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The president leveraged the meeting as his chance to trumpet his domestic and foreign policy moves.
Sept. 30, 2025, 3:16 p.m. ET
Hundreds of generals and admirals gathered on Tuesday to listen as President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered sprawling, campaign-style speeches that laid out talking points on cultural issues from the right.
Mr. Trump’s remarks at the event, a highly unusual gathering of commanders from around the world, often veered away from military matters. The president trumpeted positions he has assumed on an array of issues both foreign and domestic.
Addressing an auditorium of impassive uniformed officers, Mr. Trump spoke about topics including his deployment of the National Guard to American cities, his relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and nuclear weapons.
Here are five takeaways from Mr. Trump’s speech on Tuesday.
Trump repeated a familiar list of grievances.
Former President Joseph R. Biden was frequently mentioned by Mr. Trump. He assailed Mr. Biden’s tenure as a failed presidency that he used to emphasize what he views as his successes, particularly the lower number of migrants crossing the southern border.
Mr. Trump used his remarks to raise false claims that Mr. Biden’s aides had used autopen to approve pardons and sign executive orders on his behalf without actual authorization. He criticized the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that occurred under his predecessor and blamed Mr. Biden for lower military recruitment numbers — a misleading claim that ignores an increase that began before Mr. Trump took office.
The president also falsely suggested that the U.S. military had not operated under a merit system but recruited and promoted “people that were totally unfit” because of “political correctness.”
“The apparatus of our country was not set up for merit,” he said. “It was set up for political correctness.”
The president suggested troops use cities as military ‘training grounds.’
Mr. Trump again labeled large coastal cities run by Democratic mayors as “unsafe” and “dangerous” places where law enforcement officers faced brutal attacks by protesters and “career criminals” roamed for victims. That, he said, was his rationale for deploying the National Guard troops to Washington, Chicago and Portland, Ore., adding he would “straighten them out one by one.”
But then he went a step further. The president recounted telling Mr. Hegseth that the U.S. military should use those cities as “training grounds” for future wars.
“That’s a war too. It’s a war from within,” he said. “We have to handle it before it gets out of control.”
Mr. Trump’s defiance of military norms — a federal judge in early September said his deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles violated federal law — goes beyond his focus on Democrat-run cities. Over the summer, he ordered the Pentagon to use the armed forces to target drug cartels and help with immigration enforcement.
Trump voiced his disappointment in Russia’s president.
Mr. Trump expressed deep frustration over the continued war in Ukraine, despite his efforts to broker a peace agreement, including with a one-on-one meeting in Alaska where the president rolled out the red carpet for Mr. Putin.
Mr. Trump said that he had thought the war in Ukraine would be the “easiest” one to end, but it “turned out to be the hardest” of all conflicts to solve. Mr. Trump also called Mr. Putin “a paper tiger” for failing to win the war, which began with a full-scale invasion more than three years ago.
“I’m so disappointed in President Putin,” Mr. Trump said. “We met in Alaska and had a good meeting. Then he went back and started sending drones into Kyiv.”
He emphasized ‘peace through strength’ but expressed dismay at a possibility of nuclear war.
Mr. Trump repeated his usual lines that the United States was regaining respect from other countries, crediting it to his administration’s willingness to use military options in place of diplomacy, as he did in ordered the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities after talks faltered.
But on Tuesday, he called nuclear weapons “a second N word” as he warned against the buildup of weapons by China and Russia’s modernization of its arsenal. The prospect of using such weapons, he said, was “horrendous.”
“There are two N words, and you can’t use either of them,” Mr. Trump said. He added that using nuclear weapons on American adversaries “is something we don’t ever want to even have to think about.”
The top brass reacted little to the president’s remarks.
Other than some chuckles when Mr. Trump tried to crack jokes, nearly all of the generals and admirals listened to the president’s remarks in silence. There were no loud ovations during his remarks, after senior Pentagon leaders warned the attendees not to react or cheer, in keeping with the norms of the country’s traditionally nonpartisan military.
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Mr. Trump sensed the subdued atmosphere immediately. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he said.
The president then encouraged the generals to “feel nice and loose,” saying that they were “allowed” to applaud, laugh or even get up and leave if they don’t like what they’re hearing — though he joked that then they’d be fired if they left early.
The only applause he received was a muted round of clapping at the end of his 73-minute speech.
Minho Kim covers breaking news and climate change for The Times. He is based in Washington.
