On Sept. 30, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth convened a rare gathering of top U.S. military leaders in Quantico, Virginia, to speak to them about changes to the Department of Defense. During the gathering, Hegseth spoke to the crowd of generals and other military personnel before Trump took the stage to do the same. The pair’s speeches combined to be about two hours long.
Following the speeches, people on social media critical of the administration claimed the military leaders didn’t clap for Hegseth, for Trump, or for either of them. Popular posts on Facebook (archived) and X (archived) noted the general silence and lack of applause from the generals. Some posts (archived) on Instagram (archived) and X (archived) remarked on the silence to Hegseth’s speech. Other posts (archived) on X (archived) called out the silence in response to Trump, who encouraged the generals to clap.
In a recording of both speeches posted to YouTube by CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Snopes could identify only one instance where it sounded as if the audience were clapping: at the end of Trump’s speech. The military leadership present did not applaud during Hegseth’s speech and also did not clap at the beginning of Trump’s speech, when he noted the silence of the room and encouraged those in attendance to applaud if they wanted. Some people in the room did laugh when Trump joked about threatening to strip leaders of their rank early in the speech, but otherwise audibly reacted little to it.
The one instance of applause could be heard after about 1:56:09 in the “Face the Nation” recording, right at the conclusion of Trump’s speech. The applause sounded brief and muted before it was drowned out by music. This aligns with how the moment sounded in the broadcast from Fox News, which also zoomed out at the time to show the attending military leaders from behind.
According to Air & Space Forces Magazine, the monthly journal of the Air & Space Forces Association, the military leaders “gave a respectful hearing to Trump and Hegseth, but the reception was subdued as the officers sought to maintain an apolitical bearing.”
The muted reaction to Hegseth’s and Trump’s speeches wasn’t necessarily an unexpected one. On Sept. 29, 2025, the day before Trump and Hegseth gathered the military leaders, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that a lot of civilians don’t really understand that “a military audience doesn’t applaud or take enthusiastic recognition of a speech by a senior officer.”
While there haven’t been many instances in which top military leaders have been gathered for speeches from the U.S. president and secretary of defense, there is some precedent to this kind of response from at least smaller groups of military leadership before.
In January 2016, during then-President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are the most senior uniformed military leaders in the Department of Defense, did not clap while much of the chamber applauded during a portion of the president’s speech regarding the U.S. military. Eventually though, near the end of that portion of the speech, the military leaders could be seen on camera rising to their feet and applauding.