Trump's military parade is a warning

is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
Donald Trump's military parade in Washington this weekend — a show of force in the capital that just happens to take place on the president's birthday — smacks of authoritarian Dear Leader-style politics (even though Trump actually got the idea after attending the 2017 Bastille Day parade in Paris).
Yet as disconcerting as the imagery of tanks rolling down Constitution Avenue will be, it's not even close to Trump's most insidious assault on the US military's historic and democratically essential nonpartisan ethos.
In fact, it's not even the most worrying thing he's done this week.
On Tuesday, the president gave a speech at Fort Bragg, an Army base home to Special Operations Command. While presidential speeches to soldiers are not uncommon — rows of uniformed troops make a great backdrop for a foreign policy speech — they generally avoid overt partisan attacks and campaign-style rhetoric. The soldiers, for their part, are expected to be studiously neutral, laughing at jokes and such, but remaining fully impassive during any policy conversation.
That's not what happened at Fort Bragg. Trump's speech was a partisan tirade that targeted 'radical left' opponents ranging from Joe Biden to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. He celebrated his deployment of Marines to Los Angeles, proposed jailing people for burning the American flag, and called on soldiers to be 'aggressive' toward the protesters they encountered.
The soldiers, for their part, cheered Trump and booed his enemies — as they were seemingly expected to. Reporters at Military.com, a military news service, uncovered internal communications from 82nd Airborne leadership suggesting that the crowd was screened for their political opinions.
'If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,' one note read.
To call this unusual is an understatement. I spoke with four different experts on civil-military relations, two of whom teach at the Naval War College, about the speech and its implications. To a person, they said it was a step towards politicizing the military with no real precedent in modern American history.
'That is, I think, a really big red flag because it means the military's professional ethic is breaking down internally,' says Risa Brooks, a professor at Marquette University. 'Its capacity to maintain that firewall against civilian politicization may be faltering.'
This may sound alarmist — like an overreading of a one-off incident — but it's part of a bigger pattern. The totality of Trump administration policies, ranging from the parade in Washington to the LA troop deployment to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's firing of high-ranking women and officers of color, suggests a concerted effort to erode the military's professional ethos and turn it into an institution subservient to the Trump administration's whims. This is a signal policy aim of would-be dictators, who wish to head off the risk of a coup and ensure the armed forces' political reliability if they are needed to repress dissent in a crisis.
Steve Saideman, a professor at Carleton University, put together a list of eight different signs that a military is being politicized in this fashion. The Trump administration has exhibited six out of the eight.
'The biggest theme is that we are seeing a number of checks on the executive fail at the same time — and that's what's making individual events seem more alarming than they might otherwise,' says Jessica Blankshain, a professor at the Naval War College (speaking not for the military but in a personal capacity).
That Trump is trying to politicize the military does not mean he has succeeded. There are several signs, including Trump's handpicked chair of the Joint Chiefs repudiating the president's claims of a migrant invasion during congressional testimony, that the US military is resisting Trump's politicization.
But the events in Fort Bragg and Washington suggest that we are in the midst of a quiet crisis in civil-military relations in the United States — one whose implications for American democracy's future could well be profound.
The Trump crisis in civil-military relations, explained
A military is, by sheer fact of its existence, a threat to any civilian government. If you have an institution that controls the overwhelming bulk of weaponry in a society, it always has the physical capacity to seize control of the government at gunpoint. A key question for any government is how to convince the armed forces that they cannot or should not take power for themselves.
Democracies typically do this through a process called 'professionalization.' Soldiers are rigorously taught to think of themselves as a class of public servants, people trained to perform a specific job within defined parameters. Their ultimate loyalty is not to their generals or even individual presidents, but rather to the people and the constitutional order.
Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard political scientist, is the canonical theorist of a professional military. In his book The Soldier and the State, he described optimal professionalization as a system of 'objective control': one in which the military retains autonomy in how they fight and plan for wars while deferring to politicians on whether and why to fight in the first place. In effect, they stay out of the politicians' affairs while the politicians stay out of theirs.
The idea of such a system is to emphasize to the military that they are professionals: Their responsibility isn't deciding when to use force, but only to conduct operations as effectively as possible once ordered to engage in them. There is thus a strict firewall between military affairs, on the one hand, and policy-political affairs on the other.
