The latest drama out of Washington is news that President Trump dressed down the Pentagon brass in what an account just issued by the Washington Post calls a “stunning tirade.” This happened at a meeting in July 2017 at the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Mattis, Secretary of State Tillerson, and the Joint Chiefs chairman, General Dunford, tried to talk the President out of the “America First” policy on which he’d campaigned.

This didn’t sit too well with the President, according to Post scribes Carol Leonig and Philip Rucker, whose account is drawn from their new book, “A Very Stable Genius.” The more the brass tried to sweet talk the President, the madder he got, telling them: “You’re all losers.” At one point, the President demanded to know why America couldn’t get, as the Post summarized it, “some oil” as payment for our GIs in the Gulf. “I want to win,” he railed.

“We don’t win any wars anymore,” the President thundered, adding in respect of the Iraq war: “We spend $7 trillion, everybody else got the oil and we’re not winning anymore.” The President grew so angry, the Post related, that he almost wasn’t breathing. “I wouldn’t go to war with you people,” the commander-in-chief roared. At one point he even said to his war cabinet: “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies!”

Forgive us, but all this sounds rather dainty — almost Amy Vanderbiltish — compared to the tirades to which we were subjected in the Army. We may have been drafted with a polite letter from President Lyndon Johnson that began “Greetings.” As soon as we stepped forward, though, that was the end of it. Had we tried to tell our drill sergeant that we’d lost a war after running through $7 trillion, oh, man, he’d have done more than just call us dopes and babies.

He’d have one of us chuck a hundred pounds of potatoes into the snake-infested crawl space under the mess hall and forced us to slither in ourselves and push the potatoes out with our nose. Then, though it was 34 degrees out, he’d have ordered us to stand in front of the barracks in our skivvies, put one of the raw potatoes in our left hand, and ordered that we eat it, like an apple, while he put a razor in our right hand so we could give ourselves a dry-shave.

Then he would have yanked the weekend passes for the whole platoon and blamed it on us for having wasted $7 trillion. Had anyone protested, the Sarge would have threatened to maneuver the wiseacre’s head through his, ah, lower digestive track until he was looking out between his own front teeth. Forgive the Army lingo, but we’re not losing any sleep over the way Mr. Trump talks to the brass.

No doubt those generals earned their stars. If they’d been in our platoon, though, they’d never have dared suggest it was okay to spend $7 trillion on a war and come home with no oil. They’d have just kept their mouths shut. No one would have been so imprudent as to mutter that the sergeant was a “f**king moron,” which is what Mr. Tillerson called Mr. Trump after the President left the room.

If Mr. Tillerson had said that about our sergeant, he’d have been told he was “lower than whale sh*t” and been assigned to spend the rest of his soon-to-be-truncated time as secretary of state cleaning grease traps — with his own toothbrush. That’s how the constitutional chain of command was taught at Fort Benning back in the day. Our guess is that it will boost the morale of today’s GIs to know that even the top brass gets an Class-A chewing out now and again.