The Washington Post is reporting that President Trump and Pete Hegseth clashed at Camp David over a shortage of toys–I mean, weapons. Apparently, Trump was angry that the testosterone-obsessed Secretary of War! (Show some spirit, egghead!) failed to tell the President about the munitions shortage.
According to WaPo (that’s how we “insiders” refer to it), Trump believed “the munitions issue ‘had been fixed,'” even though it generally takes as long as two years to manufacture the more advanced defensive systems that become necessary when you escalate your war of choice on a country that can fight back. Trump’s seeming inability to process the fact that problems may take time to resolve is consistent with his lack of impulse control, his dementia, and his being a billionaire. (The only justifiable delays in his orbit involve payments to his contractors.)
But the argument with Hegseth seems to indicate that the weapons shortage has finally found its way through the sticky clumps of beta-amyloid that have built up in Trump’s brain and forced its way into his consciousness. So, I guess it’s possible that Trump’s recent last-minute decision to call off a massive strike on Iran was driven by the lack of munitions, rather than the progress on negotiations that Trump touted when he called off the attack. Of course, Trump’s decisions to call off massive strikes against Iran always are made (or announced) at the last minute and always are justified by progress on negotiations, so this could be just another instance of the syndrome known as “TACO” (“Trump-Always-Chickens-Out”), although the announcement came on a Monday.
Anyway, I would have loved to have seen the Trump-Hegseth argument, which I am imagining displayed the intellectual fireworks of Beavis’ arguments with Butt-Head. It would have been amusing to see Pete shifting around nervously, desperately trying to restrain the impulse to cry or to be taller than Trump, who at 6 feet 3 inches (according to Trump) towers over Pete’s approximately 6-feet-tall frame, despite what the fake media shows in photographs.
The best moment of the argument might have been when, according to the Washington Post, Pete “blamed his deputy, Stephen Feinberg, for the shortages and for not ensuring Trump was fully apprised of the issue.” Blame-the-Jew is a tested go-to strategy in times of crisis, so we can’t be surprised that Hegseth went with it in this context.
Of course, Karoline Leavitt has denied that there was any argument between Trump and Hegseth: “This is 100% fake news. Literally never happened. And President Trump has the utmost confidence in Secretary Hegseth.”
Leavitt’s statement suggests that I never should have wasted my time writing about the non-existent argument between Trump and Hegseth, but instead should have focused on the question whether Trump’s “confidence in Secretary Hegseth” is a ground for invoking the 25th Amendment.
I’m sure I’ll have occasion to write about the 25th Amendment and Trump in the future.