The Nuremberg Clown Rally

Takeaways from an authoritarian vaudeville act

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On Tuesday morning, some eight hundred admirals, generals, and other high-ranking Pentagon figures gathered at a Virginia military base where, after days of rampant speculation and thousands of miles of travel, America’s top military brass finally learned why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump wanted to get them all in an auditorium together: Fat shaming and fascism.

Over the course of several sweaty hours, a smirking Hegseth and rambling Trump offered their most full-throated endorsements of American fascism to date, declaring war against the “enemy within” by turning “dangerous” cities into “training grounds” for military action. Befitting his previous career as a talking cable news haircut, Hegseth in particular seemed focused on the optics of the armed forces, bragging at one point about his ability to do pull-ups and whining that “frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops.” Poor guy.

Both horrifying and perversely hilarious in varying measures, the regime’s mini-Nuremberg rally was above all significant in a way few Trump events—with their canned sound bytes and raucous crowds—have been this term. Here’s why: