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Pete Hegseth Addresses Military Leaders; Wesley Clark is Interviewed about Hegseth's Address. President To Speak at Quantico; Government Shutdown Looming; Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) is Interviewed about a Shutdown; Trump Addresses Military Leaders. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired September 30, 2025 - 09:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[09:00:00]

PETE HEGSETH, DEFENSE SECRETARY: I encourage you to look it up if you've never seen it. But the prayer, it ends like this, and most of all, Lord, please keep my soldiers safe. Lead them, guide them, protect them, watch over them. And as you gave all of yourself for me, help me give all of myself for them. And amen.

I prayed this prayer many times since I've had the privilege of being your secretary. And I will continue to pray this prayer for each of you as you command and lead our nation's finest.

Go forth and do good things, hard things. President Trump has your back, and so do I. And you'll hear from him shortly. Move out and draw fire, because we are the War Department. Godspeed.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Troops, attention.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I was trying to hear if there was applause in that room. I think it's relatively silent there. I'm not sure whether that is customary with a group of admirals and generals there, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just finishing up a speech to this unprecedented gathering of military leaders called in from around the world. There was some curiosity about why they were brought in. It seems it was for the defense secretary to relay to them the types of things that he has talked about for years, written about for years, including in his own book, which he cited in front of the generals and admirals about changing the culture within the military. He says, "ending the war on warriors" and a lot of what that means. He set up this dichotomy between what he called the woke department, which is what he says the military was, and the war department, which is what he says he would like it to be.

One of the things he told the gathering of generals and admirals is that he wants the military to be apolitical, but then he also told them that if the people in the room did not agree with what he was saying, they should do the honorable thing and resign.

With us now is retired General Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme allied commander.

General, you had a chance to listen to that speech. What were your major takeaways? What did you think?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK (RET.), FORMER NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: John, there were parts of that speech I really liked. And there was part of it that was political.

I'll tell you what I really liked. We learned in Vietnam, and I was one of those men that fought in Vietnam and spent a lot of my career reflecting on it, that you should not commit American forces unless you commit them to a decisive objective and go in to win.

I worked with General Colin Powell on the preparation for General John Wickham to become the Army chief of staff in '83, and we wrote that to General Wickham in his book, that his transition book, and that was the watch word of the Defense Department. Caspar Weinberger, with Secretary -- with General Powell was there. They put it in the Weinberger doctrine. Yes, we did that in the Gulf War. That's exactly what we did. It was, in a sense, the Army's revenge for Vietnam. We won decisively. That was who we were. So, I liked that part of the speech.

But the military has to serve overall national policy as well. So, during the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we did use our forces in other means. We stopped slaughter in Rwanda. We used them to end a vicious war in Yugoslavia. We stopped ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia twice with the use of military forces, created a new nation.

After 911, the nation felt it was at war. We went to Afghanistan. That was a fight we had to have. And maybe it wasn't done right. We didn't actually get Osama bin Laden. But those men that went there were all trained by the -- by people who fought in Vietnam, by those of us who believed in decisive victory. We did win a decisive victory over the Taliban. We just didn't know what to do with it.

And those armed forces that went into Iraq in 2003, a magnificent military performance getting to Baghdad. We knew those soldiers. Many of them had worked for me. My former aide, De Camp (ph), was a silver star winner. He led the assault into Baghdad. He was a warrior. Many of these people have retired, but we never felt that we were a woke military.

[09:05:04]

Didn't even know what it meant. We picked the best people for promotion, regardless of their race or gender. That was the standard.

So, I liked what Hegseth said about lethality, warrior, winning, being decisive. General Milley, I thought, is a fine general. I think he certainly qualifies as a war fighter. So, there's some politics mixed into what Secretary Hegseth said.

But if he takes the armed forces forward, if he puts the emphasis on lethality, if he really does put the money out there to train and maintain, that's a great thing. And we need it because we're going into a very difficult period of time. BERMAN: By the way, just so people know, you didn't just serve in

Vietnam, you were wounded in Vietnam there. When you talk about Yugoslavia, you were NATO supreme allied commander during the U.S. effort there, which really ended or went a long way to saving thousands of lives in that civil war. So, you know what you're talking about.

You brought up General Milley. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth name checked General Milley. He basically said, out with the General Milleys, out with the General Peter Chiarelli, and in with the Pattons and Schwarzkopfs, he said, Admiral Stockdale as well, name checking them.

And then he said that the military has basically been in decay. Do you feel like that that's the sentiment in that room among the people who are listening?

CLARK: You know, I think the people in that room, first of all, they're not going to applaud, John, because that's just not the way we're brought up. It wasn't supposed to be a political speech. They didn't take it as a political speech. They're not voting for Secretary Hegseth. So, you can't judge it by -- like, a pep rally or something. They listen. They listened respectively.

