The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 31 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
In a speech to military officials, President Trump offered some of his most explicitly fascist remarks yet. He said America is under invasion from within, that the generals in the room will be enlisted in a war against that enemy, and that U.S. cities should be used as military training grounds.
We think this is Trump’s most explicit declaration yet that he sees large swaths of America as themselves constituting a kind of enemy nation within our borders. That kind of talk has a long history on the right, but Trump and MAGA are supercharging this sort of politics in a way that appears new—or at least newly emboldened.
Ian Reifowitz, a history professor at SUNY Empire State University, is co-author of a new book called Riling Up the Base, which looks at how Trump trades on longtime right-wing political tropes and stereotypes to fuel MAGA’s politics of grievance and hate.
So we’re unraveling all this with him. Ian, thanks for coming on.
Ian Reifowitz: Thanks for having me, Greg. It’s a pleasure.
Sargent: So this speech was really something else. Let’s just start with the most clear-cut statement of Trump’s big idea, if you can call it that.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within. We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy. But more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform you can take them out. These people don’t have uniforms. But we are under invasion from within. We’re stopping it very quickly.
Sargent: So the key thing here is the deliberate and very conscious erasing of the distinction between foreign and domestic enemies. He’s telling military officials that this distinction is gone. Yet the idea that the military handles foreign threats while law enforcement handles domestic ones is supposed to be a deeply ingrained tradition. He’s consciously obliterating that. Ian, what’s your reaction to all this?
Reifowitz: Well, this is something that we’ve seen from Trump throughout the last number of years. If we think about what he said during the campaign last year, he spoke about treason quite openly and talked about political opponents or people in the Democratic Party—Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi. He talked about these people as evil, as traitors. He talked about Kamala Harris having blood on her hands. Specifically, when it comes to things like crime, he talked about Biden and Harris having willfully allowed murderers to come into the country, willfully enacted policies that made Americans less safe.
Well, that’s putting a target on those politicians’ backs and making them something very different from just a political opponent who happens to disagree on a policy. It’s placing them outside the bounds of America. So, yeah, they’re the enemy and they have to be destroyed in Trump’s own rhetoric.
Sargent: What do you make of the fact that he’s now explicitly telling this to a room full of military officials? He’s trying to create the sense that this is now official U.S. doctrine in some sense, or at least that this regime is adopting it as official U.S. doctrine. That seems like an alarming turn of events.
Reifowitz: I think it certainly is. And especially when you consider that this administration—and here it’s echoing some prior Republican administrations; I’m thinking of Bush, Cheney, but even beyond that—have really claimed absolute authority for the president over the military. Not only commander in chief, but having the authority to issue any order and have that order be legal simply because the president issues it. So all of this connects together.
We saw the other day, three days ago, on Truth Social, Trump made a post where he said, “At the request of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth”—of course, he doesn’t have the authority to change it to secretary of war from secretary of defense, but we’ll leave that aside. He’s authorizing Hegseth to “provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland,” of course the mayor of Portland says it’s not war-ravaged, “and any other ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing full force if necessary.”
Now, what does Trump mean by “full force”? I can only assume that full means maximum, and maximum means lethal. Now he says “if necessary,” and he’ll say, “Well look, I’m not telling the troops to go and shoot everybody they see,” but if they deem it necessary to use lethal force, then they have the authority to use it. Now, of course, that’s always true in that if American soldiers are threatened and their lives are threatened, then they have the authority to respond. But why would you emphasize that if not to raise the temperature, if not to express your—as president—your authority to unleash the military in a domestic setting in an American city, even though that violates the Posse Comitatus Act, which specifically bars the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. He just doesn’t seem to recognize that law because he doesn’t accept any limits on his authority. He sees his authority as absolute.
Sargent: Well, yes, I think he’s trying to create the impression that he’s ordered the military to kill Americans. I think he’s very, very explicitly trying to create that impression. Let’s listen to a bit more from Trump’s speech. First, here’s Trump talking about how he signed another executive order that’s supposed to be about crime and disorder on U.S. streets.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won’t get out of control.
Sargent: And here’s Trump talking about using U.S. cities as military training grounds.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): And then I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor, stupid governor, stupid.
Sargent: So the key thing here is that he’s telling the generals that this is going to be a big thing for them. He told the generals that they will now be part of a war from within, as he put it. He’s enlisting the generals in his war on Americans. What did you make of that?
Reifowitz: Well, one of the most important elements of any constitutional democracy, including our own, is that the military are not involved in politics. And I think what’s so dangerous here is that you’ve got a president who’s trying to get—at least the sense of, maybe he’s talking to people outside the room, trying to get ... them to see this impression, but he’s trying to give the American people the sense that the military is on his side. And the military is against, or at least will be used against, his opponents.
He divides the people of the country into two groups: Americans who are on his side and the enemy. And here it’s the enemy within. Well, “the enemy within” are fellow Americans. They’re fellow Americans, and he is trying to paint them outside that circle. And he did talk about Schiff and Pelosi as the enemy within. I believe he talked about them as worse than China, worse than Russia.
