Neoconservative writer Bill Kristol said he spies hope for the U.S. military, despite President Donald Trump’s intense effort to turn it into another wing of the White House.
Trump’s military pageant, which Kristol called the "saddest military junta parade" in history, ‘was a flop,’ And not just in failing to draw viewers to Washington.
“[A]s both the appearance of the parade and reports from within the military suggest, neither the soldiers forced to trudge down Constitution Avenue nor their senior officers forced to organize the event seemed to have any enthusiasm for Trump’s spectacle,” Kristol said.
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Despite Trump’s every effort to screen military audiences at his events against both liberal inclinations and muffin-top, there appears to be “resistance in the military for Trump’s project of politicizing it,” said Kristol. People close to active-duty service members tell Kristol they and their friends “privately expressed distaste” for Trump’s parade and what it signified.
“You can see the fissures elsewhere,” said Kristol. “Just contrast the pathetic posturing of Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, in his testimony before Congress this week with the dignified bearing and careful statements of the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine.”
At the hearing, Hegseth defended his decision to order troops to provide security during federal immigration raids in Los Angeles, telling senators it's about “maintaining law and order.” Hegseth could not identify the specific provision giving him the constitutional authority to deploy active-duty Marines to the protests, but he repeated Trump’s argument that “there has been an invasion” of migrants entering the country without legal permission. And he said the protests in Los Angeles could spread to other areas.
But “Gen. Caine was careful to reiterate the importance of the non-political status of the military, and made clear when asked that the presence of immigrants in the United States was not an ‘invasion,’” Kristol said. “And he did so while sitting right next to Hegseth.”
“Perhaps that guardrail against Trump’s project of usurpation has even been strengthened by a kind of revulsion at what [soldiers have] seen over the last week,” Kristol added, from the unnecessary deployment to the streets of Los Angeles to Trump’s unseemly speech at Fort Bragg to what Michael Wood, a young Marine combat veteran from Texas, called on X “this silly Belarus-style parade.”
Read the full Bulwark report at this link.