If spending on war is the politically easiest way to juice an economy, then the smoothest applications for this spending are wars at home, the easiest to begin and to control. This is why, at an accelerating rate since the 1990s, America’s government has waged wars against Americans—domestic pushes against real threats created from Washington policies that Washington then uses to expand its power. These wars range from the War on Crime to the Global War on Terror to a “War on Unauthorized Immigration,” one which will not break from past precedent but turbocharge it.

Familiar players created these scenarios. It was President Bill Clinton who made a growth industry from a war on crime begun three decades before off tensions of urban development. He did this even as he laid the groundwork for Islamist terrorism by embedding American troops in Saudi Arabia and responded to his financial backers’ demand for cheap labor by averting his eyes from crossings at the southern border. It was Kamala Harris who as San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General made her name fighting Clinton’s War on Crime and filling the federally-funded prisons that came with it. Then, after 2020, she helped Joe Biden’s administration turn a war on terror against Muslims into a war on terror against “white nationalists.”

But they were working off an even earlier template. “Crime is a national defense problem; you’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile,” said Harris’s future boss, then-Democratic Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 1984. The rolodex of scares may turn, but the politicians turning it stay the same. And even more lasting than the politicians are the industries and sub-industries which grow up around them: weapons contractors and security consultancies and private prisons and surveillance companies. Together they create a domestic version of our military industrial complex: an empire of Halliburtons at home not just abroad.

Some of this domestic complex has come about through militarized policing, and through comprehensive crime bills like those in 1984 and 1994. The former allowed local police forces to access information, air surveillance, equipment, and training from defense and intelligence agencies and the military, creating fields of “urban surveillance” and “social control.” The latter allowed them to expand their equipment and hiring sprees by allocating $10.8 billion for state and local law enforcement. This had real effects; for example, Rodney King’s violent arrest for evading a speeding stop at the hands of twenty-three Los Angeles police officers while an LAPD helicopter circled overhead. New York took longer to profit from federal funds, but from 1993 to 2000 its police budget went from $1.7 billion to $2.9 billion, marijuana arrests rose from under 10,000 to 60,000 in the same period, and summonses for illegal vending increased by 40% in a single year. The results, too, took longer to percolate than in Los Angeles, but they eventually did via the Black Lives Matter protests, which took their fuel from police brutality, of the 2010s. …

But of course discontented Americans policing other Americans is not a Trumpian idea: it has an earlier precedent. In 1992, Bill Clinton released a campaign proposal to gather “unemployed veterans and active military personnel” into a “National Police Corps.” The strategy then, like the strategy now, was to solve discontent created by decades of bad policies (the neglect of veterans; the atrophying of dignified work and our industrial base) by amping up military spending to vacuum up the discontented. Clinton never ended up creating his National Police Corps, but he did create a fifteen year War on Crime employment boom. Now Trump is using ICE as a similar short-term solution, accompanied, like Clinton’s “targeted interventions” in Kosovo and Bosnia, by strikes on Yemen and Iran that juice the military corporate complex abroad. These are not the breaks into structural reform indicated by Trump’s repeated attacks on the deep state. They are continuities of American empire.

But this may not be as surprising as it might seem. Trump’s career was made, as journalist Daniel Denvir has pointed out, by New York’s 1980s building and finance boom. This boom was created by government-backed financiers, who took over city government in the late Seventies and began implementing the policies that within a decade would begin creating America’s domestic wars, including New York’s own wars on crime and terror. These players were practitioners of what we know today as neoliberalism: the so-called “privatization” of government that was anything but, since government simply stepped up subsidizing corporate vendors for services while increasing spending on security. Despite superficial differences from the Clintons and Harris, Trump comes from their world, and now he’s turbocharged it. Once again, in 2025, the state begins healing when politicians “bring the war home.”