THE SET-UP: We can’t say we didn’t know.
“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics. And…it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military.”
- Trump in an interview with FOX News on October 13, 2024
Trump has been telling anyone willing to listen that he intends to wage war on “the enemy from within.” Exactly what that “war” would look like is unclear, in no small part because he’s not challenged by reporters or members of his own party. While Republicans continue to reflexively support him mostly for fear of being primaried, his daily press availabilities have become predictable call-and-response sessions with Trump in the role of preacher and a host of newly-credentialed ideologues playing the part of choir.
Even when he entertains an actual question from an actual reporter, he is rarely pressed on the lies and hypocrisies he spreads like warm butter. A case in point is his regime’s handling of climate change. He’s basically eliminated it from the national media’s agenda and he has yet to face one notable question about his regime’s unprecedented campaign to erase the issue and the science from every corner of the Federal government.
He can bark-out wild, fanciful denunciations of windmills without fear of being challenged. And that’s increasingly true for a variety of issues. Basically, his regime’s campaign of intimidation is paying off. Universities, broadcast media and even lobbyists have been cowed. The purges that followed the assassination of Charlie Kirk extended the pall of fear across the nation. One transgressive tweet could cost you your job. If your thoughts don’t align with the ruling regime’s dogma, it is best to just keep those thoughts to yourself. That is if you want to keep your job. Jimmy Kimmel is the exception that proves the rule.
It’s an alarming slide.
After Quantico, it’s become downright scary.
Trump’s rambling remarks before more than 800 senior officers at Quantico Marine Base followed Pete “Beerbong” Hegseth’s much-criticized screed against “Wokeness.” Hegseth’s manic attempt to turn his book into marching orders garnered most of the attention. And understandably so. Hegseth is a religious zealot who loudly proclaims his devotion to Jesus and his obsession with “lethality” in the same breath. In many ways, Hegseth is a paragon of Christian hypocrisy. He even cited Jesus’ “Golden Rule” without a hint of irony or self-awareness. His inability to hear himself is what makes him a dangerous Defense Secretary. It also what makes him the perfect Defense Secretary for Donald Trump.
As for Trump, his speech has been characterized as “unusual” and “bizarre” and “embarrassing.” Most of the coverage has focused on Trump’s suggestion that US cities could be an effective “training grounds” for the military. More troubling was his repeated reference to “the enemy within.” Like this:
Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within. We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.
At least when they’re wearing a uniform, you can take them out. These people don’t have uniforms. But we are under invasion from within.
It’s quite a passage, but take particular note of his characterization of his domestic enemies as an internal “invasion.” It’s the set-piece that goes with the invasion from without. I believe it is intentional. He’s telegraphing his intention to expand ICE’s deportation crackdown to include US citizens. After all, invaders are invaders, regardless of whether they grew up here for just got here.
That’s what Trump went to Quantico to say. He’s not just signaling his intentions. Trump was preparing the US Military’s top brass for what’s to come and what he will specifically ask of them:
Oh, when we send in the troops, if you have a real leader that says you got to do what you have to do, I put that out the other day, you got to do what you got to do because we don’t want our people hurt as they stand by. I was watching during Biden troops standing up like this, brave, standing up in tension the way I should stand all the time.
And I’m like this and people are standing and their mouth is this far away from their mouth and they’re spitting at him and they’re screaming at him. And that soldier standing there, he wants to knock the hell out of the person, but he’s not allowed to do anything. So they just stand there and they get abused.
And a woman was this far away from his face and she starts spitting in his face and he’s not allowed to do anything. If it’s okay with you, generals and admirals, I’ve taken that off. I say they spit, we hit.
Is that okay? I think so. They spit. It’s a new thing.
They spit, we hit. How about the cars where the cars are coming out? They get brand new cars, Border Patrol, ice, beautiful, nice new cars. And they’re driving along and have to go through a gauntlet of rocks being thrown at the car.
So here’s this beautiful brand new car. By the time it goes 100 yards, it’s destroyed. These guys have pretty good arms, some of them.
And they’re throwing bricks at full force into the window and into the car. It looks like it’s a war zone. And I said, never let that happen again from now on, if that ever happens.
And I say it here, you get out of that car and you can do whatever the hell you want to do because those people are, you know, you can die from that. Those bricks go through the windows. You can die.
They’d like it to. They’d like it to go through the window. But this was a couple of months ago.
They just kept driving and bricks are hitting the car. And I said, why aren’t they stopping? Because they were under orders from the past administration, never stop. But that’s different with us.
