The New Yorker:

Just how dangerous is the President’s week of militarized theatre?

By Susan B. Glasser

Call it Donald Trump’s Strongman Week. Over the course of just a few days, the President has ordered the military into the streets of Los Angeles—over the objections of California’s Democratic governor—to curb protests against his immigration crackdown, appeared with cheering uniformed troops at what amounted to a political rally, and planned to hold a military parade featuring the rare spectacle of tanks rolling through the streets of Washington. Trump’s martial rhetoric accompanying these militarized photo ops has portrayed a nation that is all but on the brink of war—with itself.

That any of this is even happening amounts to the most striking contrast possible with his first term, when Trump craved similar displays of military might but found himself stymied by his own senior officials, who balked, stalled, and, at times, outright disagreed with his demands. In 2017, the President returned from an impressively bellicose Bastille Day celebration in France determined to host his own version of a military parade. It never took place, largely because the Pentagon’s leadership and Trump’s White House chief of staff, a retired four-star marine general, were adamantly opposed to such a display. In a passionate outburst that I learned about several years later, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, Paul Selva, confronted Trump about it directly in the Oval Office. Such a parade, he warned Trump, would be profoundly un-American, “what dictators do.” But Trump, of course, wanted to do it anyway.

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