What Does Donald Trump’s “War from Within” Mean in Practice?

0:00I was in West Virginia the other day and I was at a bookstore and let's just say the stacks of Joe Manchin's new biography looked shall we say undersold. It was not exactly moving. Wood chip material? It's coming to a remainder table near you. Okay. Well, listen, no author, though, we have to admit, no author can make fun of potential wood chipping materials. Fair enough. Because we're just asking to be on the remainder sale table along with them with those special stickers that says signed by author, making it even more humiliating. I have to say, I thought one of the benefits was that we didn't even have to talk about Joe Manchin anymore because he did manage to hide an awful lot of our brain space for the previous few years.

0:47I'm not sure to what end. I just wanted to bring us back to a quieter, simpler time, which is said, you know, a year ago.

0:56Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glasser, and I'm joined by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos. Hey, Jane. Hi, guys. Hey, Evan. Good morning, guys.

1:15All right. Well, great to be with you. Once again, I'm feeling an emergency need to convene this group every single day because so much is happening. But I'm so glad we're taking on this important topic today, and that is one of the most striking and alarming features, I think, of Trump's second term, and that is the militarization of American politics. In just the past few months, in just the past few days, President Trump has deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C. He's announced that he's sending troops to, quote, war-ravaged Portland and Chicago. He's even called for the imprisonment of Illinois Governor J.B.

1:58Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. And this is in a context in which just last week, I know it feels like a year, but it was just last week, that Donald Trump, speaking to hundreds of generals and admirals at Quantico, declared it's a war from within. We should use some of these dangerous cities, and he means American cities, as training grounds for our military. Donald Trump, in his second term, has reoriented the Pentagon around this new idea of national security, one that frames our greatest threats not as coming from abroad, but right here within America's own borders. It's a chilling vision of power that turns the machinery of war inward.

2:44So in this episode, what does the war within mean? In practice, Is it even legal? Where is it going? And we'll be joined later by my friend Corey Shockey, author of an upcoming book, The State and the Soldier, a veteran of the Pentagon, and really first-rate expert who'd help us understand what's at stake when the military becomes politicized. I feel like, Jane, I need to take a deep breath even when recounting this week's events. It's a remarkable week in the life of a nation, and it's one that I feel like it's important to just sort of stop and take stock. Federal district judges in both Oregon and Illinois, for now, saying no.

3:31For now. That's the key word. Okay, I mean, I'm with you. This was just a shocking week. It's shocking. And I have to say it feels dangerous. It's not really the topic of our show today about Letitia James. But when an elected official in the other party is indicted, you're crossing some new barriers here. And earlier in the week, as we've seen, we're crossing new barriers. And a couple judges, one in Oregon and one in Illinois, federal district judges, have both called out the Trump administration and said, in essence, there's no national emergency here. There's no reason to call up the National Guard.

4:10As Judge Immigrant wrote, in Oregon, she said, this is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law. So she called out and suspended what the Trump administration is trying to do. But will this hold? I mean, the same ruling, a very similar ruling was made by a district court judge in Illinois, April Perry. But will this hold? We don't know yet. And what we're already hearing is it's been appealed by the Trump administration in Oregon to the Ninth Circuit. and the three-judge appeals court panel, which has two judges who were appointed by Trump, appears to be skeptical of the lower court judge's position on this and seems to be leaning towards Trump.

4:54We'll see what happens. All of this obviously is going to end up in the lap of the Supreme Court. But meanwhile, there are troops on the streets of American cities where there is, according to reporters who are there, not an insurrection, not a national emergency, just people who are protesting and exercising their First Amendment rights and who knows, maybe being provocative here and there. But there's no sense that the local police and law enforcement people can't handle it. Yet the Trump administration has sent in troops. And I will note, Susan, just I mean, you guys know this, but it's worth listeners remembering that Judge Immergut in Oregon is not exactly a left-wing operative.

5:39This was a Trump appointee, somebody who had been appointed U.S. attorney under the George W. Bush administration, worked for Ken Starr back during the Clinton investigation. So this is somebody with bona fide conservative credentials who is standing up and saying, hold on a second, this does not fit the standards of the Constitution. Well, and Evan, to your point, her decision not only underscored the legal offense to our democratic small d system. You know, remember when Republicans were federalists? But she also wrote, and I think this is the other really salient fact for me about what is so jarring.

