At a gathering of senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday, Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signaled that they’re preparing to imminently expand the scope and size of the U.S. military, both inside and outside the United States. Trump made it clear that he knows sentiment against not only him but the entire capitalist system is growing - as are the movements of organized people in resistance. He said Tuesday, “Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”

That August Executive Order, combined with another in September declaring “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization and a National Security Directive that targets those anti-capitalist and progressive views all come as ICE is ramping up its own militarized terror in Chicago, the National Guard is set to deploy to Portland, OR, and Trump threatens to cut funding from New York City if Zohran Mamdani wins the mayoral election.

Trump also said Tuesday that the government should deploy the military and National Guard into American cities for training: “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon, that’s a big city with an incompetent governor.” Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois has called on Trump to stop, but not put forward any plan on how to make that happen outside of asking Illinois residents to post what they see on social media. A New York Times / Siena College poll released Tuesday shows that 53% of registered voters think Trump has gone too far by sending the National Guard into U.S. cities.

The fast-moving rise of authoritarianism in the United States is a sign of a system in crisis. If it wasn’t clear before, it should be now that the Trump administration has declared an open war on workers and oppressed people across the country and the world.

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