It has been almost three weeks since 800 American generals and admirals were summoned to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia to hear remarks by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The officers traveled from around the globe, directed by Hegseth to leave their posts for what he called an important meeting of an unspecified nature. It turned out to be not much more than a highly partisan Trump-like campaign stop for the president and the secretary.

The commanders were respectfully silent and expressionless as Trump and Hegseth tried to get a rise out of them with MAGA sloganeering. Both Trump and Hegseth slammed their predecessors. And they lied about ongoing insurrection to make a case for taking military action on the streets of our cities — but just Democratic cities.

In Oregon, a Trump-­appointed federal judge said “the protests at the Portland ICE facility were not significantly violent or disruptive in the days — or even weeks — leading up to the president’s directive” that troops be deployed there last month. She blocked Trump’s plan, and then Trump attacked his own appointee.

Robert Reich, former secretary of labor and now a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley, says, “Trump wants to stoke actual violence, which would make it easier for him” to invoke the Insurrection Act. Then, he could unleash federal troops “against his perceived political enemies who oppose his regime in advance of the 2026 midterms.”

The Insurrection Act is an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement. It has been used rarely, but Joseph Nunn, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, has called the 150-year-old law “dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse.”

The Founders were afraid of calls to use military forces on the streets of America. As James Madison said, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

Whatever it was that Trump and Hegseth were selling with their partisan call to arms, it was clear that the generals and admirals were not buying it.

Their response reminded me of the young Naval Academy applicants that I got to meet in the late 1990s. I had been appointed by U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum to serve on his Naval Academy Selection Committee. It was an unusual appointment — conservative Republican Santorum tapping a liberal Democrat for an advisory position — but things like that happened back then.

Ours was a Navy family, and it was an honor to have a chance to support the Navy. Every year at Christmastime, a couple of dozen Southwestern Pennsylvanians would gather at the senator’s Pittsburgh office, break into groups and interview Annapolis applicants until late in the evening.

The hard part was ranking them. Each candidate had excelled in high school, and everyone was active in academics, sports and community service. When asked why they wanted to go to Annapolis, no one ever mentioned politics or any particular officeholder, and every answer was the same: “To serve our nation.”

If we had any doubts about the future of America, they were eased after those interviews. You get the same hopeful feeling when you look at the photo of those admirals and generals — disciplined and dignified and ready to uphold American values and their oath to the Constitution.

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