Trump loves playing toy soldiers, but it is not a game
Conflating patriotism and division with personality cult, Donald Trump taking the salute as the US Army celebrated its 250th anniversary cunningly serves to give his addicted supporters a much-needed fix as America threatens to split at the seams thanks to his bewildering presidency.
Some 6000 soldiers with weapons marched in the massive grand parade through Washington streets alongside mounted cavalry, 50 military aircraft and 60-ton M1 Abrams battle tanks, while overhead a flyover of bombers, helicopters and vintage warplanes also coincided with the president's 79th birthday. People marching honour the history of the men or women who serve; the thunder of rolling metal is the expression of power. The day inevitably turned the memorial into a Trump rally.
Few seemed to notice the ironies: Trump glories in military might, yet was medically exempt from serving in Vietnam in 1968 after a foot doctor and friendly family business associate diagnosed heel spurs; he later attacked Republican rival John McCain, a Navy flyer and POW at the Hanoi Hilton, saying, 'he's not a war hero. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured '; Meanwhile, the $69 million parade comes just months after Trump slashed funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Meanwhile, as Trump bathed in birthday adulation, protests erupted across the US with the 'No Kings' group adding a personal anti-authoritarian slap in the face to the president for defying court orders and questionable deportations.
The Army celebrations were surely tainted by Trump's decision to send US Marines and the National Guard against fellow Americans protesting raids on immigrant communities in California the week before, and his subsequent threats to use the military against protesters in Washington exercising their First Amendment right. 'These are people who hate our country .… if any protesters want to come out, they will be met with very big force,' he warned.
Spectacle is often the language of empire, and just as the Romans did, Trump used the pageantry of the grand military parade to remind Americans who ruled the world and who was in charge. Trump is pushing a myth that America has fallen from greatness. Yet his empire runs hundreds of military bases across the globe, ensures policies preserve US economic hegemony and exports American ideals.
The late Jimmy Carter in 2019 told Trump during his first term as president how China has not wasted a single penny on war and was ahead of a US that had squandered $3 trillion on military spending and was 'the most warlike nation in the history of the world,' because of a tendency to try to force others to 'adopt our American principles'.
But Trump replaced bite with bark and threw the switch to vaudeville while his supporters lapped up his threats to invade Canada, Mexico, Panama and Greenland and promises to end wars in Ukraine-Russia and Gaza. But when the US Army marched down Constitution Avenue yesterday, in the rubble of Gaza, Israel or Iran, nobody sang Happy Birthday Mr President.
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