What Does Donald Trump’s “War from Within” Mean in Practice?
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
The Washington Roundtable discusses the President’s use of the military for political ends, and the “almost unlimited” powers he would unlock by invoking the Insurrection Act, with Kori Schake, the director of foreign-and-defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Donald Trump’s decisions—sending the National Guard into American cities over the objections of local leaders and firing Judge Advocate General’s Corps lawyers who help determine if an order is legal—send a message to the historically apolitical armed forces. “What he’s trying to do is circumvent the disciplined senior leadership and appeal for personal loyalty to the younger, noncommissioned and enlisted soldiers,” Schake says. “The pressure from this Administration—there’s been nothing like it since at least the constitutional crisis of 1866-68.” Schake is the author of the forthcoming book “The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States.”
This week’s reading:
- “Trump, the Self-Styled ‘President of PEACE’ Abroad, Makes War at Home,” by Susan B. Glasser
- “Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the ‘War from Within,’ ” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
- “Nixon Now Looks Restrained,” by Ruth Marcus
- “Hope and Grief in Israel After the Gaza Ceasefire Deal,” by Ruth Margalit
- “The Volunteers Tracking ICE in Los Angeles,” by Oren Peleg
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| 0:00.0 | I was in West Virginia the other day, and I was at a bookstore, and let's just say the stacks of Joe Manchin's new biography looked, shall we say, undersold. It was not exactly moving. Wood chip material. It's coming to a remainder table near you. |
| 0:18.7 | Okay. Well, listen, no author, though, we have to admit. |
| 0:21.7 | No author can make fun of potential woodchipping materials because we're just asking to be on the remainder sale table along with them with those special stickers that says signed by author, making it even more humiliating. |
| 0:36.6 | I have to say, I thought one of the benefits was that we didn't even have to talk about Joe |
| 0:41.6 | Manchin anymore because he did manage to hide an awful lot of our brain space for the previous |
| 0:46.9 | few years. |
| 0:47.8 | I'm not sure to what end. |
| 0:49.0 | I just wanted to bring us back to a quiet or simpler time, which is said, you know, a year ago. |
| 0:56.8 | Welcome to the political scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big |
| 1:00.7 | questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glasser and I'm joined by my colleagues Jane |
| 1:05.0 | Mayor and Evan Osnos. Hey, Jane. Hi, guys. Hey, Evan. Good morning, guys. All right. Well, great to be with you. Once again, I feeling an emergency need to convene this group every single day. |
| 1:24.1 | So much is happening. But I'm so glad we're taking on this important topic today, |
| 1:29.1 | and that is one of the most striking and alarming features, I think, of Trump's second term, |
| 1:35.8 | and that is the militarization of American politics. |
| 1:40.2 | In just the past few months, in just the past few days, |
| 1:48.6 | President Trump has deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C. |
| 1:54.6 | He's announced that he's sending troops to, quote, war-ravaged Portland and Chicago. He's even called for the imprisonment of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. And this is in a context in |
| 2:03.7 | which just last week, I know it feels like a year, but it was just last week, that Donald Trump, |
| 2:09.1 | speaking to hundreds of generals and admirals at Quantico, declared it's a war from within. |
| 2:20.1 | We should use some of these dangerous cities, |
| 2:26.9 | and he means American cities, as training grounds for our military. Donald Trump, in his second term, has reoriented the Pentagon around this new idea of national security, one that frames |
| 2:33.5 | our greatest threats, not as coming from |
... |
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