So we’re talking about a divisiveness that really is beyond anything that we’ve seen from any other president or even major presidential candidate.
Sargent: Well, I want to ask you about this long history. In your book, you talked about the fact that Trump has this long tradition of depicting cities, including his own, New York, as war zones and hellholes. Obviously, there’s a history of this on the right that goes back more than half a century. It feels to me like MAGA is a bit more oriented toward explicit depictions of blue America as an enemy nation, which I think you were just getting at. Can you talk about this sort of tension? In one way Trump is drawing on longtime tropes; in another way, he’s making them new. He’s supercharging them in a particularly MAGA way. MAGA is kind of a new thing in this regard, isn’t it?
Reifowitz: It’s a new thing, but it draws on something old. George Wallace is the person who comes to mind. And it’s so fascinating because George Wallace was a creature of the 1960s. And then America seemed to move in a different direction, but Trump is sort of frozen in amber. That’s the period that formed his worldview.
He is from the outer boroughs of New York. He’s from Queens. He grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, at a time where people living in white areas of Queens—let’s say, for example, or maybe the Bronx or other areas—saw Black people, maybe also Hispanic people, maybe Puerto Ricans or other New Yorkers from different Latin American countries, moving in. But I think the real fear was of Black people because there was bigotry around crime. And crime was rising, in general, certainly starting in the mid to late ’60s, peaking in the late ’80s, early ’90s.
And so you have this whole white flight thing, where people are leaving these outer boroughs, moving to the white suburbs where there were very few Black people. And Trump is a firsthand witness to all this. He grew up in a very wealthy area of Queens called Jamaica Estates, which is a few blocks—a 10-minute walk, 20-minute walk—from a very poor area called Jamaica. So he sort of feels this in his bones.
It’s almost like a zombie that came back to life, but he’s given it a new sheen. And also he has the social media savvy to make it alive and updated. Even if the message is old, it’s the method of delivery that’s new. It’s really something old, but in a very new package.
Sargent: I’m really glad you brought up Trump’s part of Queens. I actually spent some time in that part of Queens when I was younger, when I was a kid. It actually is an elite enclave. And this is something that’s lost on a lot of people who don’t know New York. Jamaica Estates was the place where lawyers, judges, lobbyists, people like that lived. There were mansions.
And as you say, it was really right down the block from some much rougher territory in Queens. And so when Trump kind of plays the outer-borough kid, or whatever, that whole shtick he does—and sometimes his supporters call him a Queens kid and an outer-borough guy and all that sort of shit—it really is sort of funny because he was actually quite a pampered young man, in this way.
You reminded me a little bit of something John Ganz wrote recently: that Trump’s brain broke in, like, 1989, when all this stuff came to a head, a lot of the racial politics came to a head. But thank you for bringing up the Jamaica Estates angle. It’s important. People don’t know it.
Reifowitz: I should tell you, I’m also a Queens kid. I was born in Hollis. I was born in sort of a more working-class, lower middle-class area. And Jamaica Estates was a 10-minute walk for me. And my family lived there for 50, 60 years. Jamaica Estates is sort of between where I grew up in Hollis and then Jamaica, which is a little further south.
So I know this area intimately, as well. Jamaica Estates looks like a leafy Westchester suburb. But it’s not far from the subway—five-minute, seven-minute walk from the subway. So Trump saw all of this. He also was in New York in the ’80s, in the mid-’70s, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The city was at its low point.
He got a lot of attention—political attention—for his racially charged, and I think that’s a euphemism, language around the Central Park jogger who was attacked. And then these five young men were accused and a confession was wrung out of them illegally, or a false confession was wrung out of them, and they eventually were exonerated. One of them now serves in, I believe, the New York City Council—Yusef Salaam, I believe is his name.
So Trump is intimately connected with crime, and his fears, real or not—and I think they’re probably real, and even more so because they’re from his own childhood—are something that he’s able to project out. He wants people to be scared of crime, and he wants people to be scared of Democrats. And so he talks about Democratic policies on race and housing as causing crime to come to your suburbs; your lovely— he doesn’t have to say “white,” but your lovely little suburbs.
And he wants to keep the bad people where they belong. I mean, it’s Wallace-era—if not segregation openly, certainly indirectly, that’s at the heart of these policies and this rhetoric.
Sargent: And you know, in the other direction from Jamaica Estates is a very, very middle-class, even slightly upper-middle-class part of Queens, which is filled with exactly the kinds of voters who could be appealed to with that kind of rhetoric, at least maybe some percentage of them. They kind of moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, I guess from 1964 to 1968 is basically the progression. And Trump was in the middle of that happening in New York as well, I think.
Reifowitz: Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, the suburbanization of the middle-class white population—and there are parts of Eastern Queens, I don’t want to get too geographically narrow, but they are basically suburbs. They feel like suburbs.
