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For more than 40 minutes on Tuesday, in a speech to hundreds of the nation’s military leaders who’d been urgently summoned from around the world to the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, President Donald J. Trump meandered through a list of political and personal grievances, accomplishments real and imagined, his quest for a Nobel Peace Prize, his notions on the aesthetics of ship design, his preference for “big beautiful firm paper,” and how much everybody loves his signature and how much better it is than his predecessor’s.

And then he told America’s generals to prepare for war. In, and on, America’s cities.

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Not all of them; just some of those run by “the radical left Democrats.”

This was not some figurative “war on poverty” or “war on drugs.” Mr. Trump envisions a literal war, with the boots of American troops on the ground in U.S. cities, battling what he called the “enemy from within” in a “war from within.”

His excuse? What Mr. Trump calls “out-of-control” urban crime.

This deeply dangerous proposal makes a mockery of America’s long-cherished concepts of democracy, justice and autonomy. It’s also, in all likelihood, illegal.

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Let’s start there: The Posse Comitatus Act, first passed in 1878, prohibits the use of the military in law enforcement except “in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.” Neither of those........

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