generals

Washington, DC – United States President Donald Trump has addressed hundreds of US generals in Virginia on topics ranging from climbing up stairs to the crisis in Ukraine – often repeating his talking points and bouncing between subjects.

Trump’s self-described “weave” – his tendency to knit multiple stories and subjects into one set of remarks – grew large on Tuesday as he spoke for more than one hour and 10 minutes.

He aired familiar grievances about his political opponents, lauded his own foreign policy and called for improving the appearance of warships.

But the US president’s most consequential message to the generals was that the military will be focusing on missions at home.

Here are five key takeaways from Trump’s speech:

Focusing on the ‘enemy within’

Trump suggested throughout the address that he wants the military to respond to perceived threats at home, including what he sees as riots and unauthorised immigration.

“Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances,” he said.

“This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”

Trump has ordered the deployment of military forces in Los Angeles, California; Washington, DC; Memphis, Tennessee; and Portland, Oregon.

On Tuesday, he suggested he will send the military to other major cities, including San Francisco, Chicago and New York, likening the push to war.

“This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within,” Trump said.

The campaign – which is already facing challenges in the courts – has raised legal questions about the role of the US military and possible violations of the law.

The US Constitution’s 10th Amendment gives all duties not otherwise specified to be federal powers to the states, and that includes policing.

Moreover, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 bars the US military from engaging in civilian law enforcement in the US unless “expressly authorised” by the law.

Ironically, Trump’s Republican Party has long championed state rights against expanding federal powers.

Making a case for the Nobel Peace Prize

The US president sought to portray himself as a peacemaker as he enumerated several global crises that he said he personally solved, including clashes between India and Pakistan in May.

He suggested that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for that effort.

“Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not,” Trump said. “They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing.”

He added that it would be a “big insult” to the US if he does not receive the award.

In the first nine months of his second term, Trump has bombed Iran and Yemen, intensified drone strikes in Somalia, and he has been carrying out attacks against boats in the Caribbean that he said are carrying drugs.

But his administration has not provided concrete proof that the deadly air raids targeted drug smugglers. Trump and his aides have joked that the waters near Venezuela are no longer safe for fishermen due to the US military campaign.

Plan to end Gaza war

Trump suggested a ceasefire in Gaza is close, saying Israel and Arab and Muslim nations have accepted his peace plan and now Hamas needs to agree.

He suggested that his 20-point plan could settle the entire region.

“I said, ‘How long have you been fighting?’ ‘Three thousand years, sir.’ That’s a long time, but we got it, I think, settled. We’ll see,” the US president said.

In reality, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict started in the early 1900s with the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, and the first Arab-Israeli war took place in 1948.

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump said he is giving Hamas three or four days to respond to his proposal or it will face a “very sad end”.

Disappointment in Putin

Trump said he is still working to end the war in Ukraine, blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for the continuation of the conflict.

Trump also suggested that Russia is struggling militarily in the conflict, saying thousands of soldiers are being killed on each side weekly.

“I’m so disappointed in President Putin,” Trump said.

“I said I thought he would get this thing over with. He should have had that war done in a week. And I said to him, ‘You know, you don’t look good. You’re four years fighting a war that should have taken a week. Are you a paper tiger?’”

Trump held direct talks with Putin in Alaska last month, and he has been pushing for a summit between the Russian president and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

But so far, US diplomacy has failed to stop the fighting.

Last week, Trump said Ukraine could win back all of the areas captured by Russia during the war, appearing to reverse earlier assertions that Kyiv would have to give up some territory to secure a peace deal with Moscow.

Biden grievances

Throughout the speech, Trump took digs at his predecessor Joe Biden, claiming that the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan under his watch is what motivated Putin to invade Ukraine.

He repeatedly described the Biden administration as “incompetent”.

“You’ll never see four years like we had with Biden and that group of incompetent people that ran this country that should have never been there,” he told the generals.

Trump said he takes stairs carefully to avoid tripping down as Biden did on a couple of occasions when he was president.

