Donald Trump claims to be a president of peace, but inside he is fomenting civil war Jonathan Friedland

DDonald Trump had more hope that the members of the Nobel Committee would not care about what was happening inside the United States. If they take a look, they will notice a contrasting pattern. While the American president likes to play the role of peacemaker abroad, at home he plays the role of Trump, the bringer of war.

It is easy to hide the first truth or divert our attention away from the second truth. This week was an example of that. It began with Trump traveling to Israel, where he was hailed as a modern-day Cyrus, a great ruler whose name will be talked about for thousands of years to come, and a man who brokered what he himself prides himself on as “eternal” peace.

Not to mention that Trump’s success, for which he certainly deserves some credit, was in getting Hamas and Israel to agree to a ceasefire and the release of hostages and prisoners, a fragile arrangement that does not address, let alone resolve, the underlying Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He presents it as a victory for the ages and a further step on his peacemaker pedestal, bringing the number of wars he claims to have ended to eight.

In fact, buoyed by his success, he makes another attempt at what he thought would be easy but, to his annoyance, has proven to be as complicated as all the hated pundits and opponents of the deep state warned it would be: Russia’s war on Ukraine. On Thursday he announced his plan to meet again with Vladimir Putin, this time hosted by Viktor Orbán in Budapest (which has the happy side benefit of trolling the EU).

Trump, unfazed by the failure of their recent meeting in Alaska, and by his failure to stand up to Putin, clearly believes he has peace momentum and that the healing magic his touch brought to Gaza will similarly unite Moscow and Kiev.

But what undermines this new vision of a Nobel Prize-ready Trump is not just ridiculous bravado, or even the confusion between the technique and optics of peacemaking with the substance and graft it requires. It is a fact that he is provoking war at home on his own citizens. I’m not talking metaphorically. Increasingly, serious analysts who are not inclined to exaggerate warn that Trump seems determined to do just that Provoking a second American Civil War. The evidence is accumulating.

The most obvious is Trump’s deployment of American forces on the streets of American cities. He claims that his original decisions to send the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Portland and Memphis were motivated solely by concern about crime. In his account, these places were “overrun by violence” and the local police needed his help. But this doesn’t stack.

Show data Most of the cities targeted by Trump were targeted minimum Violent crime rates compared to other untouched major cities. (Of the 10 major US cities with the biggest crime problems, Trump has targeted only one: Memphis.) So why is Trump sending troops?

One explanation is that he lives in such a closed bubble, and his sources of information are so narrow, that he does not have the actual facts. Earlier this month, he described Portland, Oregon, as “Burning hell“, adding that”You see fires everywhere. You see the fights, and I mean just violence. It’s so crazy. Portland residents were awestruck, as usual, as they rode bikes or took their kids to the park. It seems Trump was watching Fox Newsmixing footage from the 2020 riots with today’s.

But none of this is wrong. What cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland have in common is not imaginary runaway crime rates, but rather what irritates Trump much more: they are Democratic-run cities in Democratic-led states. (What’s clear is that Cleveland, Ohio, and Kansas City, Missouri, have higher rates of violent crime but are under Republican governors. So they’ve been left alone.)

This is a political act on Trump’s part, aimed at intimidating potential opposition strongholds. Some critics suspect the administration hopes to provoke violence from those whose cities now feel like occupied territory. Perhaps a riot or attack on the military could be immediately construed, as with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, as an act of left-wing terrorism deserving of further repression, seizure of emergency powers or suspension of freedoms.

Others believe it’s about normalizing the presence of troops on the streets before next year’s midterm elections, a crucial contest that could see Republicans lose the House, giving Democrats a serious check on Trump’s power. In this view, troops would be deployed either to intimidate minorities and others who might normally vote Democratic, or to battle after polling day, to force an attempt by the White House to overturn results that were not going their way. Let us consider repeating the elections on January 6, 2021, except for the presence of the armed forces this time to ensure the implementation of Trump’s will.

The obvious objection to this scenario is that the US military establishment would almost certainly refuse to allow it to be used as a partisan political tool. But this means missing out on what Trump and Pete Hegseth – now renamed not Secretary of Defense, but Secretary of War – are doing to the US military. Watch last month’s incredible meeting of hundreds of America’s top admirals and generals, coming together from around the world. Trump could not have been clearer, telling them that they now faced an “enemy within,” that their mission was to deal with “civil unrest,” and that they should regard “dangerous American cities as training grounds.” At one point, Hegseth said that any officer who disagreed with Trump’s new concept for the US military should:Do the honorable thing and resign“.

All of this comes in the context of a president who openly uses the judicial system to punish his critics — note Thursday’s indictment against his former national security adviser John Bolton — whose chief adviser described the Democratic Party as “Local extremist organization“Even before Kirk was killed; this is sending masked agents to kidnap people, including American citizens, off the streets; this is using a government shutdown to eliminate”Democratic agencies“This means pocketing an independent civil service that might act as a leash on presidential whims, while cutting off money from institutions, from universities to public broadcasting, that might do the same; this imposes an ideological orthodoxy on the entire federal bureaucracy, with the FBI firing an employee who had… Display the pride flag Just the latest example.

Trump likes to talk about peace talks when it comes to the Palestinians and Israelis or the Russians and Ukrainians. But inside the United States, where red meets blue, he sees not a competition between competitors but a struggle with his own enemy He admits he hates it – A war that must be fought by any means necessary, until the end.

• Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for The Guardian

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