National Review senior writer Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump’s recent addresses to top military brass amounted to a perfect distillation of the Trump administration.

“You had an innovative and unusual idea bringing everyone together, which doesn’t usually happen,” he said. “You had a lot of substantive policy declarations that are not only good on the merits, but are self-evidently mainstream.”

Cooke pointed out that it would be difficult to “marshal 20 percent of the public to disagree with most of what Hegseth said about standards, fitness, readiness, and the purpose of the military in general,” but then Trump got up and spoke. “You had Trump’s complete lunacy on display when he threatens to do things that would be unconstitutional, unprecedented, and would lead to a reasonable fear of un-American conduct.”

“And you have the fact that Trump hasn’t actually done those things.”

“So this is the Trump administration,” Cooke said. “This is what everyday observers have to work through. Some good, perhaps obvious, genuinely commonsense policy presented in an innovative or at least unusual venue, coupled with promises that probably won’t come to fruition and shouldn’t and then lunacy. And that’s what you get with the guy.”

Cooke said, “It’s a shame personally, because if Trump had summoned all of these officials, given a short address, and then had Hegseth hit the key points about fitness, readiness, and purpose, it would have been unassailable.”

“But he just can’t do it.”

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