Opinion: Trump’s Language Points Toward a Model of Governance

 James Greenberg 

I watched the CBS coverage in stunned silence. Trump stood before a room of military officers, invoking “the enemy within” and proposing that American cities be repurposed as training grounds for domestic combat. The words weren’t metaphorical. They were operational. And as they landed, I recoiled—not only in horror, but in a deeper, more disorienting sadness. Is this where we’re going?

It wasn’t just the rhetoric. It was the reclassification: dissent reframed as insurgency, cities recoded as battlegrounds, the military recast from a steward of defense into an instrument of internal enforcement. The structural shift was not subtle. It signaled a collapse of civic motifs that once marked the boundary between politics and war.

Trump’s recent language points toward a model of governance that treats dissent as insurgency. His definition of the “enemy within” is intentionally vague, shifting from day to day depending on who stands in his way. At times it is Democratic leaders like Adam Schiff or Nancy Pelosi, at times city governments, and at other moments judges, bureaucrats, or journalists. The category shifts by design. Its vagueness is the source of its usefulness.

In anthropology, words are not just descriptions. They are practices that shape reality. To call someone an “enemy within” is to reclassify them. It redraws the boundary of belonging, transforming neighbors into adversaries and dissent into betrayal. This is cultural work carried out through language, and its effect is to redefine citizenship itself.

At Quantico, speaking to military officers, Trump warned that “the enemy from within” would be their responsibility to confront. The remark was deliberate, meant as a signal. By invoking a domestic “enemy,” he collapsed the civic frame of politics into the military frame of war. Opposition was no longer disagreement among citizens but a threat to be suppressed.

Ambiguity has a purpose. It allows him to raise the specter of treason without proof. It creates a climate of fear where loyalty is constantly tested. It recalls McCarthy-era tactics, though now suspicion can be converted into action almost instantly through executive orders and mass media. From an anthropological view, this is a ritual of exclusion: vague accusations become a means of producing solidarity among insiders while pushing others to the margins.

The consequences extend beyond rhetoric. Trump has floated renaming the 

Department of Defense as the Department of War, a symbolic shift that reimagines the military’s purpose. He has proposed using the National Guard in cities without state consent. He has signed orders creating rapid deployment forces for “civil disturbances.” Institutions are not neutral machines. They are cultural systems. Changing their names, missions, and rituals alters their meaning and reshapes what they exist to do.

 

The label “radical left” plays a similar role. It collapses ideological diversity into a single enemy category. Democrats, activists, journalists, academics, and entertainers can all be branded as “radical.” When a label can stretch to fit nearly anyone, it ceases to describe and becomes a threat in itself.

 

Antifa follows the same script. A decentralized movement with no central leadership has been redefined by executive order as a terrorist organization, even though U.S. law has no such category for domestic groups. The designation was never about dismantling an organization. It created a precedent that protest itself can be treated as terrorism. From a necropolitical perspective, it marks groups as disposable, stripping them of protection and exposing them to state violence.

 

Together, these terms — “enemy within,” “radical left,” and “Antifa” — reshape civic life. 

 

Protest is cast as insurgency, dissent as treason, cities as combat zones, and citizens as suspects. The vagueness of the language makes it possible to bypass the safeguards of law. It prepares the ground for violence by recoding opposition as a threat to the body politic.

 

Trump’s allies have reinforced this drift. Pete Hegseth, his close advisor and defense nominee, has promised to remake the armed forces around “warrior culture.” Diversity and inclusion would be scrapped, protections against toxic leadership weakened, and disciplinary oversight loosened. Rebranding the Pentagon as the Department of War is more than administrative tinkering. It is cultural reprogramming. The military is recast from a steward of defense into an instrument of domestic enforcement, with loyalty redirected from the Constitution to the executive.

 

Rallies operate in the same way. Chants replace debate, symbols substitute for argument, and repetition binds followers into a moral community defined against outsiders. In this ritual space, Trump’s words do not merely describe but enact a new order: one in which dissent is treated as heresy and loyalty as devotion. Anthropology reminds us that politics often relies on ritual to produce cohesion, and Trump has turned rallies into ceremonies of belonging and exclusion.

 

The strategy is plain. Through ambiguous language, altered institutions, ritualized displays of loyalty, and necropolitical designations that mark opponents as expendable, Trump is reshaping both the role of the military and the meaning of citizenship. The protections of law are treated as obstacles to be worked around. Civilian rule is worn away through redefinition.

 

This is how preparations for military dictatorship take shape. They emerge through language that reclassifies, institutions that are renamed and repurposed, rituals that bind followers, and the marking of neighbors as disposable. Democracy falters when categories of belonging are narrowed, when opposition is treated as insurgency, and when the state claims the power to decide who lives securely and who lives under threat.