A Weak Man’s March Toward Power
At Quantico, power was staged like theater — but the risk to our democracy was real
In my seventy-nine years I have never seen my country this exposed. Not during Vietnam. Not in the bitterness of Watergate. Not under the pall of 9/11.
What unfolded the week of September 30, 2025, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth yanked roughly eight hundred flag officers and senior enlisted leaders off missions worldwide and herded them to Quantico with four days’ notice, placed the republic at extreme risk.
All so a former weekend television host, who had never commanded more than a platoon, could lecture them on a mythical “warrior ethos.” The danger isn’t abstract; it’s structural — and it’s immediate. And it played out live on camera so our adversaries could watch the rehearsal.
Gathering the nation’s top military leadership in one venue is a gift to any enemy who studies our weak spots. Doing it to sermonize about a “warrior ethos” filtered through Christian nationalism is worse than careless; it is an effort to politicize the force and launder ideology through the language of discipline and lethality.
I was an Army officer during Vietnam and I’ve led infantry companies in combat. The uniformed professionals I’ve known don’t confuse piety with readiness. They swore an oath to the Constitution, not to a creed, a party, or a man. You could read the officers’ lack of enthusiasm in the set of their jaws and in the silence after each applause line.
The Quantico message
The message was blunt: the military should be re-forged in the image of a faction. Hegseth — briefly an National Guard major, long a television personality — lectured four-star officers on what makes a force “lethal.” It was a jarring inversion of competence and authority. Seasoned commanders, hardened by war and the arithmetic of logistics, were told their institution required theological tuning to be effective. That isn’t professionalism. It’s cosplay wrapped in a flag.
It also violates a norm that has protected the republic since 1789: the separation of partisan politics from the chain of command. You can pack a court or starve an agency. But if you bend the military to personal rule, the brakes fail.
The Quantico summons was a test: could a civilian appointee, backed by a volatile president, bend the nation’s most trusted institution? The answer I saw in those officers’ faces was no — but the fact that the question was asked, publicly and brazenly, should chill us.
The spectacle of weakness
Then came the president’s seventy-minute address. Rambling. Disjointed. By turns boastful and oddly fragile. He treated a meeting of our senior military as if it were a rally, veering into grievances, personal slights, and meandering advice about “carefully” walking down stairs.
That wasn’t strength. It was the broadcast of vulnerability — political, cognitive, and moral — aimed not just at voters but at foreign services that catalog such moments for their briefings.
Strongmen thrive on fear. When their grip slips, the chaos begins — and the louder the show, the weaker the hand behind it. Watch the tells around him: the rushed denials, the “I didn’t see it” evasions, the eagerness to pivot to someone else’s sins.
Law, workarounds, and the domestic battlefield
The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 restrains use of the Army and Air Force in domestic law-enforcement roles, with parallel limits for the Navy and Marine Corps — only the Coast Guard is exempt.
Bayonets have no place near a ballot box, and you don’t need tanks in the streets to chill a neighborhood — badges, quotas, and silence can do the job. Enter the Department of Homeland Security — Border Patrol, ICE, and other units not bound by the same restrictions.
While commentators warn about “martial law,” DHS has already carried out sweeping warrantless raids in U.S. cities under the banner of immigration enforcement — door-to-door dragnets that zip-tie residents in pajamas, separate families, and only later sort citizens from non-citizens.
This is no hypothetical abuse that might happen if an emergency is declared. It’s happening now. You don’t need tanks in the streets if you can chill a neighborhood with badges, quotas, and silence.
And the silence is the point. Detainees vanish into a bureaucratic fog of transfers, flights, and sealed facilities. Lawyers scramble. Families plead. Paperwork disappears in the rear-view.
It’s not mass round-ups on a parade ground; it’s a slow erosion of rights that teaches whole communities to keep their heads down. That’s how a democracy can be hollowed out: not dramatic gunfire, just a memo and a phone call no one answers.
The budget knife and the blueprint for autocracy
While the cameras linger on spectacle, the ledger bleeds. This summer’s one-party budget “reconciliation” made permanent the tax privileges at the top while taking a hatchet to health- and nutrition-programs — and, in the rush, let Affordable Care Act premium subsidies expire.
That clerical ‘mistake’ will push millions of healthier Americans out of coverage. Premiums for everyone else will rise — the quiet dismantling of a working market disguised as fiscal virtue.
Layered atop the cuts is Project 2025: a step-by-step scheme to purge the civil service, consolidate presidential power, and refashion the state in the mold of a sect. During the campaign the president denied any link. Now he praises its architect by name and meets to operationalize the blueprint.