6:17She also wrote, this is untethered to the facts. And you made that point, there's no insurrection, there's no rebellion. By using the language of war here and sending actual armed troops into the streets. Is Donald Trump sort of looking to create the very conditions he claims already exist? I mean, what does it mean to call the city's war ravaged? It's such an important point. I'm reminded, interestingly, Susan, of something that Hegseth mentioned, just a brief passing comment in his speech at Quantico. You know, he invoked this classic saying, move out and draw fire, which is something he would have learned as a young officer.

6:58What does move out and draw fire means? It means you mobilize, you get moving as a unit, and then you draw fire from the other side, from the enemy, so as to find them, to generate the conflict, to essentially hasten the events that you expect. In a sense, what you see happening right now is the Trump administration is moving out and drawing fire in American cities, trying to elicit the very conflict that they believe will provide the predicate on which to then take the political steps to establish a greater sense of emergency, the political architecture of emergency. And it's worth paying attention to the rhetoric and the gap between the language and the facts.

7:41I'll just draw attention to one interesting little detail. We haven't talked much about the other drama, which is unfolding in parallel here, which is the United States is now using the tools of war to attack drug traffickers, boats that are believed to be coming from Venezuela, bringing drugs to the United States. There's a small detail that people have noticed, and I think it's important, which is the administration is now referring to these not as drug dealers or drug smugglers, but narco-terrorists, narco-terrorism. That term, the kind of universalization of terrorism, is an idea here to pay very close attention to.

8:16Stephen Miller has talked about terror networks going after, as he puts it, leftist terror networks. And a network is a very dangerous idea in the sort of law around how you pursue your enemies, because a network is by its very nature amorphous, amoeba-like. It can grow, it can shrink, you can define it in whatever way you want. And when you have this administration beginning to declare that it is at war in effect with terror networks, that can go in all kinds of directions. I mean, if you follow up on what Stephen Miller said in a post on X this week was that there is, quote, there is a large and growing movement of left-wing terrorism in this country and it is well organized and funded and it is shielded by so-called far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors, and attorneys general.

9:09and that the only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks. So he's actually defining some of those who are upholding the laws and are law enforcement officials in this country as being part of the terror networks. I mean, that was a pretty terrifying thing for him to be saying. And it is so amorphous. It got me going back and reading Orwell on politics in the English language. And, you know, he makes the point in it that every time there's some kind of amorphous euphemism, it usually hides some kind of hideous, specific truth. And when you have a war on terror, that's a metaphor.

9:52That's not actually a war on a particular crime. I think that's what's really made it real for many Americans this week is seeing the very specific nature of the campaign being carried out in Chicago, for example. what you're doing is you're using the military now, in effect, as a support network for the Trump mass deportation campaign and the ICE agents. And remember, you know, we can talk a little bit more. This is an illegal show about, you know, the basis. What are the troops actually allowed to do there and what are they not? And one of the main things they're doing there is acting in support of federal institutions or objects.

10:31Right. And so it's the federal agent's presence on the ground in these cities that is being used as the specific pretext for Trump's militarization of the political fight over basically American immigration policy. But these horrifying pictures, Jane, and, you know, a very specific campaign against immigrants. Many of them are legal immigrants who are being caught up in the dragnet. I saw a picture the other day, I'm sure you guys saw it, of a Chicago mother picking her children up at school, being dragged out of her car. She was then released, apparently. But let's talk a little bit about that.

11:09I mean, you know, there is a very concrete enemy here that Trump and Miller have used to their political benefit from the beginning of Trump's time in politics. The polls suggest that many Americans, even many Democrats, think that Donald Trump is not wrong to go after illegal immigrants in our cities or that cities haven't proven capable. They're using that to then justify this much broader power gain. But tell me a little bit about what you think is happening with the nexus between immigration and this war. Well, I mean, I think what we've seen is there's mission creep here. It began during the campaign, Trump saying that he was going to go after illegal immigrants who were involved in criminal activity.

11:57There's plenty of support for that, I think, bipartisan support for that. But then Stephen Miller set a quota for how many arrests needed to be made in this area per day. And they've wound up having this dragnet that is bringing in mothers picking up their kids at school, thrown to the pavement, dragged into a van, taken away, released later evidently. But this is not, I think, what people expected or support. And if you look at the polls, I think there is slippage in support for this and there is a mission creep in what's going on out there. And then to Evan's point, so the enemy defined was supposedly illegal immigrant criminals.

