America's first military parade in decades sees US marching into dark chapter of history

Irish Examiner

15 hours ago

Today, Washington DC will wake up to its first military parade in decades.
The US capitol will rumble with the sounds of armoured tanks, marching soldiers, and the roar of military aircraft.
The parade, which is being held on US president Donald Trump's 79th birthday, is ostensibly to mark the 250th anniversary of the US Army.
Sometimes a parade is just a parade and any resemblance to the proclivities of would-be despots living or deceased is, as they say in Hollywood, entirely unintentional.
But it's difficult, given the events of the past week, not to see today's flex of military muscle as a metaphor for the authoritarian creep that threatens US democracy in ways large and small - and a warning to those who would defy it.
On Wednesday night, Trump attended the opening night of Les Misérables at the Kennedy Centre, where he has also installed himself as cultural commander in chief, apparently oblivious to the irony of his fondness for a musical about the sans culottes struggle against authoritarians.
People take photos with a tank parked on the National Mall in Washington during preparations for the upcoming military parade commemorating the Army's 250th anniversary. Photo: AP/Rod Lamkey, Jr.
'Viva Los Angeles!' a member of the audience shouted amid cheers and boos.
Trump's executive order provides for the deployment of the US military across the US as he sees fit.
His decision to invoke an obscure provision of a little-known law may provide a sufficient, albeit flimsy legal fig leaf to withstand California governor Gavin Newsom's legal challenge, paving the way for the deployment of the US military across the United States, even as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency ratchets up raids and detentions in a bid to meet its unfeasible 3,000 detentions a day quota.
It was always going to be Los Angeles first. The state of California and America's second largest city have long been in Trump's crosshairs.
No other state is home to as many immigrants, documented and undocumented. And no state is more innovative or more prosperous; it recently bypassed Japan to become the world's fourth largest economy.
California has wrestled with inequality and unrest, racism and political extremes throughout its history, but for 150 years America's wealthiest and most populous state has doubled as the petri dish that fuelled almost every surge in America's economic fortunes.
From Levi's jeans to Mickey Mouse, from the movie industry to the internet, from smartphones to electric cars to CAT scans, California has been synonymous with creativity and innovation.
The US Capitol is seen through security fencing set up on the National Mall in Washington during preparations for the upcoming military parade commemorating the Army's 250th anniversary. Photo: AP/Rod Lamkey, Jr.
It's where surgeons first removed an appendix through a mouth and a gallbladder through a bellybutton.
Cheap immigrant labour has allowed its construction, agriculture and hospitality industries to flourish, while progressive policies laid the groundwork for investment in technology and green energy.
Now it seems it may become the testing ground for Trump's strongman tactics.
A combination of border proximity, liberal policies, and a labour market that relies on migrants both documented and undocumented has contributed to California's disproportionately high migrant population.
Los Angeles county is home to 10 million people of whom almost four million live in Los Angeles city.
Around 3.5 million are first-generation immigrants and of these an estimated 800,000 to 950,000 are undocumented.
Many live in 'mixed status' households where one or more family members may be legally working in the US while others are undocumented.
They are concentrated in working-class neighbourhoods like Paramount, which along with a downtown clothing wholesaler, was the site of the initial ICE raids that triggered the protests that prompted Trump to deploy of US troops onto its streets.
Protests and clashes
Trump's decision to deploy the military marks the first time in 60 years that a US President federalised the National Guard without consulting, much less obtaining the consent, of its governor.
The last time it happened Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights activists against a virulently racist governor and police force.
The city bears decades-old psychic scars from riots in the 1960s and the 1990s when mob violence and mayhem took a savage toll on the city and left an abiding mistrust of the Los Angeles Police Department, which has a long and undistinguished history of corruption and racism.
Recently, however, community policing initiatives have led to significant drops in violent crime in some of Los Angeles's most dangerous neighbourhoods.
Predictably, the protests against ICE led to clashes with the LAPD and re-inflamed tensions, with thugs setting fire to Waymo cars and providing the sort of made-for-FOX-News images that Trump seized upon to retrospectively justify his overreach.
Trump's narrative
LA was "trash", he said.
Willing supplicants fanned out across pro-MAGA media outlets peddling the narrative that the military prevented an all-out conflagration, protecting ICE agents and federal buildings from marauding hordes of homegrown anarchists, leftists, and communists who are simultaneously seeking to destroy the US from within, whilst preventing the rounding up and deporting of an invasion of foreign terrorists, drug cartel members, murderers and child traffickers.
It's a narrative that Trump has pushed to justify his trampling of the presidential norms that have thus far protected and nurtured the American experiment as it approaches its 250th anniversary.
A protester holds a sign as Border Patrol personnel in riot gear and gas masks stand guard outside an industrial park in Paramount, California last Saturday. Photo: AP/Eric Thayer
While previous presidents from both parties have dinged the guardrails of democracy in furtherance of their aims, none has attempted the sort of blatant transgressions of the past five months.
His Department of Justice is a willing and eager accomplice, defending the absurdity of deploying more US troops to Los Angeles than is currently spread across Iraq and Syria to prevent a resurgence of ISIS – just hours after the LAPD police chief issued a press statement acknowledging the peaceful nature of the protests.
Protests spread
At the time of writing, protests had spread across the United States to other cities with significant migrant populations – Denver, St Louis, Chicago, San Antonio, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia.
Most are cities in blue states but protests also broke out in Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania – four of the six swing states that Biden won in 2020 and Trump claimed back in 2024, both candidates doing so with the narrowest of margins.
Trump may not be particularly bothered by the political impact of his flirtation with authoritarianism in the 2026 midterms – or indeed the 2028 presidential election. Thus far, his presidency seems to be primarily an exercise in self-enrichment and retribution.
But even Congressional Republicans who have drowned their political principles in a murky bath of expediency and denial are aware that, to paraphrase Elon Musk, Trump has 3.5 years left while the GOP presumably hopes to match and exceed Musk's prophesied expiry date of 40 years hence.
The border crisis
The current crisis has its roots in part at least in Joe Biden's reckless border policies.
The Biden administration did little to curb or control the post-covid surge of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers.
When he and the Democrats finally acted, delivering a comprehensive bipartisan border reform bill in early 2024, it was deliberately tanked by Trump's Congressional lackeys, who knew a solution to America's decades-old border crisis would stall the engine that was powering his 2024 comeback campaign.
Polls have shown so far that the public remains largely on Trump's side.
A majority of Americans prefer the performative hyper kinetics of his immigration policies to the listlessness of the Biden era.
But outside the far-right faction of the GOP, that support is contingent upon the belief that mass deportations will lead to increased prosperity for American citizens, to cheaper homes, lower crime rates, and better paying jobs.
It's unclear to what degree and for how long America will remain willing to tolerate chaos and the suppression of individual rights if prices keep rising and Trump fails to deliver on his side of the economic Faustian pact that America has entered.
Last week may be just the beginning of a dark new chapter in US history.