But I want to make one thing very clear to the -- to our viewers, the military does what the constitutional authority of the United States, what the leaders tell them to do. So, if you didn't like the outcome in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Middle East and you say, these are forever wars. Well, look to the leadership. You know, if you announce a surge and then say, oh, but it's only going to last for nine months, and then we're going to pull everybody out. You got what you expected. If you try to do it on the cheap and not put the forces in, you get what you expected.

When I was a lieutenant colonel, I was at the U.S. Army -- at the National War College in Washington, D.C. And one of my classmates was the son of the Army chief of staff from during the Vietnam War. And he said he wished he'd resigned during the Vietnam War because during the Vietnam War we didn't commit our forces to win.

There was this famous visit by Secretary McNamara back to Vietnam in 1993, and he had this dialog with the north Vietnamese leadership. It was 30 years after the start of the war. And he said to the north Vietnamese leadership something like, you know, we could have destroyed you with our air power, and we chose not to do. We tried to signal to you, don't do this. Why didn't you listen to our signals? We were very deliberate in telling you what we wanted. We picked our targets to give you the message. And the north Vietnamese generals said something like, we just thought your bombing was ineffective.

And this was the 1965 rolling thunder campaign. And those of us who were in the military at that time and thought about it have spent years reconstructing in our minds, reading the documents, understanding the thinking about this. And it was -- it was wrong. And it was directed by political authorities, enforced on the armed forces. And people asked, why didn't the generals speak up? Why didn't the generals say that in 1964 we could have gone across the separation between north and south Vietnam, sealed off south Vietnam, cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and had a chance to bring into South Korea the same kind of freedom that north -- that south -- into south Vietnam, the same kind of freedom that South Korea established after the Korean War. But we didn't do that. So, there's a -- it's this civil military relationship.

So, I think the -- I think the generals and admirals and I think -- they're concerned. There's a lot that's happened since Secretary Hegseth took over. Twenty-one flag officers and admirals have been fired. Many without explanation. But on the other hand, a lot of what he says is going to resonate and ring true to the men and women in that room, because we are war fighters. We do want to go in. We want to size of objectives. We want to finish the job when we're put in there.

BERMAN: What do you think might change as a result of this speech?

[09:10:06]

CLARK: Not clear. That's not clear because what we didn't get was the national policy. What looks like is coming out of the Pentagon is something that most of the men and women in the room would have real problems with.

We know that Russia bears us no good will. Russia says it's at war with NATO right now. We can see what's happening to our long-term allies. And these are the people in Europe that are the greatest trade and investment partners of the United States. They're the anchor of U.S. foreign policy. If we want to manage the relationship with China, we need Europe on our side. And yet there's this ambivalence in the Pentagon about, well, we're going to reduce the forces in Europe. We're going to focus on the southern border. We're going to do more with troops in the United States. That's what seems to be bubbling out. And so, there's going to be a lot of concern about this new military strategy.

BERMAN: Retired General Wesley Clark, thank you so much for watching this speech alongside of us, helping explain some of what we saw there, especially at the end. Appreciate, as always, your expertise. Thank you, sir.

Sara.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: All right. The secretary of defense saying the military for to long has promoted to many for the wrong reasons based on their race, based on gender quotas. But when you look around that room, you're not seeing much racial diversity. In fact, the Council on Foreign Relations shows that more than 80 percent of military officers, those in high-ranking positions, are white.

CNN's Natasha Bertrand is live at Quantico this morning.

We are expecting to hear from the president. Are you expecting that his comments will very much mirror what we heard from Secretary Hegseth? NATASHA BERTRAND, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: I think so,

Sara. And we should note that his motorcade is apparently en route now to Quantico.

But I think that what we heard from Secretary Hegseth is broadly in line with the vision that President Donald Trump has expressed repeatedly for the U.S. military. He wants generals and admirals that are focused pretty much explicitly and exclusively on war fighting, on winning wars. He wants the generals and admirals to look the part as well. He has long been fixated on having, you know, an officer corps that appears, at least outwardly, very disciplined and lethal. And so, expect there to be focus on that.

But also, given that it's President Trump, expect there to be politics inserted into this. Secretary Hegseth, during his remarks, he made political comments. He, of course, disparaged General Mark Milley. He talked about how previous administrations had focused too much on diversity initiatives.

But President Trump is known, especially in forums like this, where he has this kind of captive audience, to really get political. And we saw that earlier this year over the summer when he spoke to troops at Fort Bragg. He trashed his predecessor. He spoke in overtly political terms, which is not something that troops are typically used to dealing with, let alone the generals and admirals who are in this room behind me who are unlikely to applaud any of President Trump's lines, just as you did not hear them applaud any of Secretary Hegseth's lines. It's simply not what they do. And so, if President Trump is expecting them to do that, he may be disappointed.