“We have great peace through strength. America is respected again as a country,” he said. “We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day. Every day, the guy’s falling down stairs.”

Malian minister says situation under control after plot foiled to ‘destabilising the institutions of the republic’.

Authorities in Mali have arrested a group of military personnel and civilians, including two Malian army generals and a suspected French secret agent, accused of attempting to destabilise the country.

Mali’s security minister, General Daoud Aly Mohammedine, announced the arrests on Thursday evening following days of rumours that Malian military officials had been arrested.

The minister said, “The situation is completely under control.”

“The transitional government informs the national public of the arrest of a small group of marginal elements of the Malian armed and security forces for criminal offences aimed at destabilising the institutions of the republic,” Mohammedine said on national news.

“The conspiracy has been foiled with the arrests of those involved,” he said, adding that the plot began on August 1.

“These soldiers and civilians” had obtained “the help of foreign states”, Mali’s military said in a statement, adding that a French national – identified as Yann Christian Bernard Vezilier – was held on suspicion of working “on behalf of the French intelligence service”.

The security minister said the Frenchman acted “on behalf of the French intelligence service, which mobilised political leaders, civil society actors and military personnel” in Mali.

Images shared on social media of the alleged French spying suspect featured a white man in his 50s wearing a white shirt and appearing somewhat alarmed.

National television also broadcast photos of 11 people it said were members of the group that planned the coup.

The security minister also identified two Malian generals he said were part of the plot.

One of the suspects, General Abass Dembele, is a former governor of the country’s central Mopti region, who was abruptly dismissed in May when he demanded an investigation into allegations that the Malian army killed civilians in the village of Diafarabe. The second general, Nema Sagara, was previously lauded for her role in fighting rebel groups in 2012.

Security sources told the AFP news agency that at least 55 soldiers had been arrested, and authorities said they were working to identify “possible accomplices”.

Impoverished Mali has been gripped by a security crisis since 2012, fuelled notably by violence from armed groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the ISIL (ISIS) group, as well as local criminal gangs.

The country’s military rulers, led by President Assimi Goita, have in recent years turned away from Western partners, notably former colonial power France, and aligned politically and militarily with Russia in the name of national sovereignty.

In June, Goita was granted an additional five years in power, despite the military’s earlier promises of a return to civilian rule by March 2024.

Lisa Berns, the niece of retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, passed by a newsstand in Los Angeles over the weekend and found herself reacting with dread and alarm to the news that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had just been assassinated.

The Orange County woman’s reaction surfaced again Wednesday, when her uncle announced he would not be running for President, a decision that, in Berns’ words, “hasn’t ruined my day. . . . It takes a lot of the pressure off of us. It takes the worry away.”

“People in public office just put themselves at risk every day, so I’m not unhappy that he decided not to run,” she said.

Lisa Berns’ mother, Marilyn Berns, whose only sibling is Powell, said she had never discussed the dangers of running for office with her brother, “But I know that it concerned us–my husband and our family. I think Colin’s decision was made prior” to Saturday’s tragedy in Israel.

“I wasn’t surprised [by Wednesday’s announcement] because Colin called me [Tuesday] night and told me what his decision was,” said Marilyn Berns, 64, a teacher at Martin Elementary School in Santa Ana until her retirement in June. “I’m pleased about the decision. It’s important to us that he do the thing he feels most comfortable with. . . . We were all getting very edgy about it.”

Berns said that her brother’s consideration of seeking the presidency had left his family subject to prolonged stress.

“There was this monumental decision that had to be made,” Marilyn Berns said. “Both of them [Powell and his wife, Alma], along with their kids, were just meeting and meeting and thinking it over. I didn’t realize until I spoke to him the gravity of what my brother was dealing with. That was very disturbing to me. I got a little teary over that.”

Elsewhere in Orange County, the response was less personal and more political as Democratic and Republican leaders found a common ground: Albeit for their own reasons, both parties agreed that Powell had done the right thing–the only thing he could do, really–in not seeking the White House.

