Trump: US cities should be military ‘training grounds’

U.S. generals and admirals gather in Virginia for talk by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

‘We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds,’ said Trump of San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles

(Image credit: Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images)

By Peter Weber, The Week US

published 1 October 2025

What happened

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Tuesday addressed hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals hastily summoned from around the world to a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. Hegseth said he planned to toughen physical fitness and grooming standards and root out “fat generals” and “woke” ideologies that he claimed hamstrung the military’s lethality. Trump said he wanted the military to fight the “enemy within” the U.S.

Who said what

Defense officials spent much of Tuesday “trying to make sense of the last-minute gathering,” Politico said, with one saying it “could have been an email.” The top U.S. military brass “sat mostly in silence” as Trump “talked for 73 minutes about the same things he talks about almost every day” — Joe Biden, the media, not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, The New York Times said. But there was “something new” in minute 44 of his speech, when Trump told the generals that for some of them, a “major part” of their job would be tackling the “war from within” in “San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles.”

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” Trump recounted telling his defense secretary. Hegseth told the military leaders that “you kill people and break things for a living” and will no longer have to “fight with stupid rules of engagement.”

What next?

Trump’s “emphasis on deploying the military for domestic law enforcement” was “distressing,” The Washington Post said in an editorial, and Hegseth’s fixation on making the military “more lethal” was “not a feature people typically look for in forces deployed in their communities.”

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.