U.S. General Patton said, “Wars don’t start when the first shot is fired. They start when cowards in suits make bad deals.”

Count me with those whose assessment is that Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025 will go down in history as the Turning Point, or the Liberation Day, when America and the world was first given to foresee the demise of the madness that is Donald Trump and his whole MAGA movement.

This was the day that Trump and his pathetic Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were stared down, or glared down, by 800 U.S. military leaders at that consequential, as it turned out, pep rally at Quantico. 

The silence of those 800 military professionals who were ordered there from all over the world, at no small expense to taxpayers, that met the conclusion of Hegeth’s stupid, sophomoric football coach halftime talk and the introduction onto the stage of Trump, that silence was deafening. (It did not relieve pressure for the release of the Epstein files.)

There were 800 senior U.S. military officers who’ve been through the hell of combat in one way or another, who were being dressed down by a compromised Fox News commentator named Defense Secretary by a cynical Trump administration bent on trashing the nation. Hegseth would not qualify to polish the shoes of those leaders but for Trump’s nihilism.

As for Trump’s performance that day, it was clear that he was shaken to his boots by that silence when he stepped to the microphone. He even said that he’d never experienced such silence raining down on him at a public event. It was an auditorium filled with stonefaced leaders, deadly serious as they all were, savagely unimpressed, except in a profoundly negative way, by the amateurish clown show they were forced to witness onstage.

Virginia U.S. Senator Mark Warner told the media the next day that he saw the officers’ reaction as a “hopeful sign” for the nation. It was the military exhibiting decorum and professionalism, he said, that indicated they will not take unconstitutional orders, the way that others in the media, law firms, universities and business world have.

He called Hegseth’s a “fitness standards speech” that was “insulting, demeaning and belittling.” As for its call for “no more beardos,” Warner quipped, “How does that apply to (vice president) Vance?” But the military leaders “didn’t take the bait. They didn’t respond. They didn’t bend a knee. It indicated to me that the military will not give in. It will stay loyal to the Constitution. I came away relieved.”

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius called the Trump-Hegseth show a “backward-facing message to the generals” with a “focus on grooming and the ‘enemy within,’” noting that it seemed “oblivious to the reality that 21st century combat will be dominated by  drones and artificial intelligence, plus commanders who understand these high-tech weapons.”

As for focusing on the “enemy within,” Ignatius wrote, it “seemed to mean illegal immigrants and perhaps also the ‘radical left lunatics’ who might sympathize with their plight.” Not only is that an illegal use of the military, he noted, “It’s just dumb at a time when Russia and China pose a growing military threat to the United States.” 

In a piece trending online, Michael Jochum wrote, “Trump walked in expecting a rally. He got a funeral. The generals sat in perfect silence, faces locked in the kind of grim stillness that comes from years of watching idiots talk and choosing not to react. Trump, of course, couldn’t handle it. ‘I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,’ he confessed, his voice trembling somewhere between wounded pride and panic. Then came the kicker, ‘If you want to applaud, you applaud.’”

“On Tuesday,” he wrote, “The true firing squad was silence. Not one clap, not one cheer. Just the steady hum of contempt vibrating off the brass like feedback from a dead microphone.”

“These men and women have seen actual combat. They’ve buried soldiers. They’ve lived with the weight of real command…They gave silence, the most cutting judgment of all.”

“Trump’s presidency is a hollow shell propped up by applause, and when the applause disappears, so does he.”