirement army, better known to be the commander of the working group who coordinated military aid for Hurricane Katrina, described the “inappropriate” speech.
“I have never witnessed this like that in 37 years in uniform”, honored written on social networks Tuesday.
“Once you see a case of this happening, it potentially normalizes it,” warned Brooks. “He opens the door to more bodies and more obvious violations of non -partisan ethics.”
Publisher’s note: This story has been updated with a Fort Bragg declaration provided to Military.com after the publication of history.
In relation: Trump deploys hundreds of navies in a growing military response to the demonstrations of immigration raids