President Donald Trump on Tuesday told reporters at the White House, before leaving for Marine Corps Base Quantico to meet with the hundreds of senior military officers that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth summoned, that the gathering was a morale effort, but he also said he would not hesitate to fire leaders he doesn’t like.
“I’m going to be meeting with generals and admirals and with leaders. And if I don’t like somebody, I’m going to fire them right on the spot,” the president told reporters.
“We have our real warriors over there,” he added about the Quantico gathering. “And when they’re not good, when we don’t think they’re our warriors, you know what happened? We say, ‘You’re fired. Get out.'”
But the session, Trump insisted, is a “good thing” that brought “our generals, our admirals, our leaders” together from “all over the world.” He acknowledged the cost but said it was small compared with weapons spending.
“There’s a little bit of expense, not much, but there’s a little expense so that we don’t like to waste it. We’d rather spend it on bullets and rockets, frankly,” he said.
The president also reiterated that he “rebuilt the military, the entire military” during his first term.
“We had some real bad ones last time,” he added, naming Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. James Mattis, former defense secretary; and Mark Esper, also a former defense secretary.
He added that he had accepted recommendations then “from RINOs and others” that produced some poor picks, but that “what we have now is the best.”
The Quantico meeting, reported by multiple outlets as unusually large and called on short notice by Hegseth, had drawn scrutiny because hundreds of generals and admirals were directed to converge at a single Marine base without a publicly disclosed agenda.
Hegseth, in his remarks, outlined strict plans for refocusing the nation’s military on war, not defense, including new training and personnel standards that he said must take place.