“I told [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard,” President Trump told the nearly 1,000 generals and admirals he’d summoned to Quantico today from across the globe. “But military, because we’re going into Chicago to keep domestic order and peace.”
Inasmuch as such cities have now become training grounds for our troops, that imposes a solemn duty on every American city dweller. Clearly, we (I use the first person here because I myself am a city dweller) can’t merely go about our daily rounds. Today, for instance, I’m going to the cleaners to pick up some shirts. What kind of challenge, I ask you, would that pose to our Guard and regular Army infantry—much less our artillery, air, and naval forces? Not much, I fear. Faced with that kind of challenge, I suppose our troops might inspect my shirts to see if they’re adequately cleaned, for which I’d certainly be grateful. If that sounds, well, silly, keep in mind that the Guard deployed to D.C. has been picking up litter and assorted schmutz while patrolling the National Mall.
But now that the military’s mission has become using our cities to get training on how to repel armed foreign forces, it appears that President Trump may want us—America’s city dwellers—to arm ourselves and fire off some shots to provide our young men and women with an adequate level of battlefield experience. It’s possible that that’s not what he called upon us to do, which would come as a relief: I myself can’t see very well at a distance, so there would be some risk to my embarking on this kind of troop training. But whatever his desire, I’m willing to heed his call. When Trump requests, we—like the leaders of universities, law firms, and the media—must comply.
As we’ve been called on to assist our military, I must point out that one of Trump’s suggestions to our Navy in his speech today was questionable. Noting how much he’s enjoyed watching the 1950s documentary series Victory at Sea, about the Navy’s role in winning World War II, Trump said, “I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships, by the way.” Sadly, just three days after their attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s aircraft sank Britain’s premier battleship, The Prince of Wales, that had been steaming along on the open sea. Thereafter, naval strategists on both sides viewed battleships as little more than painfully vulnerable targets in the war that followed, opting instead to wage their attacks almost exclusively with carrier-based aircraft. In the Battle of Midway, for instance, Adm. Chester Nimitz deployed his carriers to decisively defeat the Japanese fleet, while sending his battleships almost all the way back to California so they wouldn’t get in the way.
Trump is nothing if not consistent; his affinity for battleships is of a piece with his affinity for coal. For that matter, most Navy ships before 1916 were coal-powered; thereafter, they were powered by oil (and beginning in the 1950s, by nuclear power). Maybe our newest ships can once again be powered by beautiful clean coal: boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
But I digress. The main takeaway from Trump’s lecture today may be that we American city dwellers must play our role in providing our troops with the training required to suppress guerrilla and regular armed forces on foreign soil. If that was what Trump was getting at, it would be useful, I suppose, if the Black Panthers were still around to provide tutorials. In their absence, we all must do the best we can.