Distractions abound. Donโt 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, โwe the peopleโ are now the enemy from within.
Over the course of just one week, weโve 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 administrationโs unabashed embrace of graft and grift.
In the midst of it all, Pete Hegseth, the newly styled Secretary of War, compelledย a sudden gathering of the top military brassย 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 โwarrior ethos,โ the Trump administration isย celebratingย 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 Stateโwhich has consolidated its powers under Trumpโviews the role of the military, our constitutional government, and the American people.
It is a shift we cannot afford to ignore.
The name change alone is significant.
After World War II, โWarโ was deliberately retired from the departmentโs name to emphasize restraint in the wake of global conflicts that cost humanity dearly in terms of lives, fortunes and peace. That nominal bulwark has now been discarded. And with it, the very idea that Americaโs military exists for defense rather than conquest.
Reviving the Department of War signals to the bureaucracy, the brass, and the public that aggressionโnot defenseโis 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 โlethalityโ; 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.
Trumpโs reckless call to use โdangerous citiesโ as military training grounds doesnโt just echo this dystopiaโit completes the circle.
Under the banner of โwar,โ 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 plansโbuilding ballrooms, hiring thugs with extravagant bonuses for arrests and roundups, erecting detention centersโis now attempting to bribe the military with over $1 trillion in spending in 2026 if only they will march to a dictatorโs drum.
But this is precisely the scenario the Founders sought to guard against. They understood that โthe means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.โ
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.
A standing armyโsomething that propelled the early colonists into revolutionโstrips the American people of any vestige of freedom. How can there be liberty when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones overhead?
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 hasnโt sunk in with Trump, who seems to relish ruling with brute force and using the military to kill with impunity.
Just listen to himย brag about bombing Venezuelan fishing boats and killing the occupants without any attempt at due process: he sounds like every power-hungry madman who aspires to become a dictator.
And then thereโs Hegseth, whoโdespite professingย devotionย to Jesus, the prince of peaceโhas dismissed pacifism as โnaive and dangerous,โ insisting: โFrom this moment forward, the only missionโฆ is warfighting, preparing for war and preparing to win.โ
But in declaring war as the mission, Hegseth and Trump reveal exactly how far they have strayed from the Constitution.
They are a lesson in how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutelyโexactly the danger that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general in World War II, warned against:
โIn the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by theย military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.โ
Eisenhowerโs words were prophetic, because the rise of misplaced power did not begin with Trump. Trump and his administration didnโt create this quagmire from nothingโthe present police state and its tools of terror have been in the works for a long time.
Back in 2008, theย U.S. Army War Collegeย issued a report urging the military to be prepared to put down civil unrest within the country.
Summarizing the report, journalist Chris Hedges wrote, โThe military must be prepared, the document warned, for a โviolent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,โ which could be provoked by โunforeseen economic collapse,โ โpurposeful domestic resistance,โ โpervasive public health emergenciesโ or โloss of functioning political and legal order.โ The โwidespread civil violence,โ the document said, โwould force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.โโ
In 2009, DHS reports labelledย right-wing and left-wing activists and military veteransย 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, Trumpโs new national security directive, whichย equates anyone with โanti-Christianโ or โanti-capitalismโ or โanti-Americanโ views as domestic terrorists.
Add to this: โMegacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,โ aย 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 theyโre really talking about is martial law, packaged as concern for the national security.
The chilling five-minuteย training videoย paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by โcriminal networks,โ โsubstandard infrastructure,โ โreligious and ethnic tensions,โ โimpoverishment, slums,โ โopen landfills, over-burdened sewers,โ a โgrowing mass of unemployed,โ and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.
At three-and-a-half minutes in, the narrator speaks of a need to โdrain the swamps.โ
That phrase should sound chillingly familiar.
Trumpโs supporters know it as aย rallying cry against corruption in Washington. But in the Pentagonโs scenario, โdrain the swampsโ meansย clearing urban centers of โnoncombatantsโย and engaging adversaries in high-intensity conflict.
But hereโs the catch: in the Pentagonโs lexicon, those โnoncombatantsโ are not foreign armies at all. Who are they?
They are, according to the Pentagon, โadversaries.โ They are โthreats.โ They are the โenemy.โ
They are civilians. Protesters. The unemployed. The poor. Dissidents. In short: us.
Welcome to Battlefield America.
In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal eliteโthe havesโfrom the have-nots.
We are the have-nots. And once you see that division clearly, the rest falls into place.
Suddenly it all begins to make sense: the surveillance systems, the civil unrest drills, fusion centers, the databases of dissidents. The extremism reports, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military.
Meanwhile, theย government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons across government agenciesโand equipping them for war against their own citizens. In fact, there are now at leastย 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weaponsย who possess the power to arrest.
Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to build Big Brother into every device we own. Cars, phones, smart homes, loyalty cards, streaming servicesโthey all track us.
All of this has taken place in broad daylight, funded with our dollars.
Itโs astounding how convenient weโve made it for the government to lock down the nation.
So, what exactly is the government preparing for?
By โgovernment,โ I donโt mean the two-party bureaucracy of Republicans and Democrats. I mean Government with a capital โGโ: the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
This is the hidden face of power: corporatized, militarized, and contemptuous of freedom. And it is not waiting for some distant tomorrow.
The future is here.
By waging endless wars abroad, bringing the instruments of war home, turning police into soldiers, criminalizing dissent, and making peaceful revolution nearly impossible, the government has engineered an environment where domestic violence becomes inevitable.
Be warned: in the future envisioned by the military, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, โwe the peopleโ will be enemies of the state.
As I make clear in my bookย Battlefield America: The War on the American Peopleย and in its fictional counterpartย The Erik Blair Diaries, weโre 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 explainโuntil Trumpโwas that the domestic terrorists would be of the governmentโs own choosing.
โWe the peopleโ have become enemy #1.
This article was originally published atย The Rutherford Institute.
- Battlefield America: The Federal War on the “Enemy Within” - October 1, 2025
- How Tyranny Becomes Entrenched: 9/11 and the Police State’s Endless Power Grabs - September 11, 2025
- The Real National Emergency - June 23, 2025