Trump: Making the military into a 'partisan militia'?

In the space of a few days last week, President Trump "politicized the military," said The Washington Post in an editorial. And "it wasn't just the parade." Yes, the procession of troops, tanks, and artillery that rattled through Washington in nominal celebration of the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary—but before a president who just happened to be celebrating his own 79th birthday—was a pointless show of "muscle-flexing." Americans could shrug off that sparsely attended pageant, which cost up to $45 million to stage, if not for the fact that it came just days after Trump sent 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 Marines to help quell immigration protests in Los Angeles, over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Presidents have deployed troops before on U.S. soil, but always as a "regrettable last resort" in times of grave civil unrest, not gleefully, to put down mild disturbances arising from protests against their own policies. Worst of all was Trump's de facto "MAGA rally" at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, said Ed Kilgore in New York magazine. While vendors sold MAGA hats outside, Trump got a crowd of enlisted troops—prescreened for political allegiance—to "cheer him and boo his enemies," including Newsom and former President Joe Biden. The president's "self-glorifying" boorishness, like his authoritarian yearnings, is not exactly a secret at this point. But with these concrete steps to turn our "politically neutral military" into a "partisan militia," Trump has "crossed a pretty bright red line."

It's hard to overstate the danger here, said Jeet Heer in The Nation. Those who downplay the threat of a Trump dictatorship like to point out that beyond the "annoying goons" of the Proud Boys, he lacks a "mobilized mass movement" like the Brownshirts who backed Adolf Hitler. But who needs a paramilitary when you have an actual military? The Founders saw this coming, said Ruth Marcus in The New Yorker. "The means of defense against foreign danger," as James Madison put it, "have been always the instruments of tyranny at home." Trump is no Madisonian scholar, but last week he put it beyond doubt that "tyranny at home is what he's after."

Trump will be Trump, said Mike Nelson in The Dispatch. He's been trying to blur "the line between the military and politics" since he first took office in 2017. But it's disturbing, and new, to see "service members join in" with that effort, as they did at Fort Bragg, where the crowd lapped up Trump's false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. "Young soldiers will make mistakes," said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic, but when they do, senior officers must speak up. The scenes at Fort Bragg were "obscene," but most chilling, in their aftermath, is "the silence of the generals."

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The footage from Fort Bragg is "disturbing," said Max Boot in The Washington Post, but the Washington parade left the opposite impression. Trump doubtless wanted "a menacing, goose-stepping parade à la Moscow or Pyongyang." What he got instead was a cheerful tribute to the Army's history, delivered by 6,000 troops, many of them women or minorities, who walked together but not in lockstep, "smiling and waving at the spectators." Trump is up against the fact that political neutrality has been "a bedrock principle among the ranks" for the past two and a half centuries, said Zack Beauchamp in Vox. The generals have been quiet, and the troops have so far followed Trump's orders. But the more aggressive he gets in trying to use the military for domestic repression, "the more likely there is to be resistance. At least theoretically."