\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
For a man openly campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump sure does love the rhetoric of violence.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, the president posted an image of himself as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the Wagner-blasting cavalry officer in Apocalypse Now. \u201cI love the smell of deportations in the morning,\u201d the meme said, paraphrasing the famous quote from the movie. In case the implication was unclear\u2014little about Kilgore or Trump is subtle\u2014the meme added, \u201cChicago about to find out why it\u2019s called the Department of WAR.\u201d The image replaced the film\u2019s name with \u201cChipocalypse Now,\u201d superimposing the city skyline on a fiery sky.<\/p>\n
An American president threatening to unleash the U.S. military on\u2014to make war against\u2014an American city would have seemed unthinkable very recently. Although such behavior remains appalling, it is no longer unexpected. Violent language is the mother tongue of this Trump administration.<\/p>\n
What Trump intends to do in Chicago is not clear. After deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles\u2014where he also dispatched Marines\u2014Trump began talking about sending troops to other cities, including Chicago. Amid fierce pushback from state and local officials, he seemed to cool on the idea last week. He\u2019s now trying to disavow Saturday\u2019s threat too. Although Trump posted it to his personal account on a social network he majority-owns, he called it \u201cfake news\u201d yesterday: \u201cWe\u2019re not going to war. We\u2019re going to clean up our cities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even if the president doesn\u2019t want to go to war\u2014he did obtain five draft deferments to avoid military service during the Vietnam War\u2014he is attracted to the swaggering machismo he associates with the word. It\u2019s the apparent inspiration for rebranding the Defense Department (passive, reactive) to be the Department of War. He can\u2019t legally rename it without Congress\u2019s permission, and the cost of changing the branding could reportedly run into millions or billions of dollars. Either he means it or he\u2019s willing to light money on fire for a symbolic stunt. Neither is good.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s embrace of violent rhetoric is not new. During his first campaign, he encouraged rally attendees to beat up protesters. As president, he encouraged police to treat suspects brutally. As the runner-up in the 2020 election, he encouraged supporters to \u201cfight like hell,\u201d and they did, sacking the U.S. Capitol. Nevertheless, Trump has turned up the volume in his second term, with help from aides such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who, as my colleague Tom Nichols wrote last week, is obsessed with terms such as lethality and warfighters.<\/p>\n
The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House is now preparing to host a cage match for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the martial sport that proceeds from the premise that boxing is far too refined, nuanced, and rule-bound. UFC also happens to be run by\u2014speaking of branding stunts\u2014a major Trump supporter, Dana White. And this morning, Trump seemed to downplay domestic violence at an event at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. \u201cIf a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime,\u201d he scoffed. (The question is personal for the president, whose first wife, Ivana Trump, reportedly once accused him of marital rape in a deposition. She later said she didn\u2019t mean the word in a \u201ccriminal sense.\u201d Trump denied the allegation.)<\/p>\n
In this atmosphere, no wonder that some members of the administration are nearly coming to blows with one another. According to Politico, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, nearly threw hands at an exclusive MAGA social club in Georgetown last week. \u201cWhy the fuck are you talking to the president about me? Fuck you,\u201d Bessent reportedly told Pulte. \u201cI\u2019m gonna punch you in your fucking face.\u201d He also invited Pulte to \u201cgo outside \u2026 I\u2019m going to fucking beat your ass.\u201d (Bessent and Pulte declined to comment on this to Politico.) This is the same Secretary Bessent who previously dropped a series of F-bombs on Elon Musk, my colleagues Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker reported in May. Perhaps part of his success in the administration is that he\u2019s mastered its distinctive patois.<\/p>\n
Speaking fluent violence comes with a price. During Trump\u2019s first run for president, observers who should have known better were willing to believe that the real-estate mogul really was a peacenik. The delusion persisted in some quarters until his return to the White House this year, when he fully abandoned any claim to dovishness, aside from half-hearted attempts to end the war in Ukraine. Initially, Trump\u2019s embrace of militarism was directed outward, in the form of semi-veiled threats of invasions to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal. Threats became action when the United States bombed Iran, to the chagrin of some America Firsters. More recently, the military attacked and destroyed a boat leaving Venezuela whose crew members the administration has said, without offering evidence, were drug smugglers.<\/p>\n
Pressed to legally justify the killing, the administration has offered little explanation. \u201cKilling cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,\u201d Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X, later adding, \u201cI don\u2019t give a shit what you call it.\u201d That drew a rebuke from Senator Rand Paul, the libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican. \u201cDid he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation?? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial,\u201d Paul posted.<\/p>\n
Implicit in Paul\u2019s comments is the fear that brutal rhetoric and tools of repression that a government uses overseas will eventually be turned against a domestic population. This idea is called the \u201cimperial boomerang,\u201d and it\u2019s attributed both to the poet-statesman Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire and the philosopher Hannah Arendt. You don\u2019t have to look very hard to see this happening today. For the first two decades of this century, the United States waged a \u201cglobal war on terror.\u201d Now it has withdrawn most of its troops from these conflicts and instead has held a Soviet-style military parade and deployed uniformed, armed soldiers to intimidate a District of Columbia electorate that voted overwhelmingly against Trump. Or, to choose another example: The president is taking a film that dramatized the senseless imperial violence of the Vietnam War and using it to threaten war against Chicago.<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n Dispatches<\/strong><\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by The Atlantic.*<\/p>\n The Most Difficult Position in Sports<\/p>\n By Seth Wickersham<\/p>\n Steve Young lifts his arm, holding an imaginary football, preparing to throw. This act\u2014the most basic aspect of quarterbacking\u2014has defined his life and, at times, his self-worth.<\/p>\n Today, on an August evening, he\u2019s standing at the front of a country-club ballroom in San Mateo, long retired. A bunch of professional-football luminaries are in attendance, including the Hall of Famer John Lynch, the former Pro Bowl quarterback and current Stanford football executive Andrew Luck, and, in the front row, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and his wife, Jane. The occasion is an event held by the Women\u2019s Coaching Alliance, a group striving to diversify football staffs. The panel discussion topic is the state of college football. But, as always, the talk drifts toward quarterbacks, that uniquely American job with uniquely American responsibilities.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Julian Broad \/ Contour \/ Getty<\/p>\n Reminisce. Giorgio Armani, who died last Thursday at 91, made the red carpet a fashion show, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell writes.<\/p>\n Read. Arundhati Roy\u2019s new memoir explores the formidable figure who set her on a course of constant motion, Anderson Tepper writes.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. For a man openly campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump sure does love the rhetoric of violence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[964,71,261,3787],"class_list":{"0":"post-19968","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-donald","9":"tag-trumps","10":"tag-war","11":"tag-words"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n