America After Trump's 'Enemies Within' Speech
Trump and his MAGA revolutionaries eye their next target: the U.S. military.
MAGA is a revolutionary movement, which is an alien concept to many Americans and to the many reporters covering the Trump administration as just another routine shift in political power.
Revolutions are different. Revolutionaries target all key institutions of influence and turn them into levers of power to advance their cause. The MAGA revolutionaries have been doing this in three clear stages: purge, replace, and attack.
First, they purge the old guard from the targeted institution.
Next, they replace them with ideological enforcers whose main qualification is loyalty to the revolution—in this case, loyalty to Trump personally.
Finally, they transform the newly cleansed entities into weapons for Trump to use to attack his opponents or fulfill other goals of the revolution.
Purging and replacing have been the main actions of the first nine months of Trump’s second term. From the Kennedy Center to the Department of Justice, the project of 2025 has been a blitzkrieg-like assault to MAGA-ify every federal institution.
They have had plenty of help. Where there is potential ambiguity in the law about whether Trump has direct Article II control, the Supreme Court, usually through silent shadow-docket enforcement, has acted as Trump’s revolutionary handmaiden, swatting away pesky constitutional concerns from lower court judges and their 100-page opinions. Meanwhile, Congress, already under Trump’s control, cheers on from the sidelines.
Institutions that Trump doesn’t directly control are attacked indirectly. He threatens to destroy or boost specific corporations or entire sectors of the economy with tariffs that he personally sets. He stifles critical coverage at what were once the crown jewels of American media with lawsuits and threats from the federal government’s alphabet soup of regulatory agencies, such as the FCC and FTC. He uses federal government spending to modify the behavior of universities and other recipients. He attacks individual Americans and large law firms with executive orders.
Not all of this is new. Presidents have rescued or damaged favored and unfavored industries with economic policy. Media companies housed inside giant corporations have previously had to navigate sticky regulatory issues that raise press freedom questions. There have always been strings attached to federal money.
But what is new today is that these powers—and many others not cataloged here—were never exercised all at once and maximally. That’s one key difference between the right-wing MAGA revolution and the traditional political parties that have traded control of the White House in recent decades. The MAGA revolutionaries are willing—and are actually defined by that willingness—to use all state power to enforce revolutionary doctrine and cripple political opponents.
America is a big country with lots of institutions on MAGA’s hit list, so the purge and replace cycle will continue apace. But enough of the government is now fully captured by MAGA that we can expect to see much more of the scarier third phase of this project: attack.
The indictment of James Comey marks the beginning of this new era.
There have been lots of tests already—and with mixed success: Miles Taylor, ABC News, Paramount, Jimmy Kimmel, the iPhone, Harvard, Big Law. I could probably make a good case that more times than not, the Trump attacks have backfired in some way. You know the examples: grand juries in DC have refused to go along with punitive MAGA prosecutions, the law firms that stood up to Trump all won their lawsuits against his executive orders, Kimmel is back on the air, everyone hates Paramount, and most legal observers think the Comey case will crumble.
But it’s much too early to be confident about how this is all going to go.
What is true is that, as Jonathan V. Last recently argued, “we are in the worst-case scenario” relative to what almost anyone predicted back in November 2024.
And that’s why you should be very freaked out by today’s speech by Trump in Quantico to hundreds of military leaders recalled from around the world.
If you buy my argument here—that MAGA is a revolutionary movement defined by systematically taking over all institutions of power and turning them into tools for Trump’s personal use—then the purpose of the Quantico speech is obvious.
It’s no different than when Trump went to the Department of Justice in March and promised to “expel rogue actors,” fill the building with MAGA loyalists, and use DOJ as a weapon against his personal enemies. Which is exactly what he did.
Today, Trump told his top military leaders that “America is under invasion from within” and he repeatedly described “the enemy within” as the “radical left,” a term he increasingly uses to describe all of his political opponents, from Mike Pence to Joe Biden to AOC to antifa.
He said, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” who, he said, would be “a major part” of fighting this “war from within.”
If anyone was confused or had doubts about Trump’s intention to recruit the US military to fight Trump’s perceived enemies in American cities, he made it clear.
“This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room,” he said. He added that “it won’t get out of control once you’re involved at all.” He directly compared the military’s current missions fighting abroad to this new mission he has in mind at home. The “enemy within,” Trump said, was “no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”
I’ve heard some military experts express relief that this is all just a fantasy because there are robust guardrails that would prevent Trump from deploying MAGA’s purge-replace-attack playbook inside the military. I don’t buy that for a second.
Remember, we are only nine months into this revolution. The key goal of the revolutionaries at this point is not to pass legislation or even to accomplish stated policy goals they seem to really believe in, such as the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. The key goal is to take total control of all levers of power. They have been remarkably successful so far with the purge-replace-attack formula.
But two major institutions have been elusive: 1) the military, and Trump made his intentions about that clear today; 2) the machinery of our elections, a topic I’ll return to soon.
But for now, I’ll just point out that it’s not a stretch to wonder whether number one is related to number two.
Because if you and your fellow revolutionaries spend the bulk of your four-year term ridding the government of “rogue actors,” restocking it with fierce loyalists, and weaponizing it against the “enemies within,” the last thing you want to do is release your grip on any of those new levers of power.
I have liked Telos stuff for a long time, but this one made me join your paid subscribers. Keep up the good work.