President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. military could use deployment to American cities as an opportunity to train in irregular warfare against public protests drew a blunt reply from a U.S. senator who saw combat during the invasion of Iraq.
The president used an appearance Tuesday before an assemblage of hundreds of top military officials — ordered to gather at a Virginia military base by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth — to offer a familiar barrage of right-wing grievances about the armed forces, including new guidance from Hegseth that could effectively exclude women from combat roles.
But Trump took things even further than the ex-Fox News host-turned-Pentagon boss by musing aloud about the possibility that the military should use “dangerous cities” such as Chicago as “training grounds” for troops.
“We have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won't get out of control once, once you get involved at all,” Trump said.
Asked about the president’s comments during an interview on CNN, Democratic Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego did not mince words.
“Look, the president is an idiot — he doesn’t actually understand how the military works,” said Gallego, a Marine Corps Iraq War veteran.
The Democratic senator said members of the military, who each swear an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution, would “not be firing upon their own men and women, their own neighbors” even if ordered to by the Trump administration.
“Only an idiot like Donald Trump” would believe they would do otherwise, he said.
Gallego added that “anybody” in the military who would use force against American civilians would “be held accountable one way or the other” and stressed that “most if not all” of the people he’d served with “understand their oath to the constitution”.
“It‘s not to this president. and when that moment comes, they‘re going to live to that constitution,” he said.
Asked to comment on Gallego’s remarks, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly noted that the Arizona senator is “currently standing by Chuck Schumer as he plunges our country into a shutdown — which would risk critical services for Veterans and force our military to work without pay.”
“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have restored a focus on warfighters at the Department of War – no one cares what Gallego has to say,” she added.
