Trump’s Made-for-TV Quantico Spectacle: Generals Refused to Be Agitprops
(Andrew Harnik/Pool via AP)
On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump addressed the top brass at Quantico in a ceremony billed as a revival of the “warrior ethos.”
At first glance, it looked like a routine reaffirmation of courage, discipline, and commitment. But the optics—and the context—revealed something far more calculated: a staged, made-for-TV performance of personal loyalty, designed for Fox News viewers rather than the men and women in uniform.
There was no reason for this address to be broadcast at all. It could have been delivered privately, quietly, effectively—a briefing on ethos without turning generals into props. That it was televised in full, exclusively on Fox News, transformed a professional reset into a spectacle.
Every scripted pause, every line of praise, every exhortation to applause reinforced allegiance—to Hegseth and Trump personally, rather than to the institution or the Constitution. “Warrior ethos” became a coded invocation: courage reframed as devotion to a figure, discipline as obedience to a show, and service as a tool for political theater.
Yet in that room, the silence of the generals and admirals was remarkable. Even as Trump awkwardly encouraged them to clap for a partisan pep talk, they didn’t. Their restraint was deliberate, almost performative in its own right: a quiet, principled refusal to be reduced to props — or agitprops to be exact — in a loyalty pageant. In a media landscape obsessed with optics, their silence communicated more than any applause line could.
In authoritarian regimes, pageantry, uniforms, and staged obeisance are tools to consolidate power; here, the refusal to perform signaled integrity.
Fox News’ exclusive live coverage underscores the intended audience. This wasn’t a reset for military morale—it was a broadcast for a political base. The event, fully televised, was less about inspiring troops than about manufacturing consent and projecting loyalty.
Converting ritual into spectacle, the ceremony subtly redrew the boundaries of institutional authority. Celebrating ethos is one thing; weaponizing it for partisan optics is another. And in an era when image often outweighs substance, the generals’ quiet rebellion offered a lesson in restraint that was as instructive as any speech.
The stakes go beyond optics. Civil-military norms rely on a professional force that remains apolitical, accountable to constitutional authority rather than personality cults. When rituals of service are co-opted into loyalty theater, public trust erodes. Audiences see obedience staged for the camera, not strategy, leadership, or substance. For a brief moment, Quantico resembled an authoritarian tableau: symbols of courage deployed to broadcast allegiance rather than to cultivate it.
And yet, the military brass reminded us what warrior ethos truly looks like. Silence became the moral center of the event. In a room full of staged loyalty, measured restraint was louder than any applause. In the theater of loyalty, sometimes the most powerful signal is the one deliberately withheld.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
