Shortly after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth broke new ground and ordered roughly 800 generals and admirals to come to Virginia from around the world on short notice, Donald Trump said he wanted to make an appearance, too.
The purpose of his scheduled remarks, the president told NBC News over the weekend, was to tell the U.S. military’s top commanders “about how well we’re doing militarily.” The Republican added, “It’s just a good message.”
After having seen Trump’s speech, a variety of words come to mind, but “good” isn’t one of them.
Much of the address featured stale and predictable nonsense. The president rambled about tariffs, the Nobel Peace Prize, his contempt for Democrats, his contempt for independent news organizations, the paper stock at the White House, how impressed he is with his own signature, his belief that his 2020 election defeat was “rigged,” his desire to add Canada to the United States, Joe Biden and the autopen, and his affection for the “Gulf of America” label.
The rhetoric was mind-numbing, but it was also inappropriate: The in-person audience included several hundred highly decorated generals and admirals. There was no reason to treat these men and women as if they were little more than sycophantic partisan supporters waiting for fresh red meat.
But making matters far more serious was Trump’s pitch on using the U.S. military on American soil. NPR summarized:
President Trump defended the use of U.S. troops in American cities and told top U.S. commanders that the military would be used against the ‘enemy within.’ … ‘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,’ Trump told those gathered for the highly unusual event at Quantico, Va. ‘It won’t get out of control once you’re involved at all.’
“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,” he told military leaders. “That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.”
Trump: "The ones that are run by radical left Democrats — what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They're very unsafe places & we're gonna straighten them out one by one. This is gonna be a major part for some people in this room. That's a war too. It's war from within" As part of the same argument, the president said he’s told Hegseth that the U.S. “should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” Trump: "San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles…That's a war too. It's a war from within…I told Pete, we should use some of these cities as training grounds for our military — national guard, but military. We're going into Chicago very soon." After troop deployments in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., as well as announced deployments to Memphis and Portland, Oregon, many raised concerns about the president’s willingness — and apparent eagerness — to use military force against Americans. After Trump’s speech to generals and admirals, those concerns deserve to be a whole lot louder.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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