And it was about—the people sitting there, they were afraid, and they would use words, they would talk about a “deluge,” right? They were afraid of the people moving in. And the whole idea of redlining, and Trump’s own history of racial discrimination in housing, is all about keeping Black people out of white buildings, white neighborhoods, white streets.
So all of these things are connected in his worldview. And it comes from his childhood, but it informs his presidency.
Sargent: And now he’s talking about it right in front of the military elite of the country. I want to listen to how Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, a Democrat, responded to Trump’s threat to use cities as military training grounds.
Senator Ruben Gallego: Look, the president’s an idiot. He doesn’t actually understand how the military works. The first thing it’s going to be is that most U.S. citizens will stand against that in civil protests. And you’ll have many of us joining them in that if they try to do such a thing. Number two, the oath that our members of the military take, they will not be firing upon their own men and women, their own neighbors. Only, again, an idiot like Donald Trump would believe in such a thing. And, thirdly, we will do everything within our constitutional power to make sure we hold anybody accountable should they ever do something of that nature. And whether it’s now or when this president is gone, anybody that engages in that type of action against our civilian military will be held accountable one way or the other.
Sargent: It’s worth noting that Senator Gallego has actual combat experience, unlike Trump. I want to point out that there’s an argument for responding like Gallego does here with contempt and ridicule. Trump is clearly and visibly right here in mental and physical decline. He’s failing on many political fronts. And here he’s clearly trying to make himself appear strong. He’s going to unleash the military on us. But of course, at the same time, the authoritarian threat is deadly serious. It’s absolutely real. It seems like the key here is getting this balance right. But I do think mockery has to be a part of the equation. What do you think?
Reifowitz: I do think Senator Gallego does a really good job of balancing a number of things. One, he pushes back using mockery. He pushes back against Trump’s projection of strength. Two, Gallego does that—he resists Trump, but he doesn’t do it in a way that would allow him to be painted as too far-left, right? Because that’s a tricky thing for Democrats. Can you be anti-Trump without being outside the mainstream, in terms of far-left?
Because Gallego is very clear: Anybody who attacks a member of the military or a member of law enforcement is outside the pale. He doesn’t accept that. So he’s making some clear boundaries. He rejects the extreme on the left but is as strong as anybody else—whether left or center—on pushing back against Trump. He strikes a very important balance.
Look, Democrats have to really walk a tightrope here if they’re going to be successful against Trump. He is a skilled communicator, even if he is a poor communicator by maybe traditional presidential standards, because he knows how to move people. I mean, not to tout the name of the book, but it’s called Riling Up the Base. He knows how to rile up his base. And his base—even though it’s maybe about a third of the country—it was enough to propel him to the leadership of the Republican Party, and then to eke out a couple of presidential wins and give him what he has now, which is the position as the most powerful person in the world and, clearly, I think, the dominant political figure of the last 10 years, for better or worse.
Sargent: Maybe the through line here is that in situations where Trump is really politically weak, he falls back on that riling of the base. We had a new poll from The New York Times that found 51 percent oppose the deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. Only 41 percent support it. Those are pretty striking numbers. We’ve seen other polls that are even worse for Trump.
I think Stephen Miller is whispering in Trump’s ear that fascism is popular, but it isn’t. So where are we on all this? Where does this go? Is this just the doddering old fool trying to appear strong, or is it the genuine article?
Reifowitz: I think there are limits to what he can do. But what he might be trying to do is provoke an incident that would then extend those limits. There’s only so much he can do when there’s not actually things burning down. The idea that Portland or D.C. is a war zone is absurd, and he looks foolish for saying it.
But if he can provoke something like we saw in the summer of 2020—when yes, they were relatively isolated, but there were incidents of rioting, incidents of violence, there was some blood in the streets—I think he’s almost, I shouldn’t say hoping, but thinking that maybe if there’s a rerun of that, then he can respond in a different way.
And I don’t know, and I don’t claim to read his mind. And I hope that’s not the case. But I do think he recognizes that crime and disorder are winning issues for him. And so whatever he can do to keep that in the front of people’s minds means that they won’t be thinking as much about the fact that he hasn’t brought down inflation, or that his tariffs are not going to succeed—at least not likely to succeed—in bringing back American manufacturing jobs.
And so crime is what animates him. It’s what he’s gone to since he came into the presidential race, whether it’s about undocumented immigrants and his largely false claims about them increasing crime, or whether it’s more traditional big-city crime. This is his go-to, and it always has been.
Sargent: I think the essential point there is that speeches like this are really, at least in part, about inciting, about getting the violent response from protesters on the ground that he hopes for in order to expand his crackdown. Folks, make sure to check out Ian’s new book. It’s called Riling Up the Base. Ian, thanks so much for coming on, man. We really appreciate it. It was nice to talk about Queens a little bit.
Reifowitz: Absolutely, Greg. It was really nice of you to have me on. Thanks.