Trump and Hegseth’s “warrior culture” invades Chicago

Years from now, as the history of President Donald Trump‘s political life is being written, Tuesday, Sept. 30 may come to be seen as something of a watershed in his second term — when all the dots were finally connected, once and for all, between all the elements of his domestic authoritarian agenda.

At a Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth convened an unprecedented meeting of hundreds of senior military leaders to speechify about “warrior culture” and effectively ordered the armed forces to ignore international law. 

His remarks set off alarm bells about America’s collapsing democracy. By my count, Hegseth echoed at least nine of the 14 traits of fascism outlined by philosopher Umberto Eco in his seminal 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism.” 

But the secretary was just the warm-up act. When Trump took the stage, he “joked” about firing officers who do not like him. His speech was rambling and incoherent at times, but he became laser-focused in its conclusion. The military, he declared, should be used to fight “the enemy within” — and America’s “inner cities” should be used for “training grounds.” 

But it wouldn’t be just any city. “[T]he ones that are run by the radical-left Democrats,” the president specified. “And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.” 

Seven hundred miles away in Chicago, in the early hours before Trump and Hegseth’s confab, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were busy playing soldier on the administration’s orders. In a scene that evoked a night raid by Special Ops forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, ICE agents rappelled out of UH-60 Blackhawks to assist law enforcement in raiding a building in the working-class South Shore neighborhood that had allegedly been “taken over” by the Venezuelan gang El Tren de Aragua. Drones provided persistent surveillance, and armored vehicles were on the scene. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem shared a propaganda video of the raid which featured dramatic music and images of the helicopters and their searchlights, ICE agents kicking down doors, and people being led away under arrest.  

American citizens were reportedly detained and tied up with plastic zip-ties for hours. According to Block Club Chicago, a local publication, one was Rodrick Johnson, who reported hearing “‘people dropping on the roof’ before FBI agents kicked in his door. He was stuffed inside a van with his neighbors for what felt like several hours until agents told them the building was clear, he said.”

“‘They didn’t tell me why I was being detained,’ Johnson said. ‘They left people’s doors open, firearms, money, whatever, right there in the open.’” 

Witnesses also reported that children, some of whom were not wearing clothes, were restrained. 

This raid, along with the president’s message later that day, made the Trump doctrine crystal clear: The military’s “warrior culture” would first be applied on the homefront. 

In case there was any doubt, Hegseth reinforced the message in an interview with Fox News on Sunday, saying that the military would more likely be used “to defend the homeland first” — not from foreign aggressors, but from antifa and the radical left. 

But the administration wasn’t through with its messaging. Early Monday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller made comments that, by the end of the day, were clearly priming the pump for Trump to weigh-in. According to Miller, judicial rulings that thwarted the administration’s agenda were “an insurrection against the laws and Constitution of the United States.” Later, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said he would weigh invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military if federal judges blocked his use of the National Guard to aid with law enforcement.

These plans are a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which bans the use of the country’s military for domestic law enforcement in all but the most specific and extreme circumstances. 

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That, though, doesn’t seem to matter to Trump. The president has already created the pretext for turning the military — and other parts of the national security state and law enforcement — against those Americans deemed to be the enemy through his new National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). The order mandates that the power of the federal government should be used against those who show “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” As part of his mass deportation scheme and crime crackdown, he has ordered the National Guard, ICE and other law enforcement entities to Washington, D.C., Memphis, Portland and Chicago. In Los Angeles, he also deployed active-duty Marines.

Besides last Tuesday’s raid in the Windy City, ICE recently made a show of force as agents marched through downtown during the day and arrested a family of “illegal aliens” who were enjoying the beautiful weather in Millennium Park. West of downtown in Broadview, protesters have gathered outside an ICE detention facility. The demonstrations, which have been violent at times, are escalating.

A recent public opinion poll showed that a majority of rural white Republicans and MAGA supporters in red states support the use of the military for “law enforcement.” They are especially supportive of using such force against Democratic-led cities, many of which are home to large Black and brown populations.

If history is a guide, those same forces could at some point be turned against red state America when Trump deems them to be insufficiently loyal.

In a measured, fair analysis of Hegseth and Trump’s speeches for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), retired U.S Marine Corps Reserve Col. Mark F. Cancian warned that Trump’s focus on using the military for domestic purposes also has international implications. “An irony is the tension between Hegseth’s focus on traditional warfighting and Trump’s focus on domestic enemies and law enforcement,” he said. “A military that is sealing the border and walking the streets to fight crime is not getting ready for the lethal weapons of a great power adversary such as China or Russia.”

Many in the mainstream news media have quickly moved on from what transpired last week in Quantico, choosing to be held captive by our attention economy, the endless churn of the news cycle and a fickle public. There is a word for this: Normalization.

If these same events — the Quantico summit, the ICE raid in Chicago, the militarized “invasion” of Democratic-led cities, the broader assault on American democracy and civil society, Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act — were happening in another country, the media would call it what it is: Authoritarianism orchestrated by a political strongman. Instead, it seems that American exceptionalism will play a prominent role in the epitaph for American democracy.