Trump Tells Top Brass U.S. Cities Should Be Military "Training Grounds"

By Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt, and Shawn McCreesh

Reporting from Washington

Sept. 30, 2025

Trump and Hegseth Recount Familiar Partisan Complaints to Top Military Leaders

The U.S. generals and admirals summoned from around the world had been given little information about the planned event.

More than 800 generals and admirals, under the direction of President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were summoned to a military base in Virginia for an unprecedented meeting. 

In the end, it was just another campaign-style presentation. President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recited a familiar litany of partisan culture war talking points in their highly anticipated call-up of several hundred military officers on Tuesday.

But in a rambling and sometimes incoherent speech in which he praised his own tariffs and insulted former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump disclosed that he had told Mr. Hegseth to use American cities as “training grounds” for the military.

“The Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. What they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within. And I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor — stupid governor — stupid.”

It was an evolution of one of Mr. Trump’s favorite themes — that cities run by Democrats are lawless, urban hellscapes. But now he was telling military commanders charged with waging war his thinking on where their next deployments could be.

“It seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places,” the president told the generals and admirals at a military base in Virginia. “And we’re going to straighten them out one by one, and this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room.”

“That’s a war too,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s a war from within.”

Mr. Trump’s comments were greeted by expressionless faces — the Pentagon’s senior military leaders had warned the officers not to react or cheer, per the norms of what is supposed to be a nonpartisan military. The result: the audience was quieter and much more still than Mr. Trump usually encounters in his stump speeches.

One senior officer said they were told to clap only when the Joint Chiefs of Staff did, like at the State of the Union address.

The news last week that Mr. Hegseth had hastily summoned hundreds of the country’s top brass to Marine Corps Base Quantico for a first-of-its-kind gathering had led to a flurry of speculation and apprehension about what he had planned. More firings? A declaration of war on Venezuela? A loyalty pledge to the president?

Instead, it was more criticism of the military, which Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth complained had, under their predecessors, become distracted by political correctness.

Mr. Hegseth, who spoke first, told the generals and admirals that he was tightening standards for fitness and grooming, cracking down even more rigorously against “woke garbage” and rejecting the notion of “toxic” leadership. 

“It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country in the world. Real toxic leadership is promoting people based on immutable characteristics or quotas instead of based on merit. The era of politically correct, overly sensitive, don’t hurt anyone’s feelings leadership ends right now at every level.” 

It was unclear why, with a shutdown of the federal government looming, Mr. Trump and his defense secretary decided to gather the country’s senior military leaders from deployments in the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Pacific to tell them face to face that they were straight out of “central casting,” as Mr. Trump said.

“I’m thrilled to be here this morning to address the senior leadership of what is once again known around the world as the Department of War,” Mr. Trump said. (Though Mr. Trump has renamed the Defense Department, Congress has not yet approved the change.)

Mr. Trump praised his own policies as he looked to the future. “You’ll never see four years like we had with Biden and that group of incompetent people that ran this country that should have never been there,” Mr. Trump said, to silence in the room. “With leaders like we have right here in this beautiful room today, we will vanquish every danger and crush every threat to our freedom.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has ordered National Guard soldiers to Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and Portland, Ore., to assist immigration efforts and combat crime. Local political leaders have objected to the mobilizations, with many pointing out that violent crime rates have fallen sharply in recent years after surging during the coronavirus pandemic.

The president also directed the military to attack boats in the Caribbean that he said were carrying drugs to the United States, but he offered no detailed legal justification.

Even before the event was finished, former military officials were criticizing the president’s and Mr. Hegseth’s remarks.

“I couldn’t be prouder of our highest-ranking leaders for maintaining an apolitical face under immense pressure,” said retired Army Maj. General Paul D. Eaton, who served in the Iraq war.

He added, “Pete Hegseth spent millions to fly in all of our generals and admirals to rant about facial hair and brag about how many pull-ups he can do, and have Donald Trump sleepwalk through a list of partisan gripes.”

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the gathering “an expensive, dangerous dereliction of leadership” by the Trump administration.

“While American forces confront real threats across the globe, Mr. Hegseth and President Trump chose to pull generals and admirals away from their missions to listen to hours of political grievances,” Mr. Reed, a West Point graduate and former officer in the 82nd Airborne Division, said in a statement after the speeches.

In his address, Mr. Hegseth also railed against what he called “stupid rules of engagement” that he said limited soldiers and commanders in the field. He defended his firing of more than a dozen military leaders, many of them people of color and women.

And he said that, from now on, promotions would be based on merit, which in his view, they previously were not.

“We’ve already done a lot in this area, but more changes are coming soon,” he said.

When Mr. Hegseth summoned the senior officers last week, he gave no reason for the meeting, which has no precedent in scope and scale in recent memory. The military leaders were told to expect a speech from the secretary heralding a so-called war-fighter culture he has championed since taking office, but they were given little other information.

The event took a new twist on Sunday when Mr. Trump said he would attend. That raised alarm among military specialists over his tendency as commander in chief to use U.S. troops as political props and visits to bases as occasions to bash political rivals, Democrats and the news media. During a speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., in June, Mr. Trump led troops to boo journalists and Mr. Biden.

The president criticized the news media on Tuesday as well, but this time there was no response from the crowd. “We have a really corrupt press,” he opined. One officer rolled his head and looked restless. “Terrible,” another senior officer said of the speech later, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The top four-star combatant commanders and Joint Chiefs of Staff typically meet at least twice a year in Washington, often holding a working dinner with the president. But the large number of lower-ranking generals and admirals at Tuesday’s meeting was highly unusual, military officials said.

In the days before the event, Democratic lawmakers and 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. All, it appeared, for Mr. Hegseth to be able to lecture military leaders with decades of combat experience on an enhanced “warrior ethos” in a forum that was televised live.

“It appears to be one more demonstration of Secretary Hegseth mistakenly believing our military leadership needs to be directed to focus on fighting wars,” said Kori Schake, a former defense official in the George W. Bush administration who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Mr. Trump acknowledged the cost of the gathering as he boarded a helicopter to head to Quantico.

“These are our generals, our admirals, our leaders, and it’s a good thing, a thing like this has never been done before, because they came from all over the world,” the president said. “And there’s a little bit of expense, not much, but there’s a little expense for that. We don’t like to waste it. We’d rather spend it on bullets and rockets.”

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.

Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.

Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.