12:43What's happened is as it has started violating people's sense of decency, including the sense of decency of the new pope who has spoken out against this, people have rallied against it. And it's drawing the protesters who are becoming the new enemy within. And actually the judge in Chicago who has stopped the Trump administration so far said that she was – the word she used was she was afraid it would – what they're doing is fueling unrest, not quelling unrest. They're fueling it and then using that as an excuse to arrest the protesters. Susan, you know, this interesting point about the fusion of the immigration politics with the politics of militarization is something that I think actually has deeper roots.

13:37I mean, I have thought a lot about this over the last few years that you actually can go back to the 9-11 period. That 9-11 was such a shock to our system politically, psychologically. You know, the first time we were hit on the U.S. homeland, the term which then came into widespread use since Pearl Harbor. And that initiated a concept of a sort of twilight war, which then continued on for two decades. What did twilight war mean? Twilight more was the idea that it was everywhere. Your enemy could be visible or invisible. They weren't always on the battlefield. And you saw people, political entrepreneurs, opportunists, pick this up and use it.

14:19So remember, this is a name for blast from the past. Remember Tom Tancredo? He was a congressman who was one of the first people to start talking about immigration in this really harsh way. And one of the things that was happening was that he started talking about, He and others like him started talking about jihadists coming over the southern border from Mexico. And that was the beginning of ginning up this existential fear of immigration rather than it just being a chronic issue to be addressed through policymaking. And I think you follow that forward and you get into a place where you now have this notion of a kind of twilight, unending conflict with no border and no battle lines that allows somebody like Trump to now run wild into new directions.

15:09Well, I think, Evan, you make an important point about even the notion of a homeland. And in fact, actually, the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is an increasingly large portion of what we see, that was actually created in response to the 9-11 attacks. And it brought together a whole set of different functions from the government, everything from the FEMA, the emergency management, to what happens with immigration and the border. And I think it's, again, it's the militarization of the concept of the homeland that you could argue is sort of the precursor event. So now to have an American cities essentially calling out the National Guard and the U.S.

15:56military in support of essentially a domestic maneuver. Now, the other big event this week, which really, for me, underscores how much the Trump presidency is about, domestically speaking, this war within, at the same time, for me, it's a week of cognitive dissonance. This is our self-styled president of peace, the peacemaker, who's seeking to reduce hostilities in the Middle East, declaring that he's achieved a ceasefire in Gaza at the same time, literally using the language of war about his own citizens. I think it's interesting that Trump has figured out that war as an idea is a very powerful political ingredient.

16:39And he's trying to use it as a binding agent when he talks about war abroad, saying to Americans, look, we are a nation of peace. Here we are bringing peace to the Middle East. But of course, then he's using war at home to fortify his political credentials with his supporters. So, you know, he is a bit like a guy who kind of stumbled on this concept in the toy box and is now brandishing it everywhere. But I think we're fortunate that we have Corey coming on today to help us navigate what this looks like in the context of American history, too. I mean, it's the tool of every tyrant, though, right?

17:12I mean, to call up military troops at home.

17:18All right, well, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll be joined by Corey Shockey, who has a new book out on civil-military relations. We will talk with her about the politicization of the military. The political scene will be back in just a moment.

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18:29We are grateful for your time, Cori. It's so great to see you. Thank you. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I have to start knowing you and your own experience working inside the Pentagon at different times with this extraordinary moment, I think, in American history when Peek Hedset, the Defense Secretary, calls all of America's generals from overseas, calls them all together, Quantico. So he gives them a pep rally, Donald Trump, 72-minute rambling speech in which he basically says the enemy and the war is within. Tell us, first of all, sort of how you reacted to that, what your many friends in the world of the military, what they thought of this, and what does it mean for our democracy?

19:21So the behavior of both President Trump and Secretary Hagseth was genuinely shocking. and the kinds of things they were saying were an incitement to violence in our country. The notion of talking to the military about the enemy within and the importance of crushing it. He actually said, most of you in this room will be involved in this mission. He told them that Washington DC was more violent than anything they had seen fighting in Afghanistan. It should genuinely shock Americans to have the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense trying to bring our military into such contested political space.