Authoritarians tell you who they are — eventually. Believe them when they do.
Fissures in the façade
None of this means the would-be strongmen are winning. It means they’re trying — and over-reaching. Lower federal courts still enforce the law. State officials still say no. Civil society keeps finding pressure points: advertiser boycotts against censorship, legal aid against unlawful raids, public records that map what the government tries to hide.
Even inside the ruling party, fractures show. Some leaders won’t defend what they can’t explain. Others triangulate — praising the president while sliding a knife between the ribs. Succession whispering becomes insurance: if the center cannot hold, someone must be next.
Do not mistake the chaos for strength. A stable autocracy doesn’t need to shout. A confident administration doesn’t need to drag the entire senior leadership of the armed forces to be scolded on camera.
History’s rhymes
We’ve been here before, in pieces. Reconstruction’s collapse under the boot of terror and the pen of complicit editors. The late-nineteenth-century robber barons who bought legislatures. The Red Scares when fear curdled into loyalty oaths.
Again and again we relearn the lesson: if you control the story — and the permission to tell it — you control the future.
The difference now is that we can film the raid, capture the speech, trace the funding, and push it to millions in seconds. That cuts both ways — propaganda travels fast — but the monopoly on narrative is broken. The question is whether we’ll use that break to defend truth or drown in the feed.
What this moment demands
First, precision. Words matter. It’s not “martial law” if DHS agents in windbreakers — not soldiers in Kevlar — are abusing process. It’s not “political theater” if courts are enjoining unlawful actions while agencies rewrite rules in the dark. Name the thing, then fight the thing.
Second, solidarity beyond tribes. Authoritarian movements win by fracture — left versus center, urban versus rural, veterans versus civilians, race against race. The Constitution needs defenders who may disagree on policy but agree on the rules of the game. That coalition is uncomfortable by design. Embrace the discomfort.
Third, local muscle. Everyone wants a national rescue. That’s not how republics are saved. School boards. County clerks. State courts. City councils. Sheriffs who follow the law. Reporters who refuse to look away. There are fifty-two-thousand races on the ballot next month that will decide who says yes, who says no, and who asks for a warrant. Show up where your signature, your voice, and your presence matter.
Fourth, a professional military insulated from cults. Every officer and NCO who stared straight ahead at Quantico and refused to be drafted into a personality cult deserves our backing. The oath is to the Constitution. Civilian control of the military is not license for a faction to hijack the chain of command. Congress can tighten the Insurrection Act, condition appropriations on non-partisan promotions, and mandate transparency for domestic deployments. Do it now, in daylight.
The line we must hold
History shows that real institutions don’t need to cosplay. The display at Quantico was not a flex; it was a tell. A confident executive doesn’t fear professionals. A leader secure in his mandate doesn’t ramble into self-pity before the guardians of the republic. A movement certain of its legitimacy doesn’t rely on hush, confusion, and bureaucratic fog to achieve its aims.
The danger is two-fold: the brazen bid to turn the military into a tool of a faction, and the quieter project to make fear ordinary — raids routine, detentions hidden, benefits cut, truth negotiated, rules bent. One shocks the conscience, while the other slowly numbs it. Together they form the oldest play in the autocrat’s book: exhaust the public until it accepts the unacceptable.
I refuse that exhaustion. I’ve seen too much of this country, in peace and in conflict, to surrender to it now. The institutions still work when we work them. The law still bites when we feed it facts. The officers still salute the Constitution when we give them leadership worthy of their salute. The courts aren’t perfect; neither are the voters. But the alternative to imperfection isn’t order — it’s obedience.
A final word to the officers at Quantico
You kept your bearing. You did your duty. You listened to a lecture that cheapened both faith and service — and you did not flinch. You know where your oath points. If ever asked to turn that oath against the people you serve, remember the faces in your formations, the families in your housing, the graves on your posts. Remember that the republic came first, and — if we do our jobs as citizens — will outlast every man who tries to stand above it.
To the rest of us: do your part. Vote, volunteer, keep filming, give to legal aid and local journalism, and keep demanding warrants, information, and real legislation before the next stunt forces another “emergency.” Speak with the patience of a citizen and the urgency of a sentinel.
The republic is in danger — the worst I have seen in my lifetime. But it is not yet lost. The men who cosplayed power at Quantico don’t own the country they tried to command — we do. And if we mean it, truly mean it, we’ll prove it the oldest way there is: together, in public, under law, while there’s still time.
