[…]we took the freedom of speech away.
Author
- Emma Shortis
Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University
We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military[…]
They're poisoning the blood of our country.
Stand back and stand by.
The president has been saying it out loud all along.
During his first administration, in 2019, US President Donald Trump said the Constitution gave him "the right to do whatever I want". Five years later, the Supreme Court affirmed that view when it ruled the president has quasi-regal powers of immunity for "official acts".
And then last week at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, Trump's existential threat to American democracy escalated significantly.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had assembled around 800 of the United States military's top leaders. Hegseth convened the conference in an attempt to impose an ex-National Guard major's authority on America's professional military leadership. He reduced professionalism to physical appearance and fitness standards dressed up as "the warrior ethos" and "lethality".
His speech was a charge of far-right talking points. Obesity and beards are out. Hyper-masculinisation and misogyny are in.
No more identity months, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction or gender delusions - we are done with that shit.
Trump commandeered the event. The president's stream-of-consciousness, campaign-style speech took an even more radical turn.
His disdain for the admirals and generals was clear from the outset. "If you don't like what I'm saying, you can leave the room - of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future."
From both Hegseth and Trump, the message was clear. The military leaders in the room - who have all sworn an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution (not, it should be noted, the commander-in-chief) - should consider themselves nothing more than obedient servants of the president.
That in itself would represent a radical shift in civil-military relations.
But Trump, as he always does, took things even further.
He said:
I told Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities [Washington DC, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Portland] as training grounds for our military.
The president of the United States has decided that the US military, which is now meant to be more focused than ever on "lethality", should include American cities and the people who live in them in their operational plans.
'Do whatever the hell you want'
Trump's main audience for this speech, as usual, was not really the people in the room. It was his MAGA (Make America Great Again) base, a movement that he knows well and plays like a virtuoso. The same base he told to "stand back and stand by" in 2020, just before the January 6 insurrection.
We can bet they are listening. That base knows, instinctively - as does the leadership of the movement - that Trump's promise of no consequences extends beyond the military. He showed them that when he pardoned those that had tried to overthrow a democratically elected government on his behalf.
This context matters, because Trump, Hegseth and the rest are reshaping not just the military but the entire federal government in their ideological image. Through mass layoffs and recruitment - all laid out in Project 2025 - they are consolidating their power everywhere.
The cities Trump wants the military to use as "training grounds" are the same cities being targeted by violent, oppressive enforcement of the Trump administration's "mass deportations" policy, led by the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In practice, those operations include the arbitrary arrest and detention of American citizens and the denial of legal rights and due process. In Chicago, where Trump has just deployed the National Guard, raids have reportedly included pulling children naked from their beds in the middle of the night and separating them from their mothers. Those same agencies using these practices are clashing with protesters in increasingly violent confrontations, and the National Guard is being deployed as reinforcement.
At times during his speech, Trump spoke directly to "border patrol, ICE" saying that if they were spat at or had bricks thrown at their vehicles, "you get out of that car and you can do whatever the hell you want to do".
The president then went on to immediately compare this to the administration's attacks on Venezuelan boats in international waters, which the New York City Bar Association has described as "unlawful executions". As Trump put it: "we take them out."
ICE is currently engaged in a program of mass recruitment, spending $30 billion to find 10,000 new deportation officers, even going so far as to offer $50,000 bonuses. In July, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said that recruits were needed because "Together, we must defend the homeland".
This blood-and-soil style violent nationalism infuses everything the administration is doing, from its recruitment to its firings, from its promises to crackdown on the "radical left" to its suppression of free speech.
The president has repeatedly told the movement behind him, and the military and law enforcement agencies, directly and indirectly, that they are free to impose this radical vision for America violently - without fear of consequence.
An American tragedy
Trump has long mused about using the military against his own people. According to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, during his first administration, enraged at Black Lives Matter protests, Trump reportedly asked "Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?"
On Thursday US time, NBC reported that officials in the White House were having "increasingly serious discussions" about invoking the Insurrection Act , which would allow the President to deploy the military domestically for civilian law enforcement. That process is now, according to an unnamed source, on its way up "an escalatory ladder".
As has been noted many times, Trump is now surrounded by people who are all-in on his agenda. The guardrails have been dismantled.
What Trump suggested in Quantico would mean the use of unaccountable, unsanctioned force against American citizens delivered by the all-volunteer personnel of the US military.
None of the assembled generals or admirals walked out when he said that.
In the absence of resistance, this transforms the US military into a domestic political tool of the executive and turns American military leaders into the enforcers of presidential political will against the American people themselves.
The meeting at Quantico was a transformation point in the second Trump presidency. It turned the assembled admirals and generals into a de facto enemy of the people.
It transforms the United States into an autocracy and the presidency into a dictatorship.
This is the tragedy of Trump's America.
Emma Shortis is Director of International and Security Affairs at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.