Typically, the chief worry is that the military breaches this bargain: that, for example, a general starts speaking out against elected officials' policies in ways that undermine civilian control. This is not a hypothetical fear in the United States, with the most famous such example being Gen. Douglas MacArthur's insubordination during the Korean War. Thankfully, not even MacArthur attempted the worst-case version of military overstep — a coup.
But in backsliding democracies like the modern United States, where the chief executive is attempting an anti-democratic power grab, the military poses a very different kind of threat to democracy — in fact, something akin to the exact opposite of the typical scenario.
In such cases, the issue isn't the military inserting itself into politics but rather the civilians dragging them into it in ways that upset the democratic political order. The worst-case scenario is that the military acts on presidential directives to use force against domestic dissenters, destroying democracy not by ignoring civilian orders, but by following them.
There are two ways to arrive at such a worst-case scenario, both of which are in evidence in the early days of Trump 2.0.
First is politicization: an intentional attack on the constraints against partisan activity inside the professional ranks.
Many of Pete Hegseth's major moves as secretary of defense fit this bill, including his decisions to fire nonwhite and female generals seen as politically unreliable and his effort to undermine the independence of the military's lawyers. The breaches in protocol at Fort Bragg are both consequences and causes of politicization: They could only happen in an environment of loosened constraint, and they might encourage more overt political action if gone unpunished.
The second pathway to breakdown is the weaponization of professionalism against itself. Here, Trump exploits the military's deference to politicians by ordering it to engage in undemocratic (and even questionably legal) activities.
In practice, this looks a lot like the LA deployments, and, more specifically, the lack of any visible military pushback. While the military readily agreeing to deployments is normally a good sign — that civilian control is holding — these aren't normal times. And this isn't a normal deployment, but rather one that comes uncomfortably close to the military being ordered to assist in repressing overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against executive abuses of power.
'It's really been pretty uncommon to use the military for law enforcement,' says David Burbach, another Naval War College professor (also speaking personally). 'This is really bringing the military into frontline law enforcement when. … these are really not huge disturbances.'
This, then, is the crisis: an incremental and slow-rolling effort by the Trump administration to erode the norms and procedures designed to prevent the military from being used as a tool of domestic repression.
Is it time to panic?
Among the experts I spoke with, there was consensus that the military's professional and nonpartisan ethos was weakening. This isn't just because of Trump, but his terms — the first to a degree, and now the second acutely — are major stressors.
Yet there was no consensus on just how much military nonpartisanship has eroded — that is, how close we are to a moment when the US military might be willing to follow obviously authoritarian orders.
For all its faults, the US military's professional ethos is a really important part of its identity and self-conception. While few soldiers may actually read Sam Huntington or similar scholars, the general idea that they serve the people and the republic is a bedrock principle among the ranks. There is a reason why the United States has never, in over 250 years of governance, experienced a military coup — or even come particularly close to one.
In theory, this ethos should also galvanize resistance to Trump's efforts at politicization. Soldiers are not unthinking automatons: While they are trained to follow commands, they are explicitly obligated to refuse illegal orders, even coming from the president. The more aggressive Trump's efforts to use the military as a tool of repression gets, the more likely there is to be resistance.
Or, at least theoretically.
The truth is that we don't really know how the US military will respond to a situation like this. Like so many of Trump's second-term policies, their efforts to bend the military to their will are unprecedented — actions with no real parallel in the modern history of the American military. Experts can only make informed guesses, based on their sense of US military culture as well as comparisons to historical and foreign cases.
For this reason, there are probably only two things we can say with confidence.
First, what we've seen so far is not yet sufficient evidence to declare that the military is in Trump's thrall. The signs of decay are too limited to ground any conclusions that the longstanding professional norm is entirely gone.
'We have seen a few things that are potentially alarming about erosion of the military's non-partisan norm. But not in a way that's definitive at this point,' Blankshain says.
Second, the stressors on this tradition are going to keep piling on. Trump's record makes it exceptionally clear that he wants the military to serve him personally — and that he, and Hegseth, will keep working to make it so. This means we really are in the midst of a quiet crisis, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.
'The fact that he's getting the troops to cheer for booing Democratic leaders at a time when there's actually [a deployment to] a blue city and a blue state…he is ordering the troops to take a side,' Saideman says. 'There may not be a coherent plan behind this. But there are a lot of things going on that are all in the same direction.'

