“Would you want him serving with fat or unfit troops or in a unit where standards were lowered so certain types of troops could make it in… The answer is not just no, it’s hell no.” — Pete Hegseth, Trump’s appointed Secretary of War, on Sept. 30th during a speech to Quantico officials.
The United States military has always had grooming standards and expectations for their soldiers, male and female alike, meant to promote discipline and an “arms at the ready” attitude.
Pete Hegseth is actively placing exclusionary and outrageous standards for military soldiers that spells a dangerous trend of an “Aryanizing” America.
The first signals of harsher grooming & fitness standards in our armed forces appeared in Feb. of 2025, when the future Secretary of War made an off-hand comment about prioritizing “more basic stuff” in President Trump’s second term.
That sentiment spiraled over the next seven months and culminated in a series of decisive Pentagon memos enforcing new standards for soldiers in Sept of this year; Secretary Hegseth delivered a corresponding speech two weeks after.
These new standards include gender-neutral metrics of fitness and clean-shaven soldiers with tightening restrictions on beards, goatees, mustaches and even sideburns.
Stricter grooming standards disproportionately affect Muslim and Sikh soldiers, who revere facial hair as signs of piety, as well as Black soldiers who suffer from skin conditions such as PFB (psuedo-folliculitis barbae), which increases susceptibility to painful shaving and razor bumps.
These standards also extend to women as a whole in the armed forces. In compliance with gender-neutral tests of fitness, women must meet an unreasonable physical benchmark set by men in order to resume service, and if not, then they’re deemed unfit for duty and discharged.
While exemptions exist, in Pete Hegseth’s own words, “It’s a bad look.” This was exacerbated by the Secretary’s relentless mention of purging “woke-ness” from the military, which in the Trump Administration’s mind must mean anyone who isn’t white.
What seems to be enforcing the discipline required of America’s soldiers actually signals the execution of a core radical right-wing ideology.
As long as Donald Trump has been in the White House, there have been general revocations of progress of inclusivity.
With his second term in full force, any sense of self-restraint is gone.
With Supreme Court permission for ICE officers to racially profile immigrant suspects and the vehement rollbacks of DEI initiatives in the workplace, it’s no surprise Donald Trump’s next goal was to rid the United States military of any “foreign influence.”
This narrative is supposed to be beyond the year 2025.
These efforts to homogenize the armed forces of the United States fall in line with President Trump’s already verbal scorn for Muslims and treatment of women.
America is becoming a less inclusive and hateful nation. America’s mortal enemy has become “woke-ness” and our president is dismissing devoted soldiers as a political message.
