Trump and Hegseth's "warrior culture" invades Chicago

Trump and Hegseth’s “warrior culture” invades Chicago
After the military summit in Quantico, POTUS considers invoking the Insurrection Act

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published October 7, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Years from now, as the history of President Donald Trump‘s political life is being written, Tuesday, Sept. 30 may come to be seen as something of a watershed in his second term — when all the dots were finally connected, once and for all, between all the elements of his domestic authoritarian agenda.

At a Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth convened an unprecedented meeting of hundreds of senior military leaders to speechify about “warrior culture” and effectively ordered the armed forces to ignore international law.

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Seven hundred miles away in Chicago, in the early hours before Trump and Hegseth’s confab, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were busy playing soldier on the administration’s orders. In a scene that evoked a night raid by Special Ops forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, ICE agents rappelled out of UH-60 Blackhawks to assist law enforcement in raiding a building in the working-class South Shore neighborhood that had allegedly been “taken over” by the Venezuelan gang El Tren de Aragua. Drones provided persistent surveillance, and armored vehicles were on the scene. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem shared a propaganda video of the raid which featured dramatic music and images of the helicopters and their searchlights, ICE agents kicking down doors, and people being led away under arrest.

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In a measured, fair analysis of Hegseth and Trump’s speeches for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), retired U.S Marine Corps Reserve Col. Mark F. Cancian warned that Trump’s focus on using the military for domestic purposes also has international implications. “An irony is the tension between Hegseth’s focus on traditional warfighting and Trump’s focus on domestic enemies and law enforcement,” he said. “A military that is sealing the border and walking the streets to fight crime is not getting ready for the lethal weapons of a great power adversary such as China or Russia.” ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/10/07/trump-and-hegseths-warrior-culture-invades-chicago/