But I think that also part of what Secretary Hegseth spoke to just about the changes that he's going to be making in the U.S. military are really important to highlight because essentially he was outlining how many guardrails within the U.S. military are going to be removed. And he says that that is for good purpose. He says -- he described those guardrails as debris that needs to be cleared out. And that includes overhauling the inspector general process at the Pentagon, which he says has been weaponized. And we should note, of course, that the inspector general is investigating him and his use of Signal to discuss sensitive and classified information earlier this year. So, that was certainly notable.

He also said that the Pentagon wants to end some nonsensical rules of engagement, which govern how troops and their commanders operate. And he also said he wants to do a full review of the department's definition of, quote, "toxic leadership" because words like bullying and hazing and toxic have been weaponized.

So, all of this really underscores how they want to remake the military in a way that really has very little guardrails around their actions, and little guardrails around, you know, whether individuals and leaders are going to be punished for behavior that was previously seen as perhaps toxic.

Sara.

SIDNER: A lot to unpack there.

Natasha Bertrand, thank you so much for your reporting.

Kate.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: So, the government shutdown is now just hours away, and there are zero signs right now that officials, Democrats and Republicans, are ready to make a deal before this deadline. We are going to take you there, see where this heads.

[09:15:06]

And a troubled past, a painful breakup, and growing resentment. The new information that we are learning about the suspect in that horrible Michigan church attack.

And drowning in surplus crops, and short on buyers. Why a bailout might be the only way to save American farmers right now.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: All right, we do have breaking news.

[09:20:01]

Less than 15 hours until a government shutdown. And just a few minutes ago, President Trump was asked about how many layoffs there could be among government workers if there is no deal by midnight. His answer? There could be a lot.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REPORTER: (Inaudible) shutdown, how many federal workers do you plan to lay off?

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, we may do a lot. And that's only because of the Democrats. And, as you know, they want to be able to take care of people that have come into our country illegally. And no system can handle that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: The president's budget director, Russ Vought, had actually written a letter to the various agencies saying they could use this opportunity to lay off permanently a number of federal workers.

Let's get to CNN's Arlette Saenz on Capitol Hill for the very latest on negotiations, if they're even happening.

ARLETTE SAENZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, John, lawmakers are expressing a lot of skepticism this morning that a deal can be reached to avert a government shutdown by midnight. That meeting between President Trump and congressional leaders did not result in a breakthrough and has really hardened many Democrats and Republicans in their positions.

Now, Republican Senate leadership is planning to, this afternoon, to bring up a vote on that seven-week funding bill. They want Democrats to get on board, but Democratic leaders say they still want concessions from Republicans as it relates to health care. They are still pushing for an extension of those Obamacare subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of the year. They also want to see a reversal on the Medicaid cuts that were made in President Trump's domestic policy agenda bill over the summer. But so far Republicans have not indicated they would get on board with that.

Now, top Democrats leaving that meeting with President Trump last night expressed some optimism that Trump might be willing to negotiate on those Obamacare subsidies. But Republicans have said that any negotiations can't take place unless the government is kept open.

Now, in order for the funding bill to pass in the Senate, seven Democrats will need to get on board with Republicans. And so far, there is only one Democrat who has said they would vote to keep the government open. That is Senator John Fetterman, who has criticized Democratic leadership's position.

Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN FETTERMAN (D-PA): Right now it's like you're running the risk of plunging our nation into chaos. Millions and millions of lives will be upended. And now that's the kind of message -- what kind of message does that send to our -- our country and to our allies and to our enemies?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SAENZ: So, for now, Democrats and Republicans up here on Capitol Hill are expecting that there will be a shutdown later this evening.

Now, the question is how to get out of that shutdown once it happens. Republican leadership has started working out a plan where they are going to bring up that seven-week funding bill over and over, hoping that Democrats will cave. Democrats, so far, have not indicated they will do so. So, a lot of questions about how this standoff ends with millions of federal workers hanging in the balance with this potential shutdown.

BERMAN: All right, Arlette Saenz for us on Capitol Hill. Thank you very much.

Kate.

BOLDUAN: Joining us right now is Democratic Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman from New Jersey. She sits on the Appropriations and Budget Committees. These are the committees that are central when it comes to funding, passing funding bills and keeping the government up and running.

First and foremost, let's get to -- I just want to ask you about the basics, and then we can get to the politics. Congresswoman, what communication -- what has the communication been

from Democratic leadership overnight about where things stand? Is the government going to shut down?

REP. BONNIE WATSON COLEMAN (D-NJ): Well, if the government shutdowns down, that's going to be on the Republicans because they control both Houses and the presidency.

