Addressing hundreds of US military generals and admirals flown in for the speech, Trump said the US military should be used to control what he described as "the invasion from within" rather than abroad.
"It seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places. And we're going to straighten them out one by one," Trump said in an auditorium in Quantico, Va. The military personnel, apolitical by custom, did not respond or applaud as the president spoke.
The US president has continued his strategy this week of threatening to deploy the National Guard in American cities run by Democrat mayors, including Portland and Chicago, despite protest from state governors and other elected officials on the ground. Still, several Democratic governors and Canadian political experts said the "training ground" remarks were an extraordinary departure from the norm for an American president.
"When you basically say the words ... 'We want to begin to train our military on our own people, to train them so that they can go afar,' I don't know if there's precedent for that out of the mouth of any American president," said Brad Lavigne, a former campaign director for the NDP, told Power & Politics Tuesday. "It's fantastically horrible."
RHM/
Your Comment