“It’s nice to start Update with some good news for once: There’s peace in the Middle East,” Colin Jost cracked on “Saturday Night Live.” “The only downside is, there’s war in Chicago.”
A laugh line, but also a telling truth. Those two words, peace and war, reflect two different sides of Donald Trump. Two different political strategies in two different forums. Two different views of the world.
Trump sees himself as the world’s best dealmaker, and openly yearns for the highest honor a dealmaker can receive: the Nobel Peace Prize. (After all, there’s no Nobel War Prize.) And even his Democratic rivals must admit that his brief but triumphal visit to the Middle East celebrated a singular achievement: a ceasefire after two years of brutal warfare.
The president received a standing ovation in Israel’s parliament, with many lawmakers donning red hats emblazoned with the words “TRUMP THE PEACE PRESIDENT.” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi told Trump that he was “the only one capable of bringing peace to our region.”
But back home, the word “peace” is practically banned, while “war” is everywhere. Trump has changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. And while the highest goal of any military should be to prevent wars, not provoke them, Secretary Pete Hegseth keeps extolling his troops as “warfighters” rather than “peacekeepers.”
In fact, Trump keeps saying that a main mission of those “warfighters” is to repress civilians, not repel invaders. Speaking to a gathering of military officers at a Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, the president argued that “San Francisco, Chicago, New York (and) Los Angeles” were “very unsafe places, and we’re gonna straighten them out, one by one. …
“That’s a war, too,” he continued. “It’s a war from within.”
“We’re directly confronting the sinister threat of left-wing domestic terrorism or violence,” Trump told his Cabinet during a recent meeting. He’s even suggested that the military use the “war from within” in America’s cities to train its “warfighters.”
On the world stage, Trump basks in the praise of foreign leaders like el-Sisi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called him the “greatest friend that the state of Israel has ever had in the White House.” In those moments, he is the president of the whole country — a national leader, not just a partisan or factional chieftain.
Back home, exactly the opposite is true. He is not a unifying figure, but openly and proudly the president of Red America — at war with the “others,” with the enemy “within.” That’s how he campaigned, and that’s how he governs: constantly demonizing his foes in ways that galvanize his core base of support and justify increasingly ruthless methods of repression, including the deployment of armed National Guard troops.
“Trump deploys tactics and language of war against perceived domestic threats,” reads a Washington Post headline. That approach “represents a dramatic shift in the use of the military, which has been focused for most of American history on threats from abroad.”
This is dramatic and dangerous, warns Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. “It’s a military language used by the government against its own people at a time, in fact, of relative tranquility,” he told the Post. “That’s really damaging, and it’s really rare.”
Trump has even mused about invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 — a law meant to repress rebellions bordering on civil war — to justify the use of federal troops against domestic foes.
“It’s an extremely dangerous slope, because it essentially says the president can just do about whatever he chooses,” Randy Manner, a retired Army major general and National Guard leader told Reuters. “It’s absolutely, absolutely the definition of dictatorship and fascism.”
The most telling rebuke of Trump’s homefront “war” came from a federal judge he appointed during his first term: Karin Immergut. In rejecting the president’s attempt to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, Immergut wrote that Trump’s description of Portland as a war-ravaged city was “was simply untethered to the facts.”
“This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” Immergut wrote. “This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law.”
Trump does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for his foreign achievements if he declares war on his own citizens here at home.
Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.
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