Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“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.” — 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.” — President Donald Trump
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.
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.
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.
Having strayed from the Constitution, Hegseth and Trump are a lesson in how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Yet 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.
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.
Welcome to Battlefield America.
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.
Monday 29 September 2025, by Dan La Botz
President Donald Trump, breaking with U.S. norms, is using the Justice Department to pursue his political enemies, going after liberal and progressive foundations and NGOs, and sending more troops to another American city to intimidate protestors. He has fired Justice Department attorneys who are unwilling to put his orders above the law and replaced them with flunkeys who will carry out his demands. He has promised “retribution” to his high-level political opponents and is now meting it out. And he is also targeting the political left, saying he will designate Antifa, that is the anti-fascist movement as a domestic terrorist organization, though there is no antifa organization and no legal designation for domestic terrorism. To carry out his campaign against Antifa he is sending troops to Portland, Oregon.
Trump’s number one enemy is James B. Comey, former head of the FBI appointed by former president Barack Obama, who had been in charge of investigations of candidate Trump’s campaign and possible coordination with Russian interference in the U.S. election. Comey’s investigation did not find evidence of Trump colluding with Russia, but left his possible obstruction of justice an open question. Trump fired Comey in 2017, but has been out to get him ever since. When a U.S. Justice Department attorney said he couldn’t find a legal basis to charge Comey, Trump fired him and replaced him with one of his personal attorneys who had been on the White House staff, and just days before the statute of limitations ran out, she indicated Comey for making a false statement to Congress, and obstructing a congressional proceeding, with a possible sentence of ten years in prison. Comey says he is innocent and welcomes a trial.
The Justice Department is also going after George Soros, a billionaire donor to the Democratic Party who also funds the Open Society Foundations (OSF). Trump for some time has demanded that Soros be thrown in jail. An internal memo says that Soros may be charged with crimes ranging from arson to material support for terrorism. The OSF, to which Soros has given billions, was originally founded to help Soviet Eastern Bloc countries achieve a democratic and capitalist society. But it also gives millions to civil rights and social justice NGOs in the United States, such as the Organization for Black Struggle. The rightwing Conservative Research Center accuses OSF of funding Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group that Israel designated as a front for a terrorist organization in 2022. OSF and other human rights organizations dismissed Israel’s claim as an attempt to silence critics. There has not yet been an indictment of Soros.
Trump is also going after leftwing activists who are protesting against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on immigrant communities and workplaces. In Portland, Oregon, a couple of dozen protestors show up regularly at an ICE facility to protest day and night, but after midnight federal agents come out of the building to confront protestors, resulting in skirmishes, but no serious violence. But now Trump is sending in the National Guard, as he has already done in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., now supposedly to stop Antifa.
But both Democratic Party Governor Tina Kotek and Mayor Keith Wilson say “there is no rebellion,” which is the only legal justification for sending in the guard. Kotek said, “There is no national security threat in Portland. Our communities are safe and calm.” Adding that “any deployment would be an abuse of power.” Portland is known for its militant demonstrations and now there will surely be more protests against ICE and Trump.
The fight for democracy in America is on.
28 September 2025
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Dan La Botz was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He is the author of Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (1991). He is also a co-editor of New Politics and editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis.
International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
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