General Trump has entered the fray and this is just the beginning

Telegraph

a day ago

Donald Trump has long had a keen fascination with swashbuckling generals from the Second World War. His rally speeches are peppered with anecdotes about General Douglas MacArthur and he used a clip from one of his favourite war movies to open his event at Manhattan's Madison Square a week before last year's election.
'Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser,' says George C Scott, playing Gen George Patton in the 1970 movie Patton.
What could be more Trumpian?
The president's first administration was packed with generals and retired generals. Mr Trump made no secret of his admiration for their can-do attitude and straightforward command structure until, that is, he soured on their adherence to rules and legal norms.
This time around, his flood-the-zone strategy of bamboozling the media and Democratic opponents with a constant stream of executive orders, public comments, and proclamations could come from one of Patton's real-life quotes: 'As long as you attack them, they cannot find the time to attack you.'
This week, Mr Trump is leaning into his role of commander-in-chief in a much more literal sense.
He has deployed active service personnel as an arm of domestic policy to back his massive deportation push. As protests grew in response to immigration raids around Los Angeles, he took the highly unusual step of deploying National Guard troops at the weekend despite the opposition of the California governor.
On Tuesday he used a speech honouring soldiers to defend his decision against charges it was a politically motivated stunt.
'Generations of army heroes did not shed their blood on distant shores only to watch our country be destroyed by invasion and third-world lawlessness,' he said at the army base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
A day later, the first of 700 Marines arrived in Los Angeles.
And he has left open the possibility of going even further, using the Insurrection Act, which authorises the president to deploy military forces on American soil to suppress domestic violence in certain scenarios.
'If there's an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it. We'll see,' he said from the Oval Office.
And then there is Saturday's military parade.
More than 100 military vehicles and thousands of soldiers are set to roll or march down Constitution Avenue in front of the White House.
Black Hawk and Apache helicopters will fill the skies.
It will be the $50 million fulfillment of a dream Mr Trump has had since 2017, when he was a guest of Emmanuel Macron, the French president, at a Bastille Day parade. Hundreds of troops marching down the Champs-Élysées beneath plumes of red, white and blue smoke trailing behind fighter jets, left a deep impression on Mr Trump.
'It was one of the greatest parades I've ever seen,' he later said. 'We're going to have to try and top it.'
A parade during his visit to China in 2017 also got the Trump seal of approval. He called it 'magnificent'.
Then, he was quietly advised then that it would not be appropriate to parade the nation's military might through the capital. But like so much of his thwarted first-term agenda, he has spent the past four years staffing up with officials who can make his dreams come true.
Officially, Saturday's parade will mark the 250th birthday of the army. And it doesn't hurt that it falls on the 79th birthday of Mr Trump.
Critics say he is abusing the nation's armed forces for his own ends.
'He views the military as political props,' said John Bolton, who worked as Trump's national security adviser in his first term before falling out with him. 'He thinks they make him look good.'
The event could serve another purpose, illustrating how Mr Trump is bringing the nation's biggest and strongest institutions into line.
And as commander-in-chief he is the one to call the shots, illustrating his hold on power.
Members of Washington's diplomatic corps will be in the audience on Saturday.
'He just likes the pomp and circumstance,' said one, speaking on condition of anonymity.
'I don't see an attack on democracy. Mr Trump looks around at other leaders and thinks that this is the sort of thing that a head of state gets.'
In the meantime, polls suggest a limit to what he can do as commander-in-chief.
A new YouGov survey found that 47 per cent of Americans disapprove of deploying the Marines to Los Angeles, with only 34 per cent approving, despite other polls showing that voters approve of the broader deportation operation.
And while legal scholars will debate whether Mr Trump's decision to deploy troops stands up to scrutiny, and whether it breaches a federal law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prevents the use of American forces to enforce domestic laws, the president sees things in black and white.
He knows where the battle lines are drawn as he made clear in his Fort Bragg speech. He used highly partisan language to slam the Los Angeles protesters and to champion the armed forces.
'They're heroes. They're fighting for us,' he said. 'They're stopping an invasion, just like you'd stop an invasion.'
His armed forces are all part of Mr Trump's us-against-them view of the world.