With its government shut down and troops on the streets, the US is descending into darker and more chaotic depths
An American President declaring he’s at war with his own people, or at least some of them, is mad enough. That Donald Trump did so on Tuesday in front of an audience of generals – who had been abruptly yanked home from around the world by newly rebranded Secretary of War Pete Hegseth – is a sign that the US is descending into darker and more chaotic depths.
The set-piece event at Quantico, Virginia, was as surreal a public appearance as Trump has ever staged: hundreds of military leaders listening while the President suggested that “dangerous” US cities should be used as “training grounds” for the army.
It also further highlighted the growing sense that Trump’s administration is leaning into violence and cruelty as virtuous principles for the state.
‘Just have a good time’
Before Trump even took to the stage, Hegseth had launched into a rant about how US troops are now too overweight and hirsute to be taken seriously.
“Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops,” he said.
Hegseth promised to reform the military’s inspector general processes, to make life harder for complainants and easier for those subject to repeated complaints. “No more walking on eggshells,” he said, with glee. (Hegseth’s confirmation was almost derailed by allegations of alcoholism and violence against former partners, both of which he denies.)
Hegseth left the stage in silence, clearing the way for Trump, who was bemused not to be welcomed with a round of applause from the generals present. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he said. “Just have a good time!”
The President then launched into an attack on the US’s largest left-leaning cities. “They’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one… This is gonna be a major part for some people in this room. That’s a war too, a war from within.”
For the generals, who have all sworn a solemn oath to defend their country, it must have been hard to “have a good time” when their rambling commander-in-chief was suggesting that large parts of their homeland were to be treated as war zones.
Trump also reiterated that he would deploy troops to Portland, Oregon (known for its farmer’s markets, expensive donuts and trams), calling the city a “nightmare” that “looks like World War II”.
Battleground America
The military isn’t the only way the Trump administration is flexing its muscles against the national security threat ostensibly posed by ordinary people.
Chicago is already at the sharp end of his administration’s growing crackdown on seemingly anyone spotted in public looking suspiciously Hispanic or immigrant-like.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, overdressed in tactical gear, are lingering on Michigan Avenue and patrolling the Chicago river in boats. The spectacle would be ludicrous posturing were Ice not also snatching people from streets in broad daylight and firing pepper balls at protesters from the roof of a detention centre.
The combination of embarrassing stormtrooper cosplay and public displays of indulgent cruelty is the stock-in-trade of authoritarians. So is the sort of approach that Trump and Hegesth indulged in in Virginia, hectoring their audience about moral degeneracy as their own tethers to logic and empathy become more frayed.
While deploying troops to the streets marks a new low, the enforcement of sadism as the military’s prime directive is not a new turn.
Less than a year before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Republican Senator Ted Cruz and others on the US right shared a dark, violent propaganda video put out by the Russian army, which they claimed put the US’s “woke, emasculated military” to shame.
The performance of maximised brutality is also playing out in civilian government in the US, which shut down most of its operations on Wednesday after Congress failed to reach agreement on funding.
In less than a year, the second Trump administration has already made good on its plan to gut agencies and departments it disdains. The shutdown may serve as an opportunity to cut hundreds of thousands more jobs, as well as vital programmes and services.
The result could be a federal government that exists principally for the purpose of facilitating corruption, while purging the US of perceived enemies and “undesirables”.
When states organised this way hit hard times, they have a way of falling apart.
The second Trump presidency is the pubescent stage of a fast-growing fascist government – and whatever emerges could prove as brittle as any other institution that deliberately puts cruelty at its core.
