Updates: Trump, Hegseth meet top US military officers at Quantico

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For our coverage of Trump and Hegseth’s Quantico gathering today, read our story, here.

And to learn more about the looming US government shutdown, and what it could mean, read our story, here.

• United States President Donald Trump spoke to top military officials, who had been called from posts across the world for an extraordinary gathering.
• Trump told military officials to prepare to oversee more operations to respond to crime and civil unrest domestically, in a falsehood-laden speech that hewed close to his typical podium fare.
• Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, said the Pentagon was doing away with “political correctness”, loosening discipline, and restoring a “war fighting” ethos. He said generals that did not agree with his approach should leave the military.
• The speech took place as Democrats and Republicans wrestled over a looming government shutdown, with no breakthroughs apparent as the midnight deadline approached.

Janessa Goldbeck, a former US Marine and the current CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation, has been among those condemning Hegseth’s address today to military generals.

She told the Associated Press that Hegseth’s speech was more aimed at “stoking grievance than strengthening the force”. Goldbeck particularly criticised Hegseth’s plan to loosen rules for military discipline, including hazing protections.

“It takes no strength to hit a recruit – it takes real strength to teach one,” she said.

She added Hegseth has “a cartoonish, 1980s comic-book idea of toughness he’s never outgrown”.

“Instead of focusing on what actually improves force readiness, he continues to waste time and taxpayer dollars on He-Man culture-war theatrics.”

Naureen Shah, director of government affairs of the equality division at the American Civil Liberties Union, has condemned Trump’s statements earlier today instructing military officials they would be involved in responding to crime and civil unrest within the US.

“The president told top military leaders he wants to use American cities as a ‘training ground’ for the military to go after ‘the enemy within’ — in other words, those who disagree with him,” Shah said.

“We don’t need to spell out how dangerous the President’s message is, but here goes: Military troops must not police us, let alone be used as a tool to suppress the President’s critics,” Shah said.

“In cities across the country, the president’s federal deployments are already creating conflict where there is none and instilling profound fear in people who are simply trying to live their lives and exercise their constitutional rights. Our country and democracy deserve far better than this.”

A government shutdown would likely leave hundreds of thousands of federal employees furloughed, although Trump has indicated his administration may go further and instead fire some of those workers.

Proportionally, the Education, StateCommerce and Labor Departments face the highest rates of furloughs, with the civilian staff of the defense department facing the highest total number, at over 300,000 facing furlough.

Health agencies are expected to be particularly hard hit, with the National Institutes of Health likely suspending a large portion of its research. Research into some areas, including health risks and ways to prevent illness, would also be affected at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Air traffic controllers, one of the most closely watched sectors, would remain on the job, but pay could be interrupted. Union officials have warned that can lead to higher stress. However, some training would be shut down, possibly harming a critical shortage of workers in the profession.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Mark Kimmitt, a retired army brigadier general has said that Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth’s messaging to top military officials did not break new ground.

During the address, Hegseth vowed to end what he called “politically correct” leadership in the military as he beckoned in the era of the “Department of War”. He claimed a war-fighting mentality had faded at the department.

Kimmitt said Hegseth appeared to have called the meeting to “put on notice” top military officials “about what the standards are and what the intent is of the Secretary of Defense”.

“I think what the clear message, whether right or wrong, was that Pete Hegseth wants those commanders to be focusing on the war fighting tasks, and he was concerned that we had been going from war fighters to social engineers inside the military,” Kimmitt said.

Argentina’s Foreign Ministry has announced the meeting, which comes after Milei met with Trump on the sidelines of the UNGA earlier this week.

Trump has agreed to help bail out Argentina’s flagging economy, a move that has rankled some in Trump’s “America First” camp. Trump has been a vocal supporter of Milei, who has been a vocal critic of government spending.

“This meeting represents a new opportunity to continue strengthening the strategic partnership between both countries, based on shared values and a shared commitment to freedom, democracy and the prosperity of our peoples,” the ministry said in a post on X.

