At Navy event, Trump focuses on himself and his grievances

The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press Editorial Board, The Virginian-Pilot on Oct 8, 2025

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It’s been several years since President Barack Obama stood at Naval Station Norfolk in front of active-duty sailors and compared Republicans to bugs in need of extermination.

In a rambling speech, Obama made specious claims about the armed forces, asserted that he predicted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and urged uniformed service members to boo his political opponents in a violation of propriety and protocol.

That never happened, of course. But that accurately describes what unfolded in Norfolk on Sunday afternoon when President Donald Trump delivered a wholly inappropriate address at the world’s largest Navy base.

Sunday’s event was meant to commemorate the 250th birthday of the U.S. Navy but Trump predictably used the occasion for self-aggrandizement and political score settling. Once again he failed to rise to the moment, choosing to focus on himself rather than the courageous men and women who serve our nation.

Even before the president appeared, the rally — and Trump later said, “Let’s face it, this is a rally.” — featured music selections that included “Dixie,” a racist Confederate-era anthem adopted by the Southern forces fighting the U.S. military in the Civil War. It was also employed by protesters opposing integration in the 1950s and 1960s, and was played in Virginia as the Trump administration attempted to deploy National Guard units from Texas to Oregon and Illinois despite legal objections by those states’ governors.

“Your diversity is not your strength,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the assembled service members prior to the president’s speech, though one-third of the active-duty military are racial minorities and 17% are women.

Those were ominous tone-setters, but were nothing compared to the objectionable statements made by the president throughout his address.

Most notable was his attack on the opposition party that included his assertion, “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats.”

He echoed Hegseth’s misguided belief that the military is driven more by political correctness and social engineering than a desire to target combatants and protect civilians. Trump, who did not serve and in 1997 said avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was his “personal Vietnam,” said, “The problem with Vietnam, we, you know, we stopped fighting to win. We would’ve won easy. We would’ve won Afghanistan easy. We would’ve won every war easy. But we got politically correct. ‘Oh, let’s take it easy.’ We’re not politically correct anymore, just so you understand.”

Trump claimed to have predicted the 2001 terrorist attacks: “Please remember I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year ago, one year before he blew up the World Trade Center. And I said, ‘You gotta watch Osama bin Laden!’ … I gotta take a little credit.” He said despite the nation’s intelligence services establishing teams focused on bin Laden as early as 1995.

And, of course, the president couldn’t resist repeating his demonstrably false lies about the 2020 election, saying,“I was president in 2016. And then they rigged the election on me. And then we caught ’em, didn’t we?”

None of this is normal. None of this is acceptable. And the president’s speech risked putting service members in violation of a long-standing Department of Defense directive prohibiting uniformed military from engaging in overt political acts.

That’s not how a commander in chief should act, and every president before Trump honored the cherished American tradition of a nonpartisan, non-political military. It’s impossible to imagine Obama or leaders such as Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy or Dwight Eisenhower making such outrageous statements as Trump did in Norfolk.

Americans are right to expect more from their president — and from the military leadership who apparently failed to instruct the assembled sailors to refrain from cheering overtly political statements.

The Norfolk event should have been focused entirely on the storied history of the U.S. Navy and the proud men and women in uniform who serve this country. What a shame it is that the president couldn’t help but make it about himself.