This meandering digression is far more telling than it appears. Make no mistake, Trump’s letting us all know that the crackdown is going to crack skulls. He says directly to the “generals and admirals” that he’s “taken off” the restrictions against violence that constrained “troops” during Biden’s Administration.
That is not just another Trumpian bloviation.
Just within the last few days an ICE officer was captured on video shoving a woman to the ground. The first response was to relieve the officer of his “current duties” on the grounds that his behavior was “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE.”
But, in what CBS News called “a striking about-face,” the officer was quickly returned to regular duty. An ICE official told CBS News:
“President Trump and Secretary Noem are not going to allow criminal illegal aliens to terrorize American citizens.”
Obviously, the about-face came from the top. Not coincidentally, ICE officers sent a photojournalist to the hospital a couple days later. Masked goons, often in plain clothes, are roaming the streets, empowered by Trump himself to rough-up and intimidate and menace. Trump’s intention is to add unformed military personnel to his growing goon squad (or squadristi, as the case may be). What’s more, he also plans on deploying a domestic version of special forces to take on “civil disturbances’:
Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won’t get out of control.
What’s “out of control” is the accelerating police state Trump is catalyzing with his rhetoric and his power. In fact, his rhetoric and his exercise of executive power are weaving a self-fulfilling prophecy. Portland is a provocation. Chicago is a provocation.
And that’s just the beginning:
We have many cities in great shape, too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical-left Democrats — what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles — they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.
And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.
Trump just declared war, folks. And I expect this “war” to more than just a crackdown on “enemies,” apostates and protestors. This is preparation for 2026 and 2028. Trump hates to lose. If he can generate enough fear and intimidate enough people into keeping their heads down and their mouths shut, he may never lose again. - jp
BTW, I recommend watching Trump’s speech in full … it’s not just frightening for the reasons outlined above, it’s extra frightening because his thinking seems increasingly convoluted.
President Trump Delivers Remarks to the Department of War
https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/president-trump-delivers-remarks-to-the-department-of-war/
President Trump Address to Pentagon Leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico – Full Transcript
https://www.sofx.com/president-trump-address-to-pentagon-leaders-at-marine-corps-base-quantico-full-transcript/
Trump Tells Generals the Military Will Be Used to Fight ‘Enemy Within’
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pete-hegseth-trump-quantico-military-speech-80ffabe5
Trump’s Speech to Generals Was Incitement to Violence Against Americans
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/10/01/trump-military-generals-incitement-civilians/
‘Let’s Go Bash Some Skulls’: Inside the Militarization of Trump’s America
https://inkstickmedia.com/lets-go-bash-some-skulls-inside-the-militarization-of-trumps-america/
Trump tells generals US cities should be military training grounds
https://www.stlamerican.com/news/trump-tells-generals-us-cities-should-be-military-training-grounds/
The Silence of the Generals
https:/www.thebulwark.com/p/the-silence-of-the-generals-hegseth-trump-quantico-speech-william-young-ice-opinion
Trump’s Made-for-TV Quantico Spectacle: Generals Refused to Be Agitprops
https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/trumps-made-for-tv-quantico-spectacle-generals-refused-to-be-agitprops/
Retired general: Trump sounded ‘incoherent, exhausted’ in Quantico remarks
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5531676-trump-mccaffrey-quantico-speech/
The Commander in Chief Is Not Okay
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/09/trump-hegseth-speech-incoherent/684421/
So Donald Trump Is Declaring War On US Cities Based On Fake Fox News Footage And Nonsense His ‘People’ Tell Him
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/30/so-donald-trump-is-declaring-war-on-us-cities-based-on-fake-fox-news-footage-and-nonsense-his-people-tell-him/
Trump’s comments on sending troops to American cities were ‘cherry-picked’ from speech, Speaker Johnson says
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trumps-comments-sending-troops-american-cities-cherry-picked/story?id=126109613
Trump’s ICE Has Started Targeting Activists, Not Just Immigrants
https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-ice-turns-its-target-to-activists-not-just-immigrants/
The United States Is Becoming a Police State
https://www.theglobalist.com/the-united-states-is-becoming-a-police-state/
ICE Doesn’t Want You To Know Why They Bought a Phone Cracking System
https://reason.com/2025/09/29/ice-doesnt-want-you-to-know-why-they-bought-a-phone-cracking-system/
ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day
https://www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-tool-that-tracks-locations-of-hundreds-of-millions-of-phones-every-day/