20:12It's genuinely dangerous. Where I think Americans can take some solace in this spectacle, this disgraceful spectacle, is the comportment of those 400 or so military leaders and non-commissioned officers. because they did exactly what the professionalism of being in military service requires. Namely, they had a duty to show up because the commander in chief and the secretary, their civilian leadership ordered it, and they have a duty not to participate in the politics. They played it straight down the line, just like the Joint Chiefs of Staff do at the State of the Union address. and President Trump had clearly been coached that they were not going to be cheering 18-year-olds because the first thing he said to them was, it's okay to clap.

21:05Still, none of us really did. Do you think that when the moment comes, there will be a way for them to react? I mean, you've thought a lot about this since Trump's first term. I mean, this is a group that basically is gotten their DNA to follow orders and to go where the leader takes them? So it's an integral part of American military professionalism that they follow legal orders. And there's a process for determining the orders are legal. So actually, one of the most dangerous things President Trump and Secretary Hykseth have done is firing the judge advocates general of the services because they were intending to send a signal that they want more lenient legal rulings out of the military lawyers.

21:56So you can expect that the military will follow legal orders. You can expect they will ask their lawyers whether the orders are legal. Where I think there's a misunderstanding among the public is the mistaken belief that the American military can refuse to follow immoral orders or lawful but awful orders. And militaries work on strict chains of command, and they don't have that kind of latitude. So if they get ordered to deploy to Chicago, they're going to do it until somebody tells them it's illegal. Have they replaced the Jags with replacements who were favorable to the Trump administration's point of view as they did basically with the prosecutors in Virginia?

22:45Are you seeing the same kind of process of replacement of professionals with political cronies? I have not seen that. And the bench strength is quite deep of serious professional lawyers in the military. I mean, it was the American military in 1863 that promulgated the first laws of war to constrain the behavior of an army. And it runs really deep in the American military. You could fire the top thousand American military officers and still get reliable behavior to the rule of law. So I don't think we should be that worried about it. Besides Jane, I mean, policy follow-through execution isn't really the strong suit of this civilian team in the Pentagon.

23:34So I think more we need to worry about nobody being at the helm rather than a political partisan being at the helm. In your book, one of the things I thought was an interesting point was that Trump from the start has championed people who were seen as war criminals. And he's also shown a lot of disrespect for people we think of as war heroes, whether it was John McCain or the Gold Star families in the very beginning. It's a different attitude, isn't it, that he is evincing towards the military? Yes, I think it's actually insidious that what he's trying to do is circumvent the disciplined senior leadership and appeal for personal loyalty to the younger and the non-commissioned and enlisted soldiers to try and eliminate or corrode the chain of command in ways that I think are quite dangerous.

24:36You've made the point in the book and in this conversation, I think something worth really important to underscore, which is the idea that in the military, people will follow orders that they might dislike. That is something that is very important both for the integrity of the military, but it also raises the possibility of risk for us in a situation like this right now, where you may have uniformed leaders who recognize the risk to the service of doing things that the president directs. Because the military by tradition is also very wary of politicization. They know that's a corrosive path. How do you see those two instincts, those two traditions in conflict or intention?

25:19How do they play out? You're exactly right that they are contradictory pressures. And the military, part of the reason the American military is so devoted to being an inert political force is that when you have a military sized to one half of 1 % of the American public, they want an integral connection to the American public. They feel it's important for recruiting, for retention. their ability to explain why they are doing what they're doing. But the pressure from this administration, I think there's been nothing like it since at least the constitutional crisis of 1866 to 68. And it's really dangerous.

26:07And there is a tendency, because the military is visible in our society. There is a tendency for people who don't like the president's policies, people like me who don't like the president's policies, wanting the military to save us from the people we elect or the people that the Senate confirms in appointments. And the military cannot save us. In the American system, the solutions to these problems are civilian in nature. It's governors suing the federal government. It's Congress acting to tighten up the Insurrection Act, right? There are only three ways that a president of the United States should be able to use American military forces domestically.

26:57One is if he federalizes them over the objections of governors because constitutional rights are not being respected. The second is if Congress by statute permits the president and limits the conditions. And the third is if a governor requests assistance. None of those three standards have been met by President Trump's deployments of American troops into American cities. Yeah, Corey, this is such an important point. We were talking about this before, that of course, in a divided country, we have a divided Congress. A divided Congress isn't going to pass a law amending the Insurrection Act, even though they knew that Donald Trump, even in his first term, was obsessed with the idea that he was going to invoke it and was only stopped from doing it by the pleas of a number of senior advisors of the kind that he doesn't have anymore, including then Attorney General Bill Barr, who was the last Attorney General when he was George H.W.