Donald
Trump’s Dictator Cosplay
Just
how dangerous is the President’s week of militarized theatre?
June 12,
2025
Call it Donald
Trump’s Strongman Week. Over the course of just a few days, the
President has ordered the military into the streets of Los Angeles—over the
objections of California’s Democratic governor—to curb protests against his
immigration crackdown, appeared with cheering uniformed troops at what amounted
to a political rally, and planned to hold a military parade featuring the rare
spectacle of tanks rolling through the streets of Washington. Trump’s martial
rhetoric accompanying these militarized photo ops has portrayed a nation that
is all but on the brink of war—with itself.
That any of this is even happening
amounts to the most striking contrast possible with his first term, when Trump
craved similar displays of military might but found himself stymied by his own
senior officials, who balked, stalled, and, at times, outright disagreed with
his demands. In 2017, the President returned from an impressively bellicose
Bastille Day celebration in France determined to host his own version of a
military parade. It never took place, largely because the Pentagon’s leadership
and Trump’s White House chief of staff, a retired four-star marine general,
were adamantly opposed to such a display. In a passionate outburst that I
learned about several years later, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff at the time, Paul Selva, confronted Trump about it directly in
the Oval Office. Such a parade, he warned Trump, would be profoundly
un-American, “what dictators do.” But Trump, of course, wanted to do it anyway.
How telling, then, that the President
who, in his first term, was frustrated in his attempt to throw a
military-themed party for America is not only getting his parade this time but
doing it on his own birthday. (A mere coincidence, according to Trump’s defenders,
who tell us that, really, it’s only the “haters” who would bring up the
President’s birthday since the actual purpose of the parade is to celebrate the
Army’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary.) The truth is that the parade is
the least of it—an empty spectacle that is surely to be quickly forgotten
except in the District of Columbia itself, where tens of millions of dollars
will have to be spent to repair the damage done by heavy weapons of war ripping
up its pavement. The plan for thousands of simultaneous anti-Trump “No Kings”
protests around the country on Saturday means that the day is just as likely
expected to be remembered as an example of America’s tragic divisions right now
as for its display of a Commander-in-Chief’s unchecked power.
It’s on the front lines in Los
Angeles, rather than from a reviewing stand in D.C., where Trump seems tempted
to take the leap from performative strongmanism to something more approaching
the real thing. When protests against increasingly heavy-handed raids by agents
of his Department of Homeland Security escalated there last weekend, the
President rushed to do what his advisers had stopped him from attempting in his
first term—sending in the uniformed military to quell a domestic political
disturbance. Nearly five years ago to the day, on June 1, 2020, Attorney
General Bill Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—Trump appointees all—teamed up to talk him out of
invoking the Insurrection Act and mobilizing the military to stop the Black
Lives Matter protests that had sprung up across the nation in the wake of the
police killing of an unarmed Black man, George
Floyd, in Minneapolis. Trump never stopped regretting that decision,
and his quick move to escalate in Los Angeles looked like an exorcism of sorts.
The message? This is Trump unfettered, erasing the lingering frustrations from
his first term and no longer constrained by any dissenting voices on his own
staff.
For the President, the deployment in
California is political theatre just as irresistible as his parade; he is
forever playing Richard Nixon in 1968, the “law and order” candidate who will
save America’s cities from left-wing riots. One problem for Trump with this
vision is that the citizens of Los Angeles mostly failed to coöperate with his
plan and did not actually torch their own downtown at the behest of rampaging
illegal-alien hordes; the acts of violence and Waymo-taxi burning that did
occur, however outrageous, could easily have been handled by the usual civilian
authorities along with more peaceful forms of protest. Another hard-to-overlook
obstacle for Trump are the federal courts, which will now consider whether
Trump had the right to overrule California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, and order the deployments of
thousands of the state’s National Guard, along with seven hundred marines.
In a speech on Tuesday night, Newsom
denounced Trump’s move as a “brazen abuse of power.” But what’s struck me is
the response by Trump and his officials, who are warning not only that they may
defy the federal courts regarding California but that this is the new template
for them wherever they choose to use it in America. On Wednesday, Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth testified to Congress that he
was prepared to send troops to other cities if protests spread
there—“anywhere,” he said, “if necessary.” That same day, Trump himself
promised “very big force” would be arrayed against anyone who dared to protest
his parade, the First Amendment apparently be damned, and a really scary level
of aggressiveness toward the political opposition was readily apparent on
Thursday, when federal agents tackled and briefly handcuffed one of
California’s senators, Alex Padilla, as he tried to shout a question at Trump’s
Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, during a press conference. Earlier
in the day, Hegseth had refused to confirm that the Administration would comply
with any court ruling against the Los Angeles deployment. “We should not have
local judges determining foreign policy or national-security policy,” he said.
This is the real escalation—a
Trump-led federal government that has now redefined national security to
include dissent from its policies by American citizens. The threats that most
animate this President are those not from malign foreign actors but from “the enemy from within.”
And he told us so himself, even before the 2024 election, whether people paid
attention to it or not.
Consider this exchange on Thursday
morning between Trump and Jack Posobiec, one of his highly online supporters,
who noted, “There are now more U.S. troops deployed to Los Angeles than in Iraq
and Syria. Is this what you voted for?”
“YES,” Trump replied, “IN A
LANDSLIDE!!!”
During Trump 1.0, it was
Infrastructure Week that his White House used to promise, though it became a
running joke when proposed legislation to update America’s aging bridges,
roads, tunnels, and the like never materialized until Joe
Biden’s first year in office. At least Trump’s first Administration
still felt a need to pursue some conventional markers of political success;
talking about its plans for an infrastructure bill was the legislative
equivalent of wearing red, white, and blue—safely bipartisan, genuinely
popular, all-American.
Eight years ago, Sarah Huckabee
Sanders was Trump’s press secretary, the public mouthpiece for those
Infrastructure-Week-any-day-now announcements. Now governor of deep-red
Arkansas, she took to social media this week to cheer Trump’s decision to send
in the troops over the objections of another state’s chief executive. “What’s
happening in California would never happen here in Arkansas because we value
order over chaos,” she posted. Newsom swiftly responded, “Your homicide rate is
literally DOUBLE California’s.”
What struck me about their
back-and-forth was how concisely it revealed the truth chasm in American
politics. Reality itself is now so conditioned on political identity that, for
a large swath of Trump’s supporters, it does not matter what conditions in California
actually are: if Trump and his acolytes such as Sanders say that it is a
crime-ridden hellscape under invasion by foreign masses and native-born
“insurrectionists,” as Trump put it when he appeared at Fort Bragg on Tuesday,
then that is what it must be. It’s true that Trump’s first term was also
terrible, but I admit to being more than a little nostalgic right now for those
empty promises of bipartisan legislation. He’s not even pretending anymore; he
doesn’t think he needs to. This is the line that has been crossed.
On Saturday, Trump may not show up to
his parade in full Saddam regalia; he’s more likely to wear a suit and a
red MAGA hat than the
shades and medal-bedecked uniform of one of those thugs, such as Kim Jong Un,
whom he so admires. But I’d say watch out just the same: All this dictator
cosplay may, sooner or later, persuade him to try out the real thing. Happy
seventy-ninth, Dear Leader! ♦
