The speeches by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth before a compelled in-person meeting with all our nation’s admirals and generals properly have been criticized on many grounds: improperly shifting the military mission to internal threats, explicitly declaring our cities as dangers to be met with military tactics, and rambling political diatribes irrelevant to our non-partisan military. One other item, however, deserves mention—the wholesale misuse of merit as the rationale for some of Trump’s most egregious policies.