Donald
Trump’s Projecting Panic, Not Power
The president’s deployment of troops
to LA and parading of tanks in DC look like attempts to appear in control even
as his administration spirals.
June 10, 2025
The
Trump administration’s efforts to show strength grew more fevered this past
weekend, with Donald Trump deploying the National Guard to Los
Angeles to quell protests against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agency’s detention and deportation campaigns. In sending in the troops,
as Tom Cotton urged during the
George Floyd protests, Trump got a chance to flex his muscles and create a standoff with a highly visible liberal
foe, California governor Gavin Newsom; he may next take the
more extreme step of invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807.
At the same time, Trump is busy planning a lavish Flag Day
celebration-slash-79th birthday party set for this coming weekend in
Washington, a massive military parade that will feature 7
million pounds of tanks, fighting vehicles, and weaponry, as well as several
thousand soldiers. The June 14 event, ostensibly being held to honor the Army’s
250th birthday (but also falling on Trump’s own), will require more than 18 miles of fencing to be put up in the
capital.
Despite their being grand displays of military might, these
actions, if you look closely, don’t seem like those of an administration tired
of winning. And they come as the Trump administration has been awash in bad
news, of both the policy and personnel variety. The country is still reeling
from Trump and Elon Musk’s epic blowup, which reportedly saw the
president call his biggest donor a “big-time drug addict.”
Meanwhile, Musk endorsed a call for Trump’s impeachment and alleged that he was
mentioned in files related to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, suggesting
“that is the real reason they have not been made public.”
Eventually, Musk appeared to delete those tweets, but for
those of us able to remember Trump 1.0, this ugly episode felt oddly familiar
and like a death knell, essentially, to the fallacy that Trump 2.0 would
somehow function like a normal administration. Trump and company came in this
year with a right-wing policy playbook, Project 2025, and the president
fired off a flurry of executive orders in dizzying fashion.
But the public has shown its disapproval of Trump’s
policies, while the courts have kept the White House in check, something the
GOP-led Congress has failed to do. The recent return of Kilmar
Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man illegally deported to El Salvador, came
after top officials said he would not be brought back to the United States,
with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying
there was “no scenario” in which that would happen. “This is a victory for the
Supreme Court and the rule of law over a reluctant executive branch,” wrote the
conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board.
Even some of Trump’s supporters are bristling at his
immigration enforcement actions, with Florida state senator Ileana
Garcia, who cofounded the group Latinas for Trump, calling them “unacceptable
and inhumane.” Yes, even some people who backed Trump, whose nominating
convention featured supporters waving “Mass Deportation Now!” signs, are
bothered by the cruelty on display.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Trump’s big, beautiful (bullshit)
bill is facing opposition from within the president’s own party. Musk, of
course, called the bill a “disgusting abomination,” as it’s expected to grow
the deficit by more than $2 trillion. And as Politico noted, he “threatened to
target or primary Republican incumbents in the midterm elections.”
While there’s plenty of speculation that the Tesla chief’s
unaired complaint is that the bill also eliminates EV credits, the same
can’t be said when it comes to Senator Rand Paul, a Republican
who also opposes the bill. Trump
adviser Stephen Miller, who reportedly “laid into” top immigration
officials for not arresting and deporting enough people, took some time during
his Sunday tweetstorm about the “invaders” in Los Angeles to criticize Paul. If Democrats are smart, they
will exploit this tension: The BBB is a uniquely bad piece of legislation that
will grow the deficit and cut funding for Medicaid and food
benefits for children and adults.
Elsewhere,
Trump may want to stimulate the economy, but so far his tariff gambit has
seemed to only unnerve the markets, with Wall Street joking that Trump
Always Chickens Out. As the dollar grows weaker, there is talk of the currency
collapsing almost entirely, a doomsday scenario noted by The Economist: “A
much weaker dollar and lower prices for American bonds and stocks would force a
rebalancing by reducing the size of America’s external liabilities relative to
its external assets. Tighter financial conditions would discourage consumption,
whipping the current account into line no matter how uncomfortable such a
sudden adjustment would prove.” For now, Americans are largely being held
hostage by a kind of mad king who is enacting Schrödinger’s tariffs.
As Trump has troops facing off with protesters—or parading
down Constitution Avenue—it’s worth remembering that his authoritarian impulses
are dangerous and threaten to unravel this whole American experiment. But such
attempts to project power can be seen as coming from a place of weakness, with
the administration bungling its way from scandals like Signalgate to a
reality-show war of words between the president and the world’s richest man.
Yes, Trump can create a spectacle, but he can’t blind us to what’s behind it.