In an unusual move, the government website for Housing and Urban Development is currently telling visitors that the “Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands.”

“The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people,” the message says.

Several Democrats noted it was unusual for a government website, which citizens use to access public services, to bear such an overtly political message.

“We should not be putting political messages on government webpages,” said Representative Sylvia Garcia of Texas. “I have never seen that kind of message. I don’t think that would be acceptable with any other prior administration.”

Representative Jamie Raskin said it has become common under Trump to use “public taxpayer funds for overtly political and polemical reasons”.

A US judge has ruled that Trump’s administration violated the US Constitution by adopting a policy of revoking the visas of foreign students and faculty who engage in pro-Palestinian advocacy, and arresting, detaining and deporting them.

US District Judge William Young in Boston sided on Tuesday with groups representing university faculty in finding that the administration was chilling free speech on college campuses in violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.

His decision only assessed whether the administration had adopted an unlawful policy. Young has said he would determine what remedy to impose at a later phase of the case. Lawyers for the faculty groups have urged him to bar the Trump administration from threatening such arrests and deportations going forward.

Young, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, issued the ruling after presiding over a trial in a challenge to actions the administration undertook as part of the Republican president’s hardline immigration agenda.

The lawsuit was filed in March after immigration authorities arrested recent Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, the first target of Trump’s effort to deport non-citizen students with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views.

Since then, the administration has cancelled the visas of hundreds of students and scholars and ordered the arrest of some, including Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who was taken into custody in Massachusetts by masked and plainclothes agents after co-writing an opinion piece criticising her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

The US president has done little today to signal he was actively working to avoid a government shutdown.

Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office, he predicted “we’ll probably have a shutdown”. He claimed that was because Democrats want to give healthcare to “illegal immigrants”.

The statement is false. While Democrats have been holding a hard line in an attempt to force Republicans to renew cuts to healthcare, the programmes in question do not apply to people in the US without documentation.

Trump also warned that the administration can take “irreversible” actions during a shutdown that could undermine Democrats’ interests, including cutting “large numbers of people” from the government.

The administration has previously indicated it was prepared to fire federal employees, as opposed to the typical approach of furloughing them during a shutdown.

Trump says Hamas has three or four days to respond to his proposed peace plan to end the war in Gaza. You can follow our live coverage of the war here.

Trump has announced that the pharmaceutical company Pfizer will cut the prices of all its prescription drugs sold to the Medicaid insurance program and will introduce all new prescription drugs at a “most favoured nation” price.

Trump sent letters to 17 leading drug companies in July telling them to slash drug prices to match those paid overseas – a policy the president has called most favoured nation pricing. He asked them to respond with binding commitments by September 29.

Pfizer is the first company to announce a deal.

The White House was also set to unveil a direct-to-consumer website for Americans to buy drugs, set to be called TrumpRx, according to the official.

Trump has repeatedly promised to bring down drug prices, although details of his policies have remained murky. The latest update comes amid a standoff over government funding, with Democrats calling for Republicans to restore healthcare funding cut in a massive tax bill passed earlier this year.

The top Democrats have condemned Trump for posting an AI-generated video, just moments after they left the White House on Monday after talks aimed at avoiding a government shutdown.

The video included an impersonation of Schumer’s voice and showed Jeffries wearing a sombrero and fake moustache.

Speaking earlier today, Jeffries called the video “racist and fake”.

Schumer, meanwhile, said the video showed Trump was not seriously trying to avert a shutdown.

“Listen to this, America: Hours away from a shutdown, which we don’t want, the American people don’t want, the president is busy trolling away on the internet like a 10-year-old,” Schumer said from the Senate floor.

What happens if the government shuts down? Air traffic controllers and other essential employees will still have to go to work. They just don’t get paid. Nonessential employees just stay home, and they, by law, get paid when they come back.

