Examples like these remind me of one of the most valuable things I’ve learned from studying my country’s endless foreign wars as both an anthropologist and a military spouse: Armed conflict transforms the bodies and minds of people far beyond its battlefields, including in the country that launched such wars in often distant lands.
it’s hard to know which came first: our president-elect, or Americans who distrust each other as much as they do outsiders, the federal government, and factual reporting.
As Americans await the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, I find myself thinking that it couldn’t be more important to understand the culturally transformative impact of war. My vantage point is a strange but (I think) salient one. I’m the wife of a U.S. military veteran and the mother of children who have been encouraged by those in our family and community to become fighters “like Daddy.” Yet I’m also someone who, through my involvement in Brown University’s Costs of War Project, has long critiqued this country’s warfighting efforts and the culture that sustains them.
In short, I find myself in an awkward position in this fragile democracy of ours. After all, I’m someone who has devoted unpaid labor to our military-industrial complex, yet can’t resist the impulse to critique it for its impact. How’s that for a conflict of interest?
Having risked plenty in this position, I might as well keep at it. One thing I can say is that all too many Americans, whatever their political leanings, agree on the benefits of funding our military with ever more hundreds of billions of our tax dollars that disproportionately benefit weapons contractors rather than us or our social safety network.
In fact, decades of federal budgets have favored war fighting with all too lax human-rights standards in dozens of foreign countries, hostility and violence against vulnerable people within the ranks of our own troops, antiterrorism policies that have encroached on domestic civil liberties, and the flow via police departments of military assault rifles and armored vehicles onto America’s city streets. And don’t forget the Veterans Day celebrations that propagandize military service to young children or the military recruiters in public schools. All of that is yet more evidence of what Americans value most. Yes, many of us have balked at school shootings and spiking child death rates, or at the servicemen and veterans who helped lead the rampage to overturn the 2020 election certification, but it’s clear that ever more of us, in or out of uniform, agree, in some fashion, on the sanctity of armed violence.
In a sense, the fact that we just voted back into the presidency someone who embodies a lack of restraint might be considered the climax of America’s decades-long War on Terror that began in response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Twenty-odd years later, we have a president-(re)elect who doesn’t believe in the peaceful transfer of power. He’s already used the bully pulpit of his presidency and then his candidacies to demonize federal workers and journalists. He’s called his political opponents “vermin” and “the enemy within,” while conjuring up specific images of violence against them. And he’s accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of our country—language that, in other settings like Hitler’s Germany or early 1990s Rwanda, led to upsurges in extralegal violence even before the first official orders to kill were given.
Trump has used his public statements to direct his anger—and so that of his most ardent supporters—not toward China and Russia whose militaries threaten the sovereignty of our allies, but toward our own unarmed civilian workers who feed, educate, nourish, and pay Americans. Under such conditions, it’s hard to know which came first: our President-elect, or Americans who distrust each other as much as they do outsiders, the federal government, and factual reporting. And talking about wars of terror, if ever conditions were ripe for civilian bloodshed at home, it’s now—a time when there exists no shared sense of what it means to be an American or even any way to talk about it together.
Start ‘Em Early.
Perhaps the truest reflection of our faith in war fighting as problem-solving is the emphasis still given to telling kids that it’s a good idea to join the military. Within military communities, it remains an unspoken rule that kids ought to be raised to be like their parents in uniform. As an example, consider the Pentagon’s take-your-child-to-work-day, attended by over 8,000 children this year and replete with athletic events, refreshments, and paraphernalia for those kids to take home. My own children experience a version of that: toy battleships and fighter jets, as well as coffee-table books displaying every class of armored vehicle ever made and old uniforms and memorabilia from various military bases.
Teachers at local elementary schools ask younger grades to draw pictures of those they know who serve in the military and write essays about why they’re proud of them. A local gathering in honor of loved ones in the military, during which community leaders extol the bravery and resolve of those who serve, is among the best-attended events in my small rural town. If only that many people attended PTA meetings to discuss the curriculum and school safety, among other things!
In our kids’ local Cub Scouts troop during Veterans Day week, parents who served in the military were invited to talk to the scouts about what they did while in uniform. Adults and children peppered them with questions about the weaponry they used and who they fought. And mind you, in such settings, when was the last time you heard of doctors, election workers, teachers, or federal employees being asked to describe their work, no less what they use to do it?
A Mandate to Kill
The way we spend money, go to war, vote, and raise our children suggests that, on some level, we’ve already given our military and law enforcement our implicit trust. How else to interpret the results of the 2024 election? By a significant margin, voters decided that leadership means not standing up to autocratic leaders abroad, but promising to hurt those who would speak out against you at home.