But private citizens throughout the county reacted glumly, saying that Powell’s decision deprived American voters of a candidate whom many felt was potentially the best President of anyone in public life.

Others expressed relief, however, saying the timing just didn’t feel right.

Numerous political pundits said Wednesday that Powell’s wife had been “adamant” about having him decline, language with which both Berns women took issue.

Marilyn Berns said that her sister-in-law “has a lot of input” into her husband’s choices and that “they do things together as a team”–to a point.

Even if Alma Powell had strongly resisted her husband’s running, “she’s not the type of woman who is so forceful that she would ram her views down someone’s throat. That’s not Alma Powell’s style. She gives her input, and that’s it. She doesn’t beat a dead horse.”

“I haven’t talked to my aunt [Alma, Powell’s wife]. I don’t know that she’s adamant about him not running,” said Lisa Berns, a computer saleswoman in Orange County, “but I don’t think she’s got a burning desire for him to run.

“I don’t know what she feels precisely about Rabin’s assassination. I don’t know that it played a big part in their decision, but I will tell you this: I was in L.A. over the weekend visiting friends. I hadn’t been watching the news, or reading the newspaper.

“But at 5 o’clock when I walked by a newsstand and saw that Rabin had been assassinated, my heart sank. I don’t know if anybody else in the family had it cross their minds, but it certainly crossed mine.”

The Berns family is so concerned about its own privacy that both mother and daughter asked not to have published the name of the Orange County community where the family lives.

Despite her uncle’s decision, “I think he would have been great” as President, Lisa Berns said. “I think he would be good at anything he sets out to do. He’s obviously very bright, very well spoken, level-headed, cool. . . . He knows how to work under tremendous pressure in various capacities. He’s a fair person, an eminently decent person.”

On other fronts, Democrats and Republicans across the county were not about to try to persuade Powell to change his mind.

“If he had run, it would have made the Republican [presidential] race even uglier than it is already,” by pitting the moderate Powell against GOP conservatives, said Irvine attorney Jim Toledano, chairman of the Democratic Party in Orange County.

“The announcement comes as no surprise to me,” countered Thomas A. Fuentes, chairman of the Republican Party in Orange County. “I never met a party activist who was favorable to [Powell’s] nomination during all the time the press was touting it.”

It was always the media and never the GOP constituency who wanted Powell to run, Fuentes said, claiming the negative feeling was far more prevalent in the ultraconservative, Republican stronghold of Orange County.

“If there were ever a media-contrived candidacy, this was the best example,” Fuentes said. “To carry our banner requires some time of service to the party and also the full embrace of the values and ideals of the party–and that was lacking.”

Fuentes suggested that party regulars felt the would-be candidate had not yet paid his dues, noting that Powell’s most trusted advisers “obviously shared with him the reality that there was no Powell ground network. There has to be some structure, some network, some reality to a campaign. That not being in place, I think he just came to grips with reality.”

But some people reacted to Wednesday’s news with disappointment.

At the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, about 150 people watched Powell’s announcement on a big-screen television. Many were both surprised and crestfallen at his decision. “I really thought he had the impetus and the appeal to win,” said 54-year-old Beverly Nocas of Pasadena. “He’s very articulate and I think he could have done a lot for us.”

Norma Canova, a 50-year-old resident of Yorba Linda, said, “I think he could have had a great role in healing racial problems in this country.”

But several onlookers, who had gathered to watch a fashion show called “Dressing the First Lady,” expressed relief.

“I couldn’t vote for him because I don’t know what he stands for,” said 81-year-old Henry Boney of San Diego. “I know that he’s a good salesman though. He created a lot of publicity for his book.”

Newport Beach resident Elaine Parks said she was “very impressed” with Powell, but was heartened by his decision to stay out of the race.

“It would have been divisive to the party, and we need complete unity to beat the current President, which I sincerely hope happens,” Parks said.