“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.
Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.
