House Speaker Mike Johnson got into a heated exchange with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos over Donald Trump’s alarming call to use U.S. cities as “training grounds” for the military.
“Is this the highest and best use of the U.S. military, and is this the right way to train them?” the Good Morning America host asked Johnson about Trump’s comments to a room full of military leaders on Tuesday.
“I don’t serve in the Pentagon. I run the House of Representatives, and what we need to be talking about today is real harm that the American people are going to feel because of what Chuck Schumer is doing,” Johnson replied, referencing the government shutdown that Republicans are trying to pin on Democrats.
As Johnson continued his spiel, Stephanopoulos cut him off and demanded he “answer the question” instead of brushing it aside.
“Do you believe it’s appropriate to use American cities as training grounds for the U.S. military, calling those people in the American cities the enemy within?” Stephanopoulos pressed. “I’m asking you, as speaker of the House, do you think that’s appropriate?”
Johnson tried to suggest Stephanopoulos’s question contained a “characterization” of what Trump said, even though there were direct quotes from the president’s speech,. “Well, you can take his quotes out of context, which you often do, and I don’t think that’s fair to the president,” Johnson said.
During his speech at the Pentagon on Tuesday, Trump specifically suggested the military must be prepared to handle the “enemy from within” and indicated that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should direct troops to “use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds.”
The remarks come as Trump has vowed to crack down on crime in Democratic-led cities such as Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., including by deploying federal agents and National Guard troops to assist in law enforcement operations.
While sharing a clip of Trump’s rambling speech, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker posted on X: “Our troops and our nation deserve better than you acting as a petty tyrant.”
In his interview with Johnson, Stephanopoulos reiterated that his description of Trump’s remarks was accurate: “Nothing I said about the president was out of context. Those were direct quotes from the president,” he said.
Johnson also brushed off a question about how Trump’s how posting of unhinged and racist AI-generated videos attacking House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Schumer “helps the cause” in preventing a government shutdown.
“The president uses social media for humor, he makes jokes, he does lots of things,” Johnson meekly replied.
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