Trump's use of the military as props is despicable

The top news item about the president’s recent address at Fort Bragg was that the Army vetted the soldiers who appeared behind Donald Trump so that only his supporters were seen in video of the event.

The second news item was that none of them were fat.

All that is terrible enough, but it isn’t the worst part.

The worst part is what the event suggests about the enduring appeal of Trumpism, which is to say, the power of America’s totalitarian drift.

Is it temporary or permanent? Will it die with Trump?

The president’s public breakup with billionaire Elon Musk seemed to suggest it might. Writer Daniel Roberts told me recently that it exposed the fragility deep in the heart of the Trump coalition.

“Without Trump as a unifying figure (and, again, I use ‘unifying’ loosely), it has always seemed obvious to me that this coalition collapses,” Dan said. “They might all still vote Republican, but without Trump, it’s going to be constant internecine warfare between them.”

But then, less than a week later, Musk relented, saying that he went too far. The Trump coalition may be more resilient than we think.

Then there’s Fort Bragg.

It was basically a campaign rally featuring all the familiar gripes and grievances. The difference was the audience, men and women in uniform who enthusiastically cheered and jeered. Trump slandered Joe Biden. He smeared American cities. He railed against “wokeness.”

And they roared in response.

The backdrop, of course, was Los Angeles. The president had dispatched 500 Marines. He commandeered 4,000 of California’s National Guard. ICE and Border Patrol are acting like the president’s secret police, snatching people in the night, attacking citizens for expressing their right of free speech, wearing masks to hide their identity and prevent any attempt at accountability. And officials are using the language of warfare to describe their intended goals.

“We are not going away,” Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem said. “We are staying here to liberate [Los Angeles] from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

This is in addition to the hard-to-pin-down sense that politics is coming to an end and that disagreements will be settled by force. This sense has been ambient, but it snapped into hard focus yesterday. Instead of answering questions raised by US Senator Alex Padilla during a press briefing, Noem had him thrown out and handcuffed.

Liberals looked on that moment in disbelief in the same way they disbelieve the regime can accomplish what it’s setting out to do, namely, making America white again. The country is just too diverse, liberals tell themselves. It can’t get rid of millions of people. For that reason, state violence in LA is really the outcome of its impotence.

Yet the president is reportedly planning to expand the use of the Guard in a broader immigration crackdown. In his Fort Bragg speech, he smears Los Angeles, calling it a “trash heap,” invoking the memory of “enemies within” that are, he has said, worse than enemies abroad.

And they whooped and hollered, like the president’s personal army.

Then there’s the fact that Trump is spending tens of millions of dollars on a military parade this weekend, on his birthday, in the wake of his regime’s illegal impoundment of congressionally approved money for everything from cancer research to public libraries. And if you have a problem with the parade, he said, forget about expressing dissent.

Any protest will be met with “a very heavy force,” he said.

If you think handcuffing Padilla was bad, just wait.

“Understand: Nothing Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America,” D. Earl Stephens told me. “Everything Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America. Will he succeed?

Earl publishes the newsletter Enough Already and is a regular contributor to Raw Story. “We are at the most dangerous juncture in America since the beginning of the Civil War,” he told me Thursday.