Battlefield America: Trump’s War on the Enemy Within—the American People

“The era of the Department of Defense is over… From this moment forward, the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: warfighting… We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country… You kill people and break things for a living.”
Pete Hegseth

“America is under invasion from within… That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within… We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military… it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”
President Donald Trump in remarks to more than 800 of the country’s top military leaders

Distractions abound. Don’t be distracted.

The American police state under Donald Trump has mastered the art of delivering endless diversions, constant uproar, and wall-to-wall chaos designed to prevent us from focusing on any single issue for long.

This is how psyops work: keep the populace reactive, confused, fearful and pliant while power consolidates.

According to the Trump administration, “we the people” are now the enemy from within.

Over the course of just one week, we’ve been bombarded with headlines about government shutdowns, a presidential directive aimed at blacklisting dissent, threats by Trump to deploy the National Guard into states he considers political opponents, the politicization of the military, tariffs that inflict economic pain on American consumers, and the administration’s unabashed embrace of graft and grift.

In the midst of it all, Pete Hegseth, the newly styled Secretary of War, compelled a sudden gathering of the top military brass for a costly $6 million exercise that amounted to little more than chest-thumping, propaganda and grandstanding.

With Hegseth at the helm of the renamed Department of War, calling for a new “warrior ethos,” the Trump administration is celebrating aggression and blind obedience over peacekeeping, honor and constitutional duty.

Both the rebranding of the War Department and the warrior-ethos pep rally signaled a profound shift in how the Deep State—which has consolidated its powers under Trump—views the role of the military, our constitutional government, and the American people.

It is a shift we cannot afford to ignore.

The name change alone is significant.

After World War II, “War” was deliberately retired from the department’s name to emphasize restraint in the wake of global conflicts that cost humanity dearly in terms of lives, fortunes and peace. That nominal bulwark has now been discarded. And with it, the very idea that America’s military exists for defense rather than conquest.

Reviving the Department of War signals to the bureaucracy, the brass, and the public that aggression—not defense—is the organizing principle.

The Pentagon has been rechristened not as a fortress against foreign threats but as a machine for waging endless war here at home: Democratic cities will become military staging grounds; rules of engagement will be loosened to maximize “lethality”; and militarized police will be given a license to kill their fellow Americans.

This is not the language of defense. It is the language of aggression and occupation.

A standing army on domestic soil was precisely what the Founders feared. They lived under troops quartered in their towns. They knew what happens when government treats its own citizens as a hostile force.

Two centuries later, their fear has become our reality.

For years, federal and state agencies have blurred the line between soldiers and police. Armored vehicles on neighborhood streets. Combat training in American towns. Laws allowing indefinite detention of citizens without trial.

Methodically, a war culture has been transplanted from the battlefield abroad to the homeland.

With armored tanks on our streets, SWAT raids treated as routine, and citizens viewed as combatants rather than neighbors with rights, the results are predictable: abuse, eroded liberties, and the slow death of a constitutional republic.

This is the future we warned was coming: every city a potential conflict zone, every protest a pretext for deployment, every citizen a suspect.

Trump’s reckless call to use “dangerous cities” as military training grounds doesn’t just echo this dystopia—it completes the circle.

Under the banner of “war,” the government is giving itself license to treat the American people as the enemy.

And Trump, buoyed by the power of the presidency and his ability to use taxpayer dollars for his own grandiose plans—building ballrooms, hiring thugs with extravagant bonuses for arrests and roundups, erecting detention centers—is now attempting to bribe the military with over $1 trillion in spending in 2026 if only they will march to a dictator’s drum.

But this is precisely the scenario the Founders sought to guard against. They understood that “the means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

Their warning is clear to everyone but the die-hard devotees of the American police state: a standing army puts the American people squarely in the crosshairs of a tyrannous regime.

A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the American people of any vestige of freedom. How can there be liberty when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones overhead?

It was for this reason the Founders vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military regime ruled by force.

They opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

That basic civics lesson hasn’t sunk in with Trump, who seems to relish ruling with brute force and using the military to kill with impunity.

Just listen to him brag about bombing Venezuelan fishing boats and killing the occupants without any attempt at due process: he sounds like every power-hungry madman who aspires to become a dictator.

And then there’s Hegseth, who—despite professing devotion to Jesus, the prince of peace—has dismissed pacifism as “naive and dangerous,” insisting: “From this moment forward, the only mission… is warfighting, preparing for war and preparing to win.”

But in declaring war as the mission, Hegseth and Trump reveal exactly how far they have strayed from the Constitution.

They are a lesson in how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely—exactly the danger that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general in World War II, warned against:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Eisenhower’s words were prophetic, because the rise of misplaced power did not begin with Trump. Trump and his administration didn’t create this quagmire from nothing—the present police state and its tools of terror have been in the works for a long time.

Back in 2008, the U.S. Army War College issued a report urging the military to be prepared to put down civil unrest within the country.

Summarizing the report, journalist Chris Hedges wrote, “The military must be prepared, the document warned, for a ‘violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,’ which could be provoked by ‘unforeseen economic collapse,’ ‘purposeful domestic resistance,’ ‘pervasive public health emergencies’ or ‘loss of functioning political and legal order.’ The ‘widespread civil violence,’ the document said, ‘would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.’”

In 2009, DHS reports labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists, calling on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance.

Fast forward to the present day, and you have NSPM-7, Trump’s new national security directive, which equates anyone with “anti-Christian” or “anti-capitalism” or “anti-American” views as domestic terrorists.

Add to this: “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, which envisions using armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.

What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as concern for the national security.

The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

At three-and-a-half minutes in, the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

That phrase should sound chillingly familiar.

Trump’s supporters know it as a rallying cry against corruption in Washington. But in the Pentagon’s scenario, “drain the swamps” means clearing urban centers of “noncombatants” and engaging adversaries in high-intensity conflict.

But here’s the catch: in the Pentagon’s lexicon, those “noncombatants” are not foreign armies at all. Who are they?

They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.” They are “threats.” They are the “enemy.”

They are civilians. Protesters. The unemployed. The poor. Dissidents. In short: us.

Welcome to Battlefield America.

In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.

We are the have-nots. And once you see that division clearly, the rest falls into place.

Suddenly it all begins to make sense: the surveillance systems, the civil unrest drills, fusion centers, the databases of dissidents. The extremism reports, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military.

Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons across government agencies—and equipping them for war against their own citizens. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to build Big Brother into every device we own. Cars, phones, smart homes, loyalty cards, streaming services—they all track us.

All of this has taken place in broad daylight, funded with our dollars.

It’s astounding how convenient we’ve made it for the government to lock down the nation.

So, what exactly is the government preparing for?

By “government,” I don’t mean the two-party bureaucracy of Republicans and Democrats. I mean Government with a capital “G”: the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of power: corporatized, militarized, and contemptuous of freedom. And it is not waiting for some distant tomorrow.

The future is here.

By waging endless wars abroad, bringing the instruments of war home, turning police into soldiers, criminalizing dissent, and making peaceful revolution nearly impossible, the government has engineered an environment where domestic violence becomes inevitable.

Be warned: in the future envisioned by the military, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will be enemies of the state.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re already enemies of the state.

For years, the government has warned of domestic terrorism, erected surveillance, and trained law enforcement to equate anti-government views (that is, exercising your constitutional rights) with extremism. Now that groundwork has paid off.

What the government failed to explain—until Trump—was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own choosing.

“We the people” have become enemy #1.

Originally posted via The Rutherford Institute

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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