Sticking with the mandate established for the Washington press corps this year – that ANY comment from the Trump administration needs to be countered, regardless of accuracy – The Washington Post has come out with a deep investigation of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. What has so bothered the paper of the nation’s capital is that Hegseth has dared to exhibit pride over results seen in the military ranks that he desired to achieve.

This centers on the recruitment figures in the military, highlighting some awe-inspiring and encouraging statistics within the armed forces.

As the Army celebrates its 250th birthday with an elaborately planned parade through the streets of Washington, D.C., the service is also touting an epic recruiting turnaround, reaching its annual goal of 61,000 new recruits four months early after falling short by 10,000 soldiers just two years prior.

Good news, to be sure. So, what is it that has WaPo getting cranky? Well, it appears that both Hegseth and President Trump have dared to suggest that this result is directly correlated to their efforts since the change in administrations this year.

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been quick to take credit for the recruiting surge. Hegseth, who has championed a “warrior ethos” and waged war on diversity initiatives…this month described a “morale shift” starting at Trump’s inauguration.

Those scoundrels. How DARE they try to take credit for one of the very things that was stated as a goal when Hegseth was initially tapped by the president-elect to run the DOD?! This was, after all, one of the very pronounced goals Hegseth announced he wanted to address during his confirmation process. 

I am going to work with President Trump, and this committee to: ONE – Restore the Warrior Ethos to the Pentagon and throughout our fighting force. In doing so, we will reestablish trust in our military, addressing the recruiting crisis, the retention crisis, and readiness crisis in our ranks.

Now, for him to come out and express pride in already hitting recruitment goals, and well ahead of projections, is simply unacceptable. The Post dispatched Alex Horton and Hope Hodge Seck to go out and speak with anyone they could to generate more smoke around this result than seen during a hostile heli-vac extraction effort.

To craft this article (one that can be summed up by “It’s complicated”), Seck and Horton spoke with or quoted a dozen individuals who all cast various impressions around the numbers coming in today. 

Let’s pause for just a moment and consider the effort they undertook for this pedestrian storyline, in light of the current narratives about the news industry refusing to report on Joe Biden’s condition. It almost looks like more journalism is being committed to prove Trump-Hegseth wrong than was ever spent investigating President Silveralert and his mental decline.

All manner of shading is brought out, such as lasting outreach motivators and possibly delayed entry of recruits leading to this result. We even get told that this rise could be due to changes three years ago in strategies and a reduction in paperwork. Even so, as it stands, about one-third of prospective enrollees are expressing conservative impressions and the leadership of the current administration as motivators for signing up.

Said one recruiter about this reality, “Those people are much more likely, in my experience, to be people who are coming to us to join a combat job, rather than desk jobs. I think the people who are interested in the more combat-oriented career fields are more concerned about who’s making decisions [and] the overall strategic vision of what we’re going for.”

Despite this reality, there is also an attempt to recalibrate the drop in numbers during the Biden term, so that the current rise appears more of a return to norms. One of the experts consulted states that the pandemic, coupled with an end to the Afghanistan conflict, depressed interest in those considering the military as a career choice. Of course, not addressed here was Biden’s aggression towards service members, which led to significant declines in retention numbers.

This is to be expected from our press these days. This article echoes one seen from the paper a week ago, regarding data about Fentanyl coming across the border. With border crossings today near record lows, and well over 90 percent below what was recorded just in the past years, it would stand to reason that the drug traffic would also plunge. Yet The Post was mystified as to what could possibly lead to this “mysterious” drop in Fentanyl seizures in recent months.

This is the pathetically amusing stance of our press these days. Give them the glaringly obvious, and their first approach to any story is: What is Trump’s position on the matter? Opposition is then made by default, and the facts will be found in some fashion, or barring that, then turn to any “expert” who can come up with a scenario to explain how the opposite is somehow in play. 

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