Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We think this is Trump’s most explicit declaration yet that he sees large swaths of America as themselves constituting a kind of enemy nation within our borders. That kind of talk has a long history on the right, but Trump and MAGA are supercharging this sort of politics in a way that appears new—or at least newly emboldened.
So we’re unraveling all this with him. Ian, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: So this speech was really something else. Let’s just start with the most clear cut statement of Trump’s big idea, if you can call it that.
Sargent: So the key thing here is the deliberate and very conscious erasing of the distinction between foreign and domestic enemies. He’s telling military officials that this distinction is gone. Yet the idea that the military handles foreign threats while law enforcement handles domestic ones is supposed to be a deeply ingrained tradition. He’s consciously obliterating that. Ian, what’s your reaction to all this?
Well, that’s putting a target on those politicians’ backs and making them something very different from just a political opponent who happens to disagree on a policy. It’s placing them outside the bounds of America. So, yeah, they’re the enemy and they have to be destroyed in Trump’s own rhetoric.
Reifowitz: I think it certainly is. And especially when you consider that this administration — and here it’s echoing some prior Republican administrations, I’m thinking of Bush, Cheney, but even beyond that — have really claimed absolute authority for the president over the military, right? Not only commander in chief, having the authority to issue any order and have that order be legal simply because the president issues it. So all of this connects together.
Now, what does Trump mean by “full force”? I can only assume that full means maximum, and maximum means lethal. Now he says “if necessary,” and he’ll say, “well look, I’m not telling the troops to go and shoot everybody they see,” but if they deem it necessary to use lethal force, then they have the authority to use it. Now, of course, that’s always true in that if American soldiers are threatened and their lives are threatened, then they have the authority to respond. But why would you emphasize that if not to raise the temperature, if not to express your — as president — your authority to unleash the military in a domestic setting in an American city, even though that violates the Posse Comitatus Act, which specifically bars the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. He just doesn’t seem to recognize that law because he doesn’t accept any limits on his authority. He sees his authority as absolute.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because its the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won’t get out of control.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): And then I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city. with an incompetent governor, stupid governor, stupid.
Reifowitz: Well, one of the most important elements of any constitutional democracy, including our own, is that the military are not involved in politics. And I think what’s so dangerous here is that you’ve got a president who’s trying to get — at least the sense of, maybe these talking people outside the room, trying to get their sense, you know, them to see this impression — but he’s trying to give the American people the sense that the military is on his side. And the military is against, or at least will be used against, his opponents.
So we’re talking about a divisiveness that really is beyond anything that we’ve seen from any other president or even major presidential candidate.
Reifowitz: Yeah, it’s a new thing, but it draws on something old. I mean, you know, George Wallace is the person who comes to mind. And it’s so fascinating because George Wallace was a creature of the 1960s. And then America seemed to move in a different direction, but Trump is sort of frozen in amber. That’s the period that formed his worldview.
And so you have this whole white flight thing, where people are leaving these outer boroughs, moving to the white suburbs where there were very few Black people. And Trump is a first-hand witness to all this. He grew up in a very wealthy area of Queens called Jamaica Estates, which is a few blocks — a 10-minute walk, 20-minute walk — from a very poor area called Jamaica. So he sort of feels this in his bones.
Sargent: Well, you know, I’m really glad you brought up Trump’s part of Queens. I actually spent some time in that part of Queens when I was younger, when I was a kid. It actually is an elite enclave. And this is something that’s lost on a lot of people who don’t know New York. Jamaica Estates was the place where lawyers, judges, lobbyists, people like that lived. They were mansions.
You reminded me a little bit of something John Gans wrote recently — that Trump’s brain broke in, like, 1989, when all this stuff came to a head, a lot of the racial politics came to a head. But thank you for bringing up the Jamaica Estates angle. It’s important. People don’t know it.
So I know this area intimately as well. Jamaica Estates looks like a leafy Westchester suburb. But it’s not far from the subway — five minutes, seven-minute walk from the subway. So Trump saw all of this. He also was in New York in the ’80s, in the mid-’70s, Ford to City, “drop dead,” right? The city was at its low point.
So Trump is intimately connected with crime and his fears, real or not — and I think they’re probably real and even more so because they’re from his own childhood — are something that he’s able to project out, right? He wants people to be scared of crime and he wants people to be scared of Democrats. And so he talks about Democratic policies on race and housing as causing crime to come to your suburbs — your lovely, you know, he doesn’t have to say “white,” but your lovely little suburbs.
Sargent: And you know, in the other direction from Jamaica Estates is a very, very middle class, even slightly upper middle class part of Queens, which is filled with exactly the kinds of voters who could be appealed to with that kind of rhetoric, at least maybe some percentage of them. They kind of moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. I guess from 1964 to 1968 is basically the progression. And Trump was in the middle of that happening in New York as well, I think.
And it was about the people sitting there. They were afraid, and they would use words, they would talk about a deluge, right? They were afraid of the people moving in. And, the whole idea of redlining and Trump’s own history of racial discrimination in housing is all about keeping Black people out of white buildings, white neighborhoods, white streets.
Sargent: And now he’s talking about it right in front of the military elite of the country. I want to listen to how Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, a Democrat, responded to Trump’s threat to use cities as military training grounds.
Sargent: It’s worth noting that Senator Gallego has actual combat experience, unlike Trump. I want to point out that there’s an argument for responding like Gallego does here with contempt and ridicule. Trump is clearly and visibly right here in mental and physical decline. He’s failing on many political fronts. And here he’s clearly trying to make himself appear strong. You know, he’s going to unleash the military on us. But of course, at the same time, the authoritarian threat is deadly serious. It’s absolutely real. It seems like the key here is getting this balance right. But I do think mockery has to be a part of the equation. What do you think?
Because Gallego is very clear: anybody who attacks a member of the military or a member of law enforcement is outside the pale. He doesn’t accept that. So he’s making some clear boundaries. He rejects the extreme on the left but is as strong as anybody else — whether left or center — on pushing back against Trump. He strikes a very important balance.
Sargent: Maybe the through line here is that in situations where Trump is really politically weak, he falls back on that rallying of the base. We had a new poll from The New York Times that found 51% oppose the deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. Only 41% support it. Those are pretty striking numbers. We’ve seen other polls that are even worse for Trump.
Reifowitz: I think there are limits to what he can do. But what he might be trying to do is provoke an incident that would then extend those limits. There’s only so much he can do when there’s not actually things burning down. The idea that Portland or D.C. is a war zone is absurd, and he looks foolish for saying it.
And I don’t know, and I don’t claim to read his mind. And I hope that’s not the case. But I do think he recognizes that crime and disorder are winning issues for him. And so whatever he can do to keep that in the front of people’s minds means that they won’t be thinking as much about the fact that he hasn’t brought down inflation, or that his tariffs are not going to succeed—at least not likely to succeed—in bringing back American manufacturing jobs.
Sargent: I think the essential point there is that speeches like this are really, at least in part, about inciting, about getting the violent response from protesters on the ground that he hopes for in order to expand his crackdown. Folks, make sure to check out Ian’s new book. It’s called Riling Up the Base. Ian, thanks so much for coming on, man. We really appreciate it. It was nice to talk about Queens a little bit.
Reifowitz: Absolutely, Greg. It was really nice of you to have me on. Thanks.
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