America’s toxic masculinity crisis was on full display today when Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense or, as he likes to say, Secretary of War, stood up in front of a room full of generals, admirals, and other senior military brass and lectured them about what it meant to be a real man. Hegseth himself is clean shaven, and he has a lot of white nationalist tattoos, so he knows whereof he speaks. But here’s the thing—we’re a point where being a man, being a real man has been completely redefined by people like Pete Hegseth and Donald. There was a time when being a mature adult man meant being able to admit when you’re wrong; being able to apologize; being able to course correct when the initial strategy that you settled on proved not to be working. Well, no longer. Being a real man in America now means never admitting when you’re wrong and then continuing to be wrong and, in fact, doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on your wrongness. Being a real man in America means never course correcting. Why? Because course correcting means having to admit you were wrong.
We keep going down the most misguided, dangerous path all to protect the fragile ego of the person who set us down that path in the first place. What else does it mean to be a real man in Donald Trump’s and Pete Hegseth’s America? It means not caring about the feelings of other human beings or believing that empathy is something we should value. It means believing that kindness is weakness, and that the only feelings that matter are theirs. During the 2016 election, Donald’s supporters wore t-shirts that said, “Fuck your feelings to mock the snowflakes on the left. Guess what? It turns out that while they do not care about our feelings, they seem to think we should care about theirs. Donald in particular doesn’t like it when his feelings get hurt.
He doesn’t like it when people refuse to go out of their way to make sure that his feelings are assuaged and protected and valued. So being a real man in America means not caring at all about other people, while demanding that they care about you. It means being so obsessed with looking tough and acting tough and sounding tough, that you fail to realize how weak and pathetic you are. One of the most glaring things about Hegseth’s remarks today is that he actually believed he looked like a strong man sharing compelling ideas and that the audience, full of serious people, admired him when surely the opposite must have been the case. But when you belong to a party that thinks that Donald Trump is the ideal of masculinity, you’ve completely lost your way. Unfortunately, they’re bringing all of us down with them.
Let’s dive in.
Good evening, everybody. Welcome to tonight’s episode of Mary Trump Live. It is great to have you here.
As we know, Republicans and Democrats have been unable to reach a funding deal, so a government shutdown is almost certain to start at midnight tonight. The New York Times reports that a large sticking point is that Republicans want to extend the current funding levels until late November. Meanwhile, Democrats insist on more than $1 trillion in funding to preserve Obamacare subsidies. They warned that millions of Americans could lose coverage if those subsidies expire. Democrats also want to reverse healthcare cuts included in Donald’s “Big Abominable Bill.” Republicans of course, are telling a very different story, and it is of course nonsense. They are saying that Democrats are fighting to provide healthcare for undocumented immigrants. This is a lie. Donald pushed this lie this afternoon at an Oval Office press conference:
I don’t know. We’ll probably have a shutdown because one of the things they want to do is they want to give incredible Medicare, Cadillac, the Cadillac Medicare to illegal immigrants, and what that does is it keeps ‘em coming into our country and like they do in California, and no country can afford that, no country, they are shutting it down. We’re not shutting it down. We don’t want it to shut down because we have the greatest period of time ever. I told you we have $17 trillion being invested. So the last person that wants to shut down is us. Now, with that being said, we can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like. And you all know Russell V, he’s become very popular recently because he can trim the budget to a level that you couldn’t do any other way. So they’re taking a risk by having a shutdown because of the shutdown, we can do things medically and other ways, including benefits. We can cut large numbers of people out. We don’t want to do that, but we don’t want fraud, waste, and abuse, and we’re cutting that.
Let’s be systematic here. The Republicans control the executive branch and both houses of Congress. How in the world are Democrats responsible for shutting down a government they don’t control? Here’s the thing: the reason Republicans are failing to get any support from the Democrats to help them pass this bill—because remember, they need seven Democrats to vote with them—is that they’re trying to ram through a funding bill that contains no compromises whatsoever. They are refusing to allow the Obamacare subsidies to continue. The Republicans, in other words, want Democrats to support a bill that would take away healthcare from millions of Americans. Why on earth would any Democrat vote for such a thing and how is it their fault that the Republicans refuse to compromise?