We’ve seen this before. What’s different here is President Donald Trump’s threats to Democrats. He says if you shut down the government, there are going to be even more mass federal worker layoffs.

This threat worked on Democrats the last time Republicans needed short-term funding, but it doesn’t appear to be working now.

Democrats want to see a trillion dollars in healthcare spending put back into the budget. That’s something that the Republicans took away when they passed what they called their “big, beautiful” tax bill.

Democrats say that without the funding, about 24 million people will see their health insurance premiums go up by 75 per cent and 15 million people will simply lose health insurance in this country.

Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s John Hendren says there is an “atmosphere of intimidation” in the US military with Pentagon chief Hegseth sacking several top officials, many of whom are women and people of colour.

Hendren said the Trump administration has been “political” in directing the US military, which “likes to think of itself as nonpartisan”.

He added that Trump’s speech was “an unfocused sort of just standard campaign speech” from the US president.

It “included all kinds of nonmilitary things, claiming he won the 2020 election again, talking about how his signature was better than Joe Biden’s and talking about Biden using the autopen”.

As we’ve been reporting, Trump’s speech may have taken place in nearby Virginia, but much attention has remained on Washington, DC, as lawmakers seek a last-minute deal to avert a government shutdown.

A deal needs to be reached by Wednesday or funding will technically run out for an array of government agencies, leading to a partial suspension of their services.

Shortly after Trump’s speech, top Republicans and Democrats were still sparring on Capitol Hill. Speaking to CNBC, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed Democrats were blocking progress to symbolically “fight Trump”.

In the Senate, top Democrat Chuck Schumer accused Republicans of “trying to bully us”, saying they had not shown any willingness to budge.

For nearly an hour and 15 minutes, Trump addressed US generals on topics ranging from climbing up stairs to the crisis in Ukraine – often repeating his talking points and bouncing between subjects.

Here are five key takeaways from the speech:

• Focusing on the ‘enemy within’: Trump suggested throughout the speech that he wants the military to respond to perceived threats at home, including what he sees as riots and unauthorised migration.
• Making a case for the Nobel Peace Prize: The US president enumerated several global crises that he said he personally solved, including clashes between India and Pakistan in May. He said it would be an “insult” to the US if he did not receive a Nobel Peace Prize.
• Gaza war nearing end: Trump suggested that a ceasefire deal in Gaza is close, saying that Israel and Arab and Muslim nations have accepted his proposal, and now Hamas needs to agree.
• Biden grievances: Throughout the speech, Trump took digs at his predecessor, claiming that the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan is what motivated Putin to invade Ukraine. He repeatedly described the Biden administration as “incompetent”.
• Stressing US military power: Trump portrayed the US armed forces as the best in the world, highlighting the might of US weapons. He reiterated his praise for the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in May, pledging that the US will fight and win going forward.

Members of Congress have been scrambling to avert a government shutdown, but some took a moment to respond to Trump’s speech.

In a post on X, Representative Suhas Subramanyam said that “incompetent leadership was the only thing on full display” during the address, noting that a government shutdown would pause the pay of some members of the military.

He said he has “demanded answers from the [defense] Secretary on how much this pep rally cost the taxpayer and won’t stop pushing until we get them”.

Representative Claudia Tenney, a Republican, meanwhile, said the speech “put America’s enemies on notice”.

In Virginia this morning, incompetent leadership was the only thing on full display as @POTUS and @SecWar lectured our military just a day before Republicans shut down the government and withhold paychecks from our armed forces.@RepRobertGarcia and I demanded answers from the… https://t.co/hTLxmcAniY

— Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (VA-10) (@RepSuhas) September 30, 2025

The US president has wrapped up his lengthy remarks by praising the US military, and once again taking a jab at his predecessor, calling Biden incompetent.

“We will vanquish every danger and crush every threat to our freedom in every generation to come because we will fight, fight, fight, and we will win, win, win,” Trump said.