1. Home
  2.  » 
  3. Commentary
  4.  » Trump: U.S. cities will serve as ‘good training ground’ for Department of War

Leo Hohmann – Leo’s Newsletter Oct 2, 2025

NOTE: A heart-felt thank you to all of you who upgraded to a paid subscription over the last couple of days. I was sitting at 332 paid subs when I made the plea, hoping to get to 350 this week, and now I’m at 349. That’s 17 new paid subscribers in two days, so I have no doubt I will get one more and reach my goal of 350. I have the best most supportive readers and am thankful for every one of you! Those among the 15,000 free subscribers, I realize things are tight and you may not be able to afford to upgrade right now, but please help us out by sharing the articles with your friends and family. God bless.

War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery.

The Orwellian gaslighting has kicked into overdrive in recent weeks.

We voted for the “Peace President” but we got the “War President.”

He renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War, and ever since it seems all he wants to talk about is war.

  • War on Venezuela is imminent, under the guise of drug interdiction.
  • War with Russia is imminent because Trump has greenlighted Ukraine to launch U.S. long-range missiles deep into Russian territory. That’s an act of war and Putin knows these strikes would be impossible without Western governments not only supplying the missiles but also the targeting data and intelligence. Each time a missile sails into Russia from Ukraine, it will be seen by the Russians as compliments of America and Europe.
  • Another round of the Israel-Iran war with American backing of Israel also seems imminent.

But here’s the most disturbing one of all: President Trump warned the country’s top ranking military officials Tuesday that they could be headed to “war” with U.S. citizens.

It’s hard to overestimate the ramifications if Trump wins the legal battles taking shape that will try to prevent the federal government from using the military against its own people.

Do we really want soldiers trained to kill foreign enemies to police American streets? There is a huge difference between military training and law enforcement training. We are about to find out if they can bridge the gap. All sorts of nightmarish risks hang in the balance.

In his address to over 800 top military generals and admirals Tuesday, Trump said:

“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. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.”

Military commanders should use American cities as “training grounds,” the president went on to say.

The Los Angeles Times reports that “Trump’s words provoked instant pushback. Oregon has already filed a legal challenge, and experts expressed concern that what the president described is against the law.”

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst, joined retired Lt. Col. Daniel Davis in discussing the dangers of Trump deploying U.S. military forces into U.S. cities… “I specifically explain the profound difference, based on personal experience, between a military mindset and a law enforcement mindset,” Johnson said. They also discussed Tuesday’s meeting in Quantico, Virginia, of 850 U.S. generals and admirals who were called to attend in person from all over the world. What was the real reason for this meeting?


—

“How the military thinks about a problem is very different from how law enforcement thinks about a problem,” Johnson pointed out.

Here’s the biggest difference: When police officers encounter resistance, they are trained to deescalate the situation. When the military encounters resistance, they are trained to escalate. “You don’t say, hey, mister bad man, would you put your rifle down and let’s talk?”

U.S. military police units have at least received some training in law enforcement and how to deescalate, but that’s not predominantly who Trump is sending to the cities.

Johnson added, “Trump in revealing that he thinks sending military troops whose job is to kill, destroy and dominate an opponent, that sending them into cities is great training? That has got to rank up there as one of the stupidest things he’s ever said.”

Hegseth himself has said that “we’re sent in to kill people and break stuff.”

That’s not how municipal cops operate.

“It’s a completely different mindset,” Johnson said. “And we demonstrated it (recently) in blowing up the three boats leaving Venezuela… Just because someone is doing something even illegal doesn’t mean that you have the right to use force, to kill them.”

There is also the risk of normalizing military troops and vehicles in American cities.

And don’t forget about this inflammatory post Trump made to his Truth Social account last month.

Showing an AI-derived image of himself looking like the new sheriff in town with the city in flames in the background, while tying the scene to the newly minted Department of WAR, was meant for one thing and one thing only: to inflame the right-left divide in this country even more than it already is.

“Making this into a military confrontation does run the risk of escaling this into something very dark and ugly,” Johnson said. “We’ve already lost several of our civil rights, particularly the right to privacy where the government can spy on us right and left.”

—

Upgrade to paid

 

Source