Wargames on Main Street

There’s this poll that came out last week that quietly changed the game. For the first time in the history of The New York Times/Siena poll, the biggest issue for voters isn’t the economy or immigration or crime or even the catch-all chaos of “inflation.”

It’s division.

Not just disagreement. Not spirited debate. Division. The kind that splits Thanksgivings and bulldozes friendships. The kind where someone sees a Biden-Harris bumper sticker and mutters “communist,” and someone else sees a red hat and wonders which Capitol window they helped break.

Thirty-six percent of Americans now say the biggest problem in America is how much we hate each other. And on the heels of that little data point, President Trump flew 800 generals and admirals in from around the globe to a base in Virginia to, in essence, make it worse.

Instead of uniting the military to face an actual threat, Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brought the brass to Quantico so they could rail against “woke garbage,” complain about “toxic” leadership (by which they mean: not toxic enough), and pitch the idea that American cities, real cities, where American people live and raise American children, should be used as training grounds for war.

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” Trump said.

Yes. Actual quote. Look it up. He wants to play generalissimo with real troops and imaginary enemies.

And those imaginary enemies? They’re us. It’s not foreign terrorists or hostile regimes. It’s Portland. It’s Los Angeles. It’s wherever a progressive mayor dared to invest in something other than tear gas.

You have to understand what it means, psychologically, to call a city a “training ground.” You don’t train for a mission you agree with. You train for war. And if your soldiers are training in Chicago, it means they are training for war against Chicago. That is what martial imagination does: it reclassifies dissent as threat, and turns neighborhoods into battle maps.

And sure, the generals were quiet. Because they always are. Because the military is supposed to stay apolitical. But apolitical silence, in the face of fascistic fantasy, becomes complicity dressed in uniform.

Let’s zoom out for a second. The last time this many commanders were called back from deployment for a stateside meeting, we were preparing to invade Iraq. We are spending money we don’t have flying our most senior military leadership back from literal warzones so the president could cosplay Patton and the secretary could rant about buzzwords he read on Libs of TikTok.

And here we are, a country at war with itself, where the only thing we seem to agree on is how little we agree. The left thinks the right is fascist. The right thinks the left is satanic. And now our is being told to pick a side.

We’re not supposed to do that. Not in this country. The tanks don’t roll through Detroit. The troops don’t parachute into downtown Seattle. We do not play war games in our own streets.

But Trump doesn’t care about that, because for him, division isn’t a problem. It’s the product. It’s the brand. It’s the one campaign strategy he understands: find a fire, pour gasoline, sell ashtrays.

And here’s the part that should chill you: It’s working. Not because people believe him, but because they no longer believe in each other.

When a plurality of Americans say our greatest problem is division, and the leading candidate responds by using American cities as hypothetical insurgent camps, the real battlefield isn’t urban. It’s existential. It’s whether we still see this country as a shared project or a zero-sum game of ideological conquest.

There was a time when presidents, even cynical ones, tried to rise to the moment. Trump has always preferred to shrink it. To make the whole country small enough to fit inside his bruised ego.

We can do better. We have to. Otherwise, the next time the generals are summoned, it won’t be for a speech.

It will be for a Civil War.