Trump and Hegseth Declare War on Americans

The cat's out of the bag, the USA is going to war with Americans

By André Costa | 30 September 2025

At Quantico today the Trump regime mask slipped a little more, because what was presented on that stage was a plain declaration that the United States itself is to be treated as a battlefield, that the enemy is not just somewhere across the ocean but right in the streets and neighborhoods of American cities. Trump did not mince his words, he told the generals “We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don’t wear uniforms,” and in saying it he redrew the line between civil authority and military power, a line that had stood for generations under the Posse Comitatus Act, a line meant to keep soldiers out of the daily lives of citizens, but which he casually erased with one sentence.

“San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re gonna straighten them out one by one … That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

- Donald Trump

The room full of uniforms knew exactly what was meant when Trump turned his sights towards US cities, in a speech that was littered with partisan politics, previously unheard of for the USA. Their Commander-in-Chief was placing the urban centers of his political opponents into the category of warzones, not metaphorically but literally, because he went on to insist that “Inner cities are a big part of war,” and even floated the idea that they could serve as training grounds for the armed forces, as though American neighborhoods were no different than the deserts of Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan.

The language was suffocating in its clarity, “I will never hesitate to protect our people from the horrible plague that is taking place from within,” he said, and in that phrasing the “plague” was not a virus, it was not a foreign threat, it was America itself, or at least the parts of America that refuse to bend the knee. Hegseth, for his part, played enforcer, telling the officers that if these words made their hearts sink they should resign, knowing full well that Trump was standing behind him promising that “there goes your rank, there goes your future” for anyone who dared to walk out. It was a loyalty test wrapped in the language of war, and it left no doubt about the direction this government intends to march.

This was not a speech about strategy abroad, it was a blueprint for war at home, a redefinition of dissent as treason and of cities as battlefields. It is one thing to hear talk of cutting regulations or tightening standards, quite another to watch a president and his defense secretary stand before the nation’s top brass and declare that the “enemy within” is their new assignment. Today at Quantico they declared war on Americans, and that will be remembered, whether or not the USA decides to remove Trump.