What we're concerned about is that we cannot support a CR that doesn't address the health care costs, the health care accessibility, the Medicaid and Medicare costs that -- and diminution of those services because hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions of people will lose their access to health care or it will be so expensive that they can't have it. And all of this is about taking from those in greatest need to give to the billionaires that the president and his administration is catering to.

BOLDUAN: Congresswoman, the --

COLEMAN: And that's just unacceptable.

BOLDUAN: When it comes to keeping the government open, coming out of the meeting there were some reporting that the president might be open to negotiations when it comes to the Obamacare subsidies. But to do that, negotiations, we'd need to keep the government open, you know, beyond, you know, tonight. Would you be open to a very short term CR, an extension of funding in order to have those negotiations?

COLEMAN: You know, I don't trust the Republicans to hold on to their word because their word has not been their bond. And so I would be very -- there's no reason to hold this -- to have a very short funding measure.

[09:25:01]

We know what's on the table. We know what we, Democrats, are fighting for. We're fighting for health care. We're fighting for hospitals to be open. We're fighting for health care organizations to be able to provide services in their rural and urban and suburban communities. It's clear, we're not asking for the --

BOLDUAN: But, Congresswoman, Republicans continue to say that Democrats might be --

COLEMAN: We're not asking --

BOLDUAN: Right, but Democrats might be fighting for that and want that in terms of, you do have some leverage. You need seven Democrats to vote for anything in the Senate to get it through. But what Republicans say is, when -- especially when it comes to the Obamacare subsidies, those don't run out until the end of the year. You don't need to negotiate those in the next 12 hours.

COLEMAN: You (Inaudible) -- well, Obamacare has been the target since Obamacare became -- came into existence as it relates to Republicans. We can't trust Republicans to -- to hold on to their word. We can't trust the Republican governor -- I mean the president to hold on to his word. We do not trust them. We need verification now. We need an agreement now. We need an ironclad agreement that what -- what is agreed upon is followed through on. And -- and that's where we stand. There is no reason to believe that Republicans will do something in the future that they're not willing to do now.

BOLDUAN: Congressman, I'm going to ask the control room to just pop up, because we're keeping an eye on Quantico, Virginia, where President Trump is now walking on stage, being welcomed by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. Again, now he is moving to -- Congresswoman, thank you so much. We're going to jump over as President Trump is now going to be addressing this room full of military leaders.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: A great job you're doing too. A fantastic job.

I've never walked into a room so silent before. This is very -- don't laugh. Don't laugh. You're not allowed to do that. You know what? Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want. You can do anything you want. If you don't like what I'm saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future. But you just feel nice and loose, OK, because we're all on the same team. And I was told that, sir, you won't hear -- you won't hear a murmur in the room. I said, we got to loosen these guys up a little bit. So, you just have a good time.

But I want to thank Secretary Hegseth and General Caine. General "Razin" Caine, for a reason they call him that. When I heard his name, I said, you're the guy I'm looking for. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and so many others in this room who together represent the greatest and most elite fighting force in the history of the world, the United States military. We're very proud of our military. I rebuilt the military during my first term. It's one of the greatest achievements. We had the greatest economy in history, and I built the military. Those are the two things I say more than anything else. And I also kept us safe at the borders. We had very good borders. We didn't have people coming in from jails and prisons and everything like took place over the last four years. They'll never forget what happened to this country over the last four years with the incompetence.

There could be no higher honor than to serve as your commander in chief. It is a great honor. I look at you, you're just incredible people. Central casting, I might add. To each and every one of you. I thank you for your unwavering devotion to the armed forces and to the country that we've all sworn a sacred oath to defend. We all have that oath, every one of us.

I'm thrilled to be here this morning to address the senior leadership of what is once again known around the world as the Department of War. I know Pete spoke about it. He gave a great speech, I thought. A great speech. I don't want him to get so good. I'm -- I hate that, you know? No, I hate it. I almost fired him. I said, you can't -- I don't want to go on after that.

No, he gave -- he gave a great speech. But he talked about Department of War. We were sitting there. I said, didn't it used to be called the Department of War? And he goes, yes, sir. They changed it like in the early '50s. So, we won the First World War, we won the Second World War, we won everything in between and everything before that. We only won. And then we went in a way woke. That was probably the first sign of wokeness. And we changed it to Defense instead of War.

And I said, what do you think? How do you think if we change it back? Would that be a nice idea? And Pete loved it immediately. Some people -- thought about it. You know, they gave it a little thought. But in the end, we did it.

And I have to be honest, it's so popular. It's -- I thought it would be met with fury on the left. But they're sort of giving up. I must be honest with you. They've had it. They've had it with Trump. They've been after me for so many years now.

[09:30:02]

Here we are. Here we are. Come to the White House any time you'd like. No, they've given up. Bad -- a lot of bad people.