The Enemy From Within (Apparently, It’s Us)

Trump tells the military to treat blue cities as training grounds, shuts the government down, and leaves comedians as the last defenders of sanity.

Good morning! The United States government is closed for business, and the commander-in-chief spent yesterday openly musing about turning Democratic cities into live-fire “training grounds” for the military. It’s Wednesday in America, and we’ve entered the part of the show where the host stops bothering with plot and just hurls props at the audience.

At Quantico, Donald Trump faced hundreds of generals and admirals, people who actually studied war, led troops, and bled in combat. His contribution? To tell them that their fellow Americans were “the enemy from within,” that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military,” and to quip that the brass themselves looked like they had “just come out of central casting.”

I’ve only personally known two generals, but in both cases they were highly educated, astute students of history. Whatever their flaws, they’d earned their rank through intellect, discipline, and service. Trump, by contrast, surrounds himself with sycophants and reality-TV extras who never challenge his intellect. His usual schtick, the nicknames, the lies, the swagger, must have lain pretty flat in a room full of people who can quote Clausewitz and remember the smell of combat.

One retired general called Trump’s words what they were: “Hitleresque, right out of Nazi Germany.” Another said he hadn’t just crossed the Rubicon, he’d blown it up. These aren’t the warnings of “woke liberals”; they’re the assessments of professionals in uniform. And they were insulted, shaken, and furious. Late-night comedians turned the remark into fodder, but the laughter had an edge: Trump isn’t just playing dress-up. He’s rehearsing authoritarianism in broad daylight.

Then, just past midnight, the lights went out for real. The federal government shut down for the fifteenth time since 1981. This one promises to be uglier than most. Seven hundred fifty thousand workers furloughed, hundreds of thousands more forced to clock in without pay. Air traffic controllers and TSA agents are showing up on empty stomachs while J.D. Vance goes on Fox to warn viewers they might not land on time. Nothing says “America First” like hoping the unpaid person guiding your flight path isn’t too distracted by an overdue mortgage.

The shutdown halts the release of economic data, freezes research, stalls permits, and piles garbage in national parks. Wall Street, jittery at the best of times, slid into a gold rush while the dollar wobbled. The price tag? Four hundred million dollars a day. But Trump, ever the self-styled negotiator, crowed that the shutdown could help him permanently fire hundreds of thousands of government workers. It’s less a fiscal standoff than an ideological purge, government by wrecking ball.

Adam Schiff cut through the fog in his own remarks. This is not some bipartisan tragedy of errors; it’s a Trump shutdown. The president skipped negotiations until the last minute, then responded with an AI deepfake of Chuck Schumer. He threatened illegal firings and illegal benefit cuts. Normally, Social Security checks go out, Medicare hums, the VA keeps serving veterans. But Schiff warned that under Trump, nothing is guaranteed. He may try to use the shutdown to kneecap Medicaid, to spike health premiums, to finish strangling renewables so utility bills soar. Democrats, meanwhile, have been fighting to extend health subsidies that keep hospitals, especially rural hospitals, from closing. Republicans spun that into “giving health care to illegals,” while the actual stakes are whether your local ER has enough staff to keep the doors open. In my county, one hospital is already teetering; this shutdown could be the coup de grâce.

The president tells the armed forces, trained to defend against enemy forces, not for policing, that their job is to occupy American cities, then turns around and orders his own government to shut itself down. The generals call it unconstitutional. Schiff calls it cruelty. The rest of us call it day 254 of the Trump presidency.

If you need a palate cleanser, turn to the late-night stage. Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert staged a crossover event, each guesting on the other’s show, waving across Manhattan and Brooklyn, mocking Trump’s insults about “late-night losers.” Kimmel relived the ordeal of being suspended by ABC after calling out the MAGA spin around Charlie Kirk’s killing; Colbert recounted how his show was canceled just after he criticized Paramount for quietly settling a Trump lawsuit. Both saw Trumpworld celebrating their silencing. But last night they raised tequila with Guillermo, cheered each other on, and reminded us that ridicule still has power. When the government is shuttered and the would-be strongman is fantasizing about using tanks in Chicago, sometimes the only defense left is mockery, and friendship.

The generals look grim, the Democrats look grim, the stock market looks grim. At least the comedians are still laughing, and for once, we’re laughing with them. As for the firehose of words Trump unleashed at Quantico, I’ve written a more in-depth breakdown of that spectacle; it should post here this afternoon.