Trump: US cities should be military ‘training grounds’

What happened

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Tuesday addressed hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals hastily summoned from around the world to a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. Hegseth said he planned to toughen physical fitness and grooming standards and root out “fat generals” and “woke” ideologies that he claimed hamstrung the military’s lethality. Trump said he wanted the military to fight the “enemy within” the U.S.

Who said what

Defense officials spent much of Tuesday “trying to make sense of the last-minute gathering,” Politico said, with one saying it “could have been an email.” The top U.S. military brass “sat mostly in silence” as Trump “talked for 73 minutes about the same things he talks about almost every day” — Joe Biden, the media, not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, The New York Times said. But there was “something new” in minute 44 of his speech, when Trump told the generals that for some of them, a “major part” of their job would be tackling the “war from within” in “San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles.”

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” Trump recounted telling his defense secretary. Hegseth told the military leaders that “you kill people and break things for a living” and will no longer have to “fight with stupid rules of engagement.”

What next?

Trump’s “emphasis on deploying the military for domestic law enforcement” was “distressing,” The Washington Post said in an editorial, and Hegseth’s fixation on making the military “more lethal” was “not a feature people typically look for in forces deployed in their communities.”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up