Call this for Donald Trump’s strong men’s week. In just a few days, the president ordered the military in the streets of Los Angeles – on the objections of the Democratic Governor of California – to slow down protests against his repression of immigration, appeared with uniform troops acclaiming in what was equivalent to a political record, and planned to hold a military parade featuring the rare spectacle of tanks in the streets of Washington. Trump’s martial rhetoric accompanying these militarized photo sessions has portrayed a nation that is anything but on the verge of war – with itself.
The fact that all of this occurs is equivalent to the most striking contrast possible with his first mandate, when Trump wants to demonstrate similar military power, but found himself blocked by his own senior officials, who fell, lowered and sometimes disagree with his requests. In 2017, the president returned from an impressive celebration of the Bastille day in France determined to host his own version of a military parade. This has never taken place, largely because the leadership of the Pentagon and the Chief of Staff of the White House of Trump, a retired four-star marine general, were categorically opposed to such a display. In a passionate explosion that I learned over several years later, the vice-president of the joint staff chiefs of the time, Paul Selva, confronted Trump On this subject directly in the oval office. Such a parade, he warned Trump, would be deeply non-American, “what dictators do.” But Trump, of course, wanted to do it anyway.
How much the president who, in his first mandate, was therefore frustrated in his attempt to organize a party on the military theme for America, it is not only his parade this time, but to do it for his own birthday. (A mother coincidence, According to Trump’s Defenders, Who Tell Us That, Really, It’s Only the “Haters” who Would Bring Up the President’s Birthday Sale the Actual Purpose Of The Parade is to Celebrate the Army’s Two-End-Fiftieth Anniversary.) The truth is that the Parade is the Least of it—an Empty show that is surely to be Quickly Forgotten Except in the District of Columbia Itself, where tens of Millions of Dollars Will have to be spent to repair the damage caused by heavy war weapons ripping his sidewalk. The plan for thousands of simultaneous anti-Trump protests “No Kings” across the country on Saturday means that the day is equally likely to remember an example of American tragic divisions at the moment that for its display of the uncontrolled power of a commander-in-chief.
It is on the front line in Los Angeles, rather than a revision stand at DC, where Trump seems to be tempted to make the jump of performative string to something more approaching the real thing. When demonstrations against increasingly heavy raids by agents from his internal security department degenerated there last weekend, the president rushed to do what his advisers had prevented him from trying during his first mandate – which ended in the army in uniform to repress a domestic political disturbance. Almost five years ago, on the day, on June 1, 2020, the prosecutor General Bill Barr, the defense secretary Mark Esper, and the president of the joint staff chiefs Mark Millery – Trump appointed all – staged demonstrations of black life which had risen through the country in the wake of the police of a black man, George Floyd. Trump has never ceased to regret this decision, and his quick decision to degenerate to Los Angeles looked like a kind of exorcism. The message? It is Trump without hindrance, erasing the persistent frustrations of his first mandate and is no longer limited by dissident votes in his own staff.
For the president, deployment in California is a political theater as irresistible as its parade; He forever played Richard Nixon in 1968, the candidate “Law and Order” who will save the American cities from the left riots. A problem for Trump with this vision is that the citizens of Los Angeles were not mostly copied with his plan and did not really burkey their own city center at the request of unleashed illegal-Aliennes hordes; Acts of violence and Waymo-Taxi burns which occurred, as scandalous, could easily be managed by the usual civil authorities as well as more peaceful forms of protest. Another obstacle difficult to grant to Trump is the federal courts, which will now examine if Trump had the right to cancel the Democratic Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and to order the deployments of thousands of the National Guard of the State, as well as seven hundred sea.
In a speech on Tuesday evening, Newsom denounced Trump’s decision as an “cheeky abuse”. But what struck me was Trump’s response and his officials, who warn not only that they can challenge the federal courts concerning California, but that this is the new model for them wherever they choose to use it in America. On Wednesday, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth on Wednesday, told Congress that he was ready to send troops to other cities if demonstrations were stifling there-“anywhere,” he said, “if necessary”. On the same day, Trump himself promised that “the very great force” would be willing against anyone who dared to protest against his parade, the first amendment would be apparently damned, and a level of aggressiveness really frightening towards the political opposition was easily obvious on Thursday, when he approached and briefly threatened one of the Senators of California, Alex Padilla, during the conference. Earlier in the day, Hegseth had refused to confirm that the administration would comply with any court decision against the deployment of Los Angeles. “We must not ask local judges to determine foreign policy or national security policy,” he said.
It is the real climbing – a federal government led by Trump which has now redefined national security to include the dissent of its policies by American citizens. The threats that animate this president the most are not those of malignant foreign actors but of “the enemy of the interior”. And he told us himself, even before the 2024 elections, whether people were careful or not.
Consider this exchange Thursday morning between Trump and Jack Posobiet, one of his supporters, who noted: “There are now more American troops deployed in Los Angeles than in Iraq and Syria. Is that why you voted? “
“Yes,” replied Trump, “in a landslide !!!”
During Trump 1.0, it is the infrastructure week that her white house would promise, although she has become a common joke when the legislation offered to update the American aging bridges, the roads, the tunnels, and others, does not materialize before the first year of Joe Biden. At least, Trump’s first administration has always felt the need to pursue certain conventional markers of political success; Talking about its plans for a bill on infrastructure was the legislative equivalent of the wearing of red, white and blue – bipartite, really popular, entirely American.
Eight years ago, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was Trump’s press secretary, the public spokesperson for these infrastructure-day-day announcements now. Now governor of the deep red Arkansas, she went to social networks this week to encourage Trump’s decision to send the troops to the objections of the director general of another state. “What is happening in California would never happen here in Arkansas because we appreciate the order on chaos,” she posted. Newsom quickly replied: “Your homicide rate is literally double California.”
What struck me in their back and forth is how it converted the abyss of truth in American politics. The reality itself is now so conditioned to political identity that, for a big band of supporters of Trump, regardless of the conditions in California: if Trump and his acolytes such as Sanders say that it is a landscape of hell of crime under invasion by foreign masses and “insurrectionists”, as it is the saying Trump when he appeared to strong Bragg on Tuesday, then it is necessary. It is true that Trump’s first mandate was also terrible, but I admit that I was more than a little nostalgic at the moment for these empty promises of bipartite legislation. He no longer even pretends; He doesn’t think he needs it. The line was crossed.
On Saturday, Trump may not present himself to his parade in full swing of Saddam; He is more likely to wear a suit and a red Maga Hat that the shades and the medal uniform of one of these thugs, like Kim Jong Un, which he admires so much. But I would say attention in the same way: all this dictator cosplay can, sooner or later, persuade him to try the real thing. Bless seventy-ninth, dear leader! ♦
