To make someone do a campaign openly to obtain a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump goes there in an unusual way. At the beginning of last month, the president proclaimed at a press conference that the Ministry of Defense would later be known as the Ministry of War. At the same briefing, the new alleged war secretary, Pete Hegseth, promised that the armed forces will offer a “maximum lethality” which will not be “politically correct”. It was a few days after Trump ordered the torpedo of a small boat towards Venezuela, which, according to him, was piloted by “narco-terrorists”, killing the eleven people on board, rather than, for example, having arrested and inspected it. After some experts in military law worried that it seemed uncomfortably close to a war crime, vice-president JD Vance published: “Do not give you shit”.
It therefore seemed to be quite worrying when hundreds of generals and admirals were summoned from their publications around the world for a television meeting on Tuesday with Trump and Hegseth, at the base of the Marine Corps in Quantico, in Virginia. “The central cast,” said the president, radiating the public officers, who was sitting on impassive listening, just like their tradition. He praised his own peace efforts, especially in the Middle East, and thought about bringing the battleship back (“beautiful six-inch sides, solid steel, not in aluminum”, which “melts if it looks at an upcoming missile”), then expressed what looked like a directive. He proposed to use American cities as “training grounds” for the military, imagining a “rapid reaction force” which would be sent to his discretion. “It will be a major element for some of the people in this room,” said Trump, such as a theater teacher trying to interest in the spring musical. “It is also a war. It is the war of the interior.”
Peace abroad and war at home? It was an unusual note to strike in an electoral democracy, even if recent reports had indicated that a national defense strategy project would move the attention of Russia and China to national and regional threats. But although Trump continues to talk about his national military missions in a dramatic future, little has been required from those deployed so far. In Washington, DC, where the troops were sent this summer in the context of an alleged war against crime, they were seen collecting garbage, painting fences and finding lost children, while the arrests they initiated have often led to accusations against the big juries, in what the Times described as a “citizen revolt”.
When this offensive died, Trump turned his attention to the application of immigration to the windy city. (“Chicago about to find out why this is called the Ministry of War,” he warned on social networks.) However, there was an asymmetry between the Sturm und Drang of this operation – a midnight raid presented agents recalling helicopters on a building of South Side apartments – and its effect. The eternal and Endre Vasquez, who chairs the Municipal Council Committee on the Rights of Immigrants and Refugees, said that his office had not seen the application “in terms of what is promoted by the president” and that journalists had difficulty in Carré’s allegations on the number of detainees with judicial archives. Despite this, the Border Patrol announced that a maritime unit would be moved to Chicago. “Lakes and rivers are borders,” said a manager. With what, Michigan?
Cities have problems, but it doesn’t matter how much Trump wants to literalize cultural war, they are not war areas. Memphis and Portland are the next ones on the president’s list. But the generals and admirals assembled in Quantico would have reasonably noticed a paradox: although Trump does not want any restrictions on what he can do with the army, he has not yet articulated anything specific to do, apart from making a demonstration of crime in places where the rate has generally already fallen.
The call to Quantico originally came from Hegseth, recently saw a PUSPUP competition organized with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in the injured knee. In Quantico, he said that to instill a “warrior ethics”, a new promotional policy would be based on “merit only”. But it looked like a fairly superficial idea of merit. “It all starts with physical form and appearance,” said HegSeth. He mentioned more beard and fat (he is against them) than drones or missiles. “It is quite unacceptable to see the big generals and admirals in the corridors of the Pentagon,” he added. “It’s a bad look.” But does Hegseth want the best generals, or simply the best meager?
It is interesting to note that the long tail of the erroneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should make its way here, towards a right -wing militarist president who has loudly denounced these foreign conflicts but means to treat American cities as war areas, and to a defense secretary who wants to remove the rules of engagement. Among the Defense Community, the reaction to quantico speeches was an prolonged ocular jet. “Could have been an email,” said a senior anonymous official said Politico. On Tuesday, the White House announced that the troops would be sent to Portland to “crush terrorism of violent radical violence”. It seemed much more frightening than the details of the policy reported by Oregon Public Radio: two hundred troops of the National Guard would be sent to ensure additional security in federal facilities. For the moment, there is a heavy element of image in the national military ambitions of the president, which, as was the case with the now considerably reduced doge Project, allows him to pretend that he wants a major change of background when what he really seems to want is more power.
Wednesday, in Memphis, the deputy chief of staff of the White House, Stephen Miller, Wednesday told a group of assistant federal officers: “You are unleashed.” On the same day, the president’s lawyers said in a letter to the congress that the country was now officially in an “armed conflict” with the drug trade, a determination by which Trump can claim extraordinary powers in wartime. (There have been three other deadly attacks against boats in the South Caribbean since the beginning of September, the most recent Friday.) Each of these stages has elements of military theatricals and the authoritarianism of cosplay, but the more the White House insists on the exhibitions of war – the deployments of troops, the “ethical warriors” for the legal powers – the risks there are risks made us a blow for us towards a reality. ♦