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Bloomberg

19 minutes ago

• Bloomberg

Thai Premier Won't Quit to Save Government, Ruling Party Says

Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra will not resign or dissolve parliament, her party said Saturday, amid reports the leader may step down to keep the ruling coalition in power and to end a political crisis triggered by comments she had made that were critical of the army. Speculation that Paetongtarn would accept proposals from coalition parties to quit or dissolve parliament after the passage of the budget bill 'are completely untrue,' Sorawong Thienthong, secretary-general of Pheu Thai Party, said in a post on Facebook.

The Hill

22 minutes ago

• The Hill

Beijing official overseeing Hong Kong warns of persisting national security threats

HONG KONG (AP) — A top Beijing official overseeing Hong Kong affairs on Saturday warned of persisting threats in the city as a China-imposed national security law approaches its fifth anniversary, while seeking to allay concerns about the law's impact on the financial hub's openness. Speaking at a forum about the law, attended also by the city leader John Lee and other officials, Xia Baolong, the director of China's Hong Kong and Macao Work Office, said various forms of soft resistance continue to emerge in new forms and external forces have never ceased their intervention in Hong Kong. 'Hong Kong has transformed from chaos to order. But just as a tree desires stillness, the wind continues to blow,' Xia said. The Beijing and Hong Kong governments deemed the law necessary to maintain the city's stability following anti-government protests in 2019. Under the law, many leading pro-democracy activists, including Jimmy Lai, founder of the now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper, were prosecuted. Dozens of civil society groups disbanded. This month, authorities have stepped up their crackdown, including charging young activist Joshua Wong, who was already sentenced last year over a subversion case, under the law for the second time and targeting a mobile game app. Last week, China's national security authorities in Hong Kong and the city's police launched their first publicly known joint operation, raiding the homes of six people on suspicion of colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security. Critics say the political changes indicate that the Western-style civil liberties Beijing promised to keep intact when the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997 are shrinking. But Xia said the law only targeted an extremely small number of people who severely endanger national security. He also sought to allay concerns about Hong Kong's openness and international position. He insisted that normal international exchanges do not violate Hong Kong's national security law but rather are protected by it.

Hamilton Spectator

26 minutes ago

• Hamilton Spectator

‘Rage' survey shows the politician Canadians are most angry about

Justin Trudeau leaving the stage has eased the rage. And credit Donald Trump with giving Canadian politicians a bump. That's the suggestion from Pollara Strategic Insights' latest 'Rage Index' poll . Since the firm's last such survey in November , Canadians' anger toward the federal government has plunged 18 percentage points and there was a 10 percentage point drop in frustration with various provincial governments. 'One of the main theories on this is Trudeau himself was obviously a focal point of a lot of anger in Canada. We haven't done the poll since he left as prime minister,' said Dan Arnold, Pollara's chief strategy officer. Trudeau governed from 2015 until being succeeded in March by Prime Minister Mark Carney, who then kept the Liberals in power by securing a minority government in the April federal election. 'You don't see as many 'F—- Carney' flags as you did 'F—- Trudeau' flags,' said Arnold, referring to the profane banners that became commonplace around the time of the so-called ' Freedom Convoy ' protest in Ottawa three years ago. Overall, 37 per cent were angry with the federal government — down from 55 per cent in November — while 28 per cent were happy and 35 per cent were neutral. Similarly, 42 per cent were angry with their provincial government — compared with 52 per cent in the last poll — with 27 per cent happy and 31 per cent neutral. But 78 per cent of respondents were angry with the new U.S. president, who has launched a trade war against Canada, while eight per cent were happy and 14 per cent had no opinion. 'The other thing that's going on is that Donald Trump is a big source of anger. Trump has become a bit of a lightning rod of anger,' said Arnold. 'A lot of the frustrations that people would normally put on their Canadian political leaders have been redirected toward Trump,' he said. Using online panels, Pollara surveyed 3,400 people across the country May 16-20. While opt-in polls cannot be assigned a margin of error, for comparison purposes, a random sample of this size would have one of plus or minus 1.7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The firm found 49 per cent were unhappy with 'the types of changes happening in Canada,' an improvement on the 59 per cent finding last fall. Only 16 per cent were happy on that metric with 35 per cent neutral. But 40 per cent of respondents were happy with the results of the April 28 election while 34 per cent were unhappy and 26 per cent were neutral. About one-third — 32 per cent — were happy with Carney's new cabinet sworn in last month while 26 per cent were unhappy and 42 per cent had no opinion. However, 56 per cent are angry about the Canadian economy, a one percentage point uptick from November's poll, with only 14 per cent happy and 30 per cent were neutral. In that same vein, 38 per cent were unhappy with their own personal financial situation, up from 36 per cent in the last survey while 32 per cent were happy and 30 per cent were neutral. 'That's the one area where we don't see people feeling better,' noted Arnold. 'Actually, the anger level has gone up a little bit on things like the Canadian economy and personal finances — and that is absolutely because of the uncertainty that's going on right now,' the pollster said. 'We've seen unemployment figures starting to tick up and there's ... a lot of angst out there about what tariffs are going to mean and what this is going to have as an impact on Canada,' he said. 'So that is where we do see anger increasing. Trump himself is obviously catching a lot of the negative sentiment that otherwise would be going towards Canadian leaders. People are upset with the economy, but they're blaming it on Trump, instead of blaming it on Mark Carney or the provincial premiers right now.'