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In his long, even-more-rambling-than-usual address to Pete Hegseth’s peculiar assemblage of military brass this morning, President Donald Trump talked about a lot of non-germane things, as the New York Times reported:

There does not seem to be a clear point or purpose in President Trump’s address to military generals today. It’s a garden variety tear; he’s talking about tariffs, Joe Biden and the autopen, the southern border, CNN, his personal feelings about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his anxieties that he won’t be given a Nobel Peace Prize he feels he deserves. These are things he talks about almost every day regardless of audience or setting. Every so often he throws in a statistic or observation he has about the military.

“I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships by the way,” he said at one point, pausing a riff about tariffs to bring up a 1950s documentary series about naval warfare. “I used to watch ‘Victory at Sea.’ I love ‘Victory at Sea.’”

But there is one highly germane instruction to the vast crowd of warriors that can be discerned by piecing together several passages in his remarks: Get ready to spend a lot of time fighting right here in America, as Jonathan V. Last observes:

President Trump did not have many bad things to say about America’s foreign adversaries. He spoke about Vladimir Putin in largely neutral terms (only saying he was “disappointed” in him) and barely mentioned China.

He did, however, speak with great moral clarity about certain classes of Americans whom he views as a grave threat….

The most consequential parts of the commander-in-chief’s speech were the sections in which he attempted to prepare flag officers for increased deployment of the military in American cities….

He called “inner cities” “a big part of war.”

He said America is “under invasion from within.”

That cities “that are run by the radical left Democrats” are dangerous places and “we’re going to straighten them out one at a time” and that “the people in this room are going to help with that.”

“They need the military desperately,” he said of cities with Democratic mayors.

Trump spoke of these enemy-occupied cities as a “training ground” for American war fighters, claiming that other great presidents had used the military to maintain peace and order on the home front.

The key thing to note here is that Trump is seeking to make military deployments at home routine. George Washington was dealing with a military uprising when he deployed troops during the Whiskey Rebellion. Abraham Lincoln was fighting a massive civil war. Occasionally other presidents have called up National Guard units to deal with sporadic emergencies ranging from riots to state defiance of federal laws. But these were rare exceptions to a very important bedrock American principle (and one of the grievances that led to our founding as a country) that a free society doesn’t use military force against its own population. It’s an exception that Trump wants to turn into the rule by labeling his political opponents as the “enemy within” and American cities as enemy territory.

It’s unclear whether Trump’s listeners today perceived his remarks as signaling a fundamental change in their core mission, given the largely incoherent nature of the rest of the speech. But in combination with Hegseth’s clear message that Trump’s “Department of War” would do everything differently than its “woke” predecessors, it put them on notice to gird up their loins for a different kind of war:

In this profession, you feel comfortable inside the violence so that our citizens can live peacefully. Lethality is our calling card and victory our only acceptable end state.

And if “the enemy” happens to live in the midst of “our citizens” or, worse yet, if “our citizens” treasonously work for “the enemy within,” collateral damage is just an unfortunate but inevitable by-product of all that righteous lethality.

As Last notes: “The generals understand that Trump sees their fellow Americans as his enemies. And they must now realize that at some point, they are likely to be forced to choose between Trump and their oaths to defend the Constitution.”

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