President Donald Trump on Tuesday proposed using American cities, including Chicago, as training grounds for the armed forces and spoke of needing U.S. military might to combat what he called the “invasion from within.”
Addressing an audience of military brass abruptly summoned to Virginia, Trump outlined a muscular and at times norm-shattering view of the military’s role in domestic affairs. He was joined by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who declared an end to “woke” culture and announced new directives for troops that include “gender-neutral” or “male-level” standards for physical fitness.
The dual messages underscored the Trump administration’s efforts not only to reshape contemporary Pentagon culture but to enlist military resources for the president’s priorities and decidedly domestic purposes, including quelling unrest and violent crime.
“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” Trump said. He noted at another point: “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”
“It seems that the [cities] that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one, and this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” Trump told the group. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within, but I want to salute every service member who has helped us carry out this critical mission. It’s really a very important mission, and 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. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor.”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker called the comments “insane” and said he’s “concerned for [Trump’s] health.”
“It appears that Donald Trump, not only has dementia set in, but he’s copying tactics of Vladimir Putin, sending troops into cities, thinking that that’s some sort of proving ground for war, or that indeed there’s some sort of internal war going on in the United States,” Pritzker said.
Trump’s address comes one day after Pritzker announced the Department of Homeland Security requested assistance from the Department of War in Illinois.
Speaking at a news conference, Pritzker said the Illinois National Guard learned the Department of Homeland Security sent a memo to the Department of War requesting 100 military personnel to be sent to Illinois for protecting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel and facilities during immigration enforcement efforts.
“What I have been warning of is now being realized,” Pritzker said at the briefing. “One thing is clear, none of what Trump is doing is making Illinois safer.”
The reported instruction was given after heavily armed Border Patrol agents were seen patrolling busy streets of downtown Chicago over the weekend and protests escalated outside a Broadview ICE processing center, where chemical agents were deployed during clashes between agents and demonstrators.
Pritzker, joined by lawmakers including Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, among others, criticized “the MAGA Republicans supported invasion” of Chicago, which he said, “is about creating a pretext to send armed military troops into our communities.”
Still, a number of questions remained Tuesday, including when military members would be sent to Chicago and whether a deployment would involve the National Guard.
Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement, “The Department of War has received a request for assistance to safeguard Federal personnel, property, and functions in the state of Illinois. Any decisions will be made in accordance with established processes and announced at the appropriate time.”
The National Guard hasn’t said whether a deployment has been ordered into Illinois.
If that happens, however, the governor said the state is prepared to begin a legal battle.
“What we can do when it comes to troops being sent into Chicago and to the state of Illinois is immediately go to court,” Pritzker said Tuesday. “We’re prepared to do that. Indeed, we’ve seen it in Oregon already. We’ve got to see those troops. They have not been called yet to the state of Illinois, to the city of Chicago. We’ve seen some memos. Nothing actually happened again. But believe me when I tell you that the law is on our side when it comes to keeping troops out of the city and out of the state.”
Trump has already tested the limits of a nearly 150-year-old federal law, the Posse Comitatus Act, that restricts the military’s role in enforcing domestic laws.
He has sent National Guard and active duty Marines to Los Angeles, threatened to do the same to combat crime and illegal immigration in other Democratic-led cities, including Portland, and surged troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.
National Guard members are generally exempt from the law since they are under state authority and controlled by governors.
But the law does apply to them when they’re “federalized” and put under the president’s control, as happened in Los Angeles over the Democratic governor’s objections.