In June 2020, as protests and riots against the police murder of George Floyd swelled in Washington, President Trump told military leaders that he wanted to augment police units already in the capitol with armed military personnel. Hundreds of soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division traveled from North Carolina to Fort Belvoir just south of Washington, theoretically to help units already posted around the capitol. Those troops were issued bayonets, though they didn’t display them.
Apparently betting on the prospect that Trump would not want to own the decision to deploy troops against unarmed civilians, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper attempted to appease him and buy time without acting on his suggestion. However we judge the minimalist guardrails those officials put in place, it’s no longer clear that anyone in Trump’s second term will be there to restrain him from moving forward with his worst intentions against civilians, including undocumented immigrants (against whom the president-to-be is already threatening to call in the military). “The next time, I’m not waiting,” Trump said of such a future possibility at a 2023 rally.
Trolling by Nomination
Next to the man himself, nothing telegraphs Trump’s willingness to use force against unarmed American civilians more vividly than his nomination of former Army National Guard officer Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. A Fox News host with no administrative experience in the Pentagon, he sports tattoos indicating his allegiance to Christian nationalist and white supremacist causes. It’s hard to imagine a more partisan pick for a military that is supposed to be none of the above. Hegseth also (you won’t be surprised to learn) settled a sexual assault allegation in 2017 by a woman who attended one of his speaking engagements. In three separate instances as a Fox News host, he advocated on behalf of three service members being investigated by military tribunals for killing unarmed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Subsequently, President Trump pardoned two of those convicted men and reversed the demotion of the third, who had posed with the dead body of a teenage prisoner after allegedly murdering him with a knife.
Not just Hegseth’s actions but his stated goals speak to his disdain for restraint. He’s already made explicit his intention to fire any of the military’s top brass who have participated in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which, among other things, involve badly needed education to prevent sexual assault and hate speech demonizing religious and racial minorities or LGBTQ+ service members.
Hegseth’s appointment dovetails with the incoming administration’s revulsion against law and order within its own ranks, effectively ensuring, in the years to come, that the military will rot from the inside. Trump’s governance blueprint, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is direct in stating that weeding out “manufactured extremism” will be nonnegotiable this time around. The authors of that plan have urged the incoming administration to place national law enforcement agencies like Homeland Security and the federal police directly under the leadership of the secretary of defense and the president.
Disdain for Restraint
Americans have a certain reverence for those who act on impulse without considering the consequences. I doubt Donald Trump would have such a reputation for being a “strong leader” without having egged on his most ardent followers with intimations of violence. Think about his claim that white supremacist protestors in Charlottesville who, in 2017, ranted about Jews replacing them included “very fine people”; or his boast that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”; or his urging the crew who were to become the January 6 rioters to “fight like hell”; or his suggestion that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley ought to have been executed for attempting to directly reassure a Chinese general about this country’s stability while the president was trying to remain in office after his election loss in 2020. That last example should be a reminder that instability and violence within our government present an existential safety risk not just to ordinary Americans but to the entire world, as foreign governments worry about what an unhinged Trump administration might mean for them.
For me, the greatest elephant in the room is our government’s possession of a vast supply of nuclear weaponry capable of causing exponentially more destruction than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Just the non-nuclear explosives that the Biden administration has provided to Israel to drop on Gaza have, cumulatively, had a power far greater than the Hiroshima bomb—a preview of the human destruction our elected leaders are willing to allow even without giving direct orders to do so. Since the only enemies Donald Trump now refers to live in this country, it falls within the realm of possibility that, in his hands, our arsenal of weaponry could place American cities in danger.
A New Kind of War
I like to remind myself that things have been bad in the past: police wielding fire hoses, clubs, and dogs on unarmed Black children protesting for their civil rights; troops blocking Black teenagers from attending school; and of course, border patrol agents separating children from their parents and locking them in cages. To a large extent, we rebounded from such horrors, even though hundreds of those immigrant children have yet to find their parents. Still, we can only imagine what will happen in the Trumpian immigration crackdown that awaits us.
As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg emphasized to a group of activists and supporters the day after the election, we need to “make a lot of noise” about whatever the incoming Trump administration does, and what it means for our democracy. And independent journalism and truth-telling will make this possible, not cynical mistrust of the news or of Americans who try to call out what is likely to be Trump’s violent abuse of power. Keeping our republic will be harder than ever this time around, but Americans who care about their fellow citizens need to prepare themselves to bear witness to the human costs of what could be a new kind of war right here on our own soil. Otherwise, we’ll find all too many hearts broken, including mine.
