WASHINGTON

US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use American metropolises as "training grounds" for the military as he continues to send troops into more cities.

"I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military," Trump said as he addressed top military brass at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, describing the deployments as part of a "war from within" on crime and immigration.

"Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. But there are many cities in great shape too, by the way, but it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles -- they're very unsafe places. And we're going to straighten that one by one, and 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," he said.

Trump previously deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, DC, and is in the works to do so in Memphis, Tennessee. He also deployed the Marines to Los Angeles to quell unrest because of his immigration crackdown.

On Saturday, the president said he was ordering the deployment of the "military" to Portland, Oregon, which he maintained Tuesday is "a war zone."

"I get a call from the liberal governor, 'Sir, please don't come in. We don't need you.' I said, 'Well, unless they're playing false tapes, this looked like World War Two. Your place is burning down,'" Trump said, recalling an alleged conversation with Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek.

Like California before them, the state of Oregon and the city of Portland have sued the Trump administration in an attempt to thwart the military deployment. The request for a temporary restraining order is slated to be taken up Friday during a federal court hearing.

The Oregon Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to temporarily block Trump from federalizing and deploying Oregon National Guard troops to protect federal buildings in Portland.

Senior Assistant Attorney General Scott Kennedy wrote in a court filing that crime is sharply down in Portland, which he said "is not under siege, war-ravaged, or otherwise a particularly violent or unruly major city."

"There is no law-enforcement or public-order need for a federal deployment to Portland," he wrote. "Rather than improve public safety at the ICE-Facility protests, or in Portland more generally, the deployment is likely to provoke a larger protest."

The US president said troops would be deployed to Chicago "very soon" over objections of the city's mayor and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, whom he called "stupid."