So instead, this fiction is being spun that the Democrats want to give American taxpayer dollars to undocumented workers and make sure that there is, and this is a quote from Donald, “Transgender for everybody,” whatever that means. This nonsense is all to convince those who are willing to be convinced that a shutdown is not the Republican’s fault. This is not Donald’s fault. It’s the fault of the evil radical left Democrats. So what is a man and a party to do? If the Democrats won’t cave in, (which to be fair, the Republicans have every right to expect them to do because that’s what they typically do), then Donald and the fascist Republicans are just going to have to punish the rest of us. They have promised to fire hundreds if not thousands of civil servants. Donald said that if Democrats don’t agree to keep the government open under terms that are absolutely unacceptable to them, he will have to cancel essential programs simply because Democrats like them. Here’s the thing, though—whether Democrats like those programs is irrelevant. These programs provide essential services to Americans, including people who voted for Donald and the Republicans.
The only way we get through this is for Democrats to stand strong, and, as I’ve been saying for a very long time now, shut it all down. Let Donald and the Republicans do their worst because, quite frankly, it cannot be as bad as what they do when the government is open.
This morning, as I alluded to earlier, Donald and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a bizarre and frightening event. Hegseth ordered all of our nation’s top military leaders to convene over 800 generals and admirals from stations around the world to report to a marine base in Quantico, Virginia. The reason was for them to listen to two rambling unhinged speeches.
To sum up, the goal seemed to be to purge military leaders who aren’t a hundred percent loyal to Donald. That’s alarming for many reasons, but there was no loyalty oath demanded. It was more strongly implied that if military offices disagreed with Donald’s policies, if they aren’t sufficiently loyal to him, they should resign. At the beginning of his remarks, Donald said that the officers in the audience could behave however they wanted—they could applaud, they could laugh, and if they didn’t like what they heard, they could leave. In the last instance, they’d lose their rank and their career. People in the audience laughed, which I don’t quite understand because he wasn’t kidding.
In the moments when Donald and Hegseth weren’t pushing their fascist agenda, they were pathetic and rambling. Donald said the following:
I’m very careful when I walk downstairs for like I’m on stairs like these stairs, I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that. You walk nice and easy. You don’t have to set any record, be cool, be cool when you walk down, but don’t bop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen Dan Bop. He’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on. I said, it’s great. I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are going to happen and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president.
The bad thing has already happened—Donald is back in the Oval Office. But is this really why we spent millions of dollars in taxpayer money to convene all of the top military brass in Virginia so they could listen to that drivel?
Hegseth had his own agenda and during one of his tirades he managed to be at once, angry, hateful, and ignorant:
This administration has done a great deal from day one to remove the social justice politically correct and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department to rip out the politics. No more identity months. DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division distraction or gender delusions. No more debris as I’ve said before, and we’ll say again. We are done with that shit.
I think the most disturbing thing about Hegseth’s remarks, besides the fact that he’s the Secretary of Defense is that he thinks that he comes across as a strong, admired leader when nothing could be further from the truth.
According to The New York Times, military specialists questioned the cost and disruption to daily operations caused by the meeting, as well as the security risks of concentrating so many top military commanders in one place. The purpose of the whole charade seems to have been to give Hegseth the opportunity to lecture military leaders with decades of experience about an “enhanced warrior ethos” on live television. That’s what this was about. It was a photo op for Donald and Hegseth. They wanted to us to believe that they were the real men in the room.
Unfortunately for us, they’re both as far from being role models as they could possibly be. I don’t know how the men and women in that audience processed the experience of having two woefully unqualified, corrupt, and deluded men lecture them.
For his part, even though he once served, clearly knows nothing about the rules of engagement and he has nothing but disdain for them. To sit in that room listening to Hegseth berate you despite your years and decades of service, and realize that that man has the authority to order you to sit in that room, waste your time, demean you and demean the troops under your command, and know that he is your boss and, worse, that Donald is his boss must have been a bridge too far.
Donald is not known for a ceremonious firing. For instance, former FBI director James Comey found out that he was fired while watching the news. Others were fired via tweet. That was something that happened during the first Trump administration.
Sources told CBS that hundreds of FBI employees will be separated from the Bureau at midnight via mass email. Some of those fired were agents who were seen kneeling in 2020 while responding to unrest in Washington DC After George Floyd’s murder.
These is purge going in inside the very law enforcement agency that protects Americans against terror attacks, child pornographers and gun runners. The question is raised; how will they use the resources that remain to protect Americans?
The answer is simple: They have no interest in protecting everyone everywhere. The goal is to purge law enforcement of anybody who is not completely loyal to Donald and the agenda of the Trump regime. Agents are getting fired because five years ago they took a knee during a protest.
That’s what happens when the person in charge is a thin-skinned bully who has a good memory when it comes to one thing: remembering slights and those who stood up against him. Donald never forgets a grudge, and that is where we are. The entire government of the United States of America and its agencies led by people like Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Robert Kennedy, Linda McMahon ,and Tulsi Gabbard, is in service to helping Donald get revenge.
