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Time Magazine
a day ago
- Politics
- Time Magazine
Why Trump May Ignore 80 Years of U.S. Regime Change Mistakes
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Donald Trump expected his first face-to-face meeting with Barack Obama would be all of '10 or 15 minutes.' After all, the pair had spent years circling each other, trading barbs from afar and using the other's political movement as a blend of punching bag and strawman. The mutual enmity was hardly a secret; Obama's trolling of Trump at a White House correspondents' dinner set in motion the New Yorker's serious contemplation of Redemption By White House Win. [time-brightcove not-tgx='true'] The 2016 summit between the President-elect and the incumbent ended up going 90 minutes, during which North Korea was, to Trump's mind, the big takeaway. (Obama's team recalled the conversation differently.) The message was pretty clear: that rogue nation was one of the biggest problems Trump was inheriting as he rose to power after the 2016 election. The election clearly did not go as Obama had hoped so he had this one set piece to convey to his successor just how fraught the situation on the Korean Peninsula was, and how any misstep could be fatal to millions. The outgoing President's concern was that Trump, or some of his top advisers, might want to try to swap regimes. But history is lined with examples why these trades have never gone as planned. And Obama wanted to convey the risks of both a nuclear-armed free agent and a country decapitated without a clear next step. Obama hated the threat of a nuclear North Korea but also understood how things might escalate in some pretty terrible ways if unchecked emotions and amateur gut sense took over. Maybe—despite his own instincts—Trump understood that regime change was not compatible with this worldview. Instead, he courted the North Koreans and broke a half century of protocol in visiting with the reclusive regime's chief. In fact, as a candidate, and even well before that, Trump resisted any suggestion of intervention. That positioning helped Trump remake the Republican Party by elevating its isolationist wing. It's why the current moment is such a challenge for Trump: Israel's strikes on Iran lure dreams of a time after an Ayatollah runs the Islamic Republic. But dreams can easily turn into nightmares, and this particular lullaby is more than a little discordant. 'Regime change' has become shorthand in national-security circles the same way 'nation building' and 'mission accomplished' have devolved from well-considered policy goals into collapsed folly. U.S. intervention into foreign nations' governance in pursuit of friendlier—if not less-lethal—regimes has proven a loser. In recent years, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya have all provided proof of the model's overly optimistic lens on the map. Going back in the post-World War II era, history has shown the United States very capable at both toppling governments and then promptly getting the sequel disastrously wrong. For every regime change at the hands of Americans that went well—think Adolf Hitler's exit from Germany and Benito Mussolini from Italy—there are multitudes that went off the rails: six overt attempts during the Cold War and another 64 in covert operations. And just about no one on the political stage this century has been more clear-eyed on that reality than Trump. Dating to his days as a celebrity host of a reality show, Trump hated foreign adventurism, although he did tell Howard Stern he supported the Iraq war a month before Congress voted on it. After launching his presidential bid in 2015, he campaigned endlessly against so-called 'forever wars' and creeping American meddling. He blasted decisions to engage beyond U.S. borders as simply stupid. He called regime change a dangerous precedent that violated sovereignty and wasted cache. For Trump, the ability to topple rivals was enough of a threat without taking it out of the safe. 'Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?' Trump said in a February 2016 debate. Months later, after he won election but before he took office, Trump seemed to redouble his skepticism of the military's reach into other governments. 'We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with,' the President-elect said in December of 2016. There's a reason why regime change has been a non-starter. Democrats hated it when George W. Bush tried it, particularly with Iraq. Republicans hated the blowback they faced for Bush's errors. Independents loathed the fallout. Swing-state voters hated that their kids were sent onto battlefields they didn't understand. Fiscal conservatives hated the costs. Fiscal liberals hated the opportunity costs. In Iraq alone, 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives. Trump gets that. He may not have a grasp on the nuances of the foreign policy but he certainly gets the zeitgeist. And, as has been the case for two decades, the patience for a thrust beyond U.S. borders is limited. Want proof? Look at the post-WW2 landscape. South Korea, Greece, and Syria all fell to U.S. meddling before 1950 even got here. Burma, Egypt, Iraq, Guatemala, Indonesia, Syria (again), Cambodia, and Cuba all followed. Far-flung efforts in the Dominican Republic, Laos, Brazil, Chile, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Afghanistan, and even Poland followed. Grenada, Panama, and Haiti left U.S. administrations in the political muck. Vietnam was the biggest catastrophe to most Americans' memories. Put in the crudest terms, the United States is really good at ignoring what Washington has coined the Pottery Barn Rule: you break it, you own it. Yes, we can break a whole lot, and have. But the United States does not exactly have total control over what it knocks off the shelf. Which brings us back to Iran, which sits dangerously close to the ledge's edge. In public comments, Trump is being very cagey about what he does next. 'I may do it, I may not do it, nobody knows what I'm going to do,' Trump said Wednesday about the prospect of launching an air strike on an Iranian nuclear facility. Read more: A New Middle East Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes Yet undermining that cautiousness is Trump's apparent acceptance of Israel's view that Iran is racing toward building a nuclear weapon. That assessment is at odds with the U.S. intelligence community's view, which remains consistent that that's not the case. 'I don't care what she said,' Trump said on Tuesday, referring to recent testimony of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that Iran isn't actively trying to build a bomb. Trump may have been brutal about Bush getting the intel wrong on Iraq, but it seems he may not have learned the risks of rushing into the mix with incomplete or manipulated facts. Trump is, at his core, a gut-driven figure who has proven adept at finding voices that confirm his instinct—and banishing those who challenge it. Trump might despise the existing regime in Tehran, but he also does not want to be left with another shattered nation in that region with little more than epoxy as a plan. Yet even members of his own base fear he may be about to do just that, dragging the country into the very kind of boondoggle he won office by denouncing and abandoning the isolationism that he inserted into the GOP's new DNA. Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.
Time Magazine
3 days ago
- Politics
- Time Magazine
Why Trump's MAGA Base Is Splintering Over Iran and Israel
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. The Constitution is pretty clear about the powers bestowed upon Presidents: they can negotiate treaties, command the military, stack a Cabinet and the courts, issue pardons and commutations. But the true superpowers of the presidency are more nebulous, but just as significant. Presidents can rally world-weary Americans to coalesce on foreign policy. They can rally America-weary countries to Washington's causes. They can exploit the instinctive respect for the presidency at moments of crisis. But for any of those softer powers to work, the White House has to have credibility. And, at the moment, President Donald Trump is at a pronounced disadvantage as he faces a Middle East in crisis. It isn't just that he is coming off a weekend in which he provoked one of the largest single-day protests in U.S. history as he threw an underwhelming, but expensive, military parade. Trump could more easily dismiss his many detractors if his base were with him as solidly as it was just a few weeks ago. But the political movement that fueled his most unlikely return to power is threatening to now crack. "We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran," Trump posted on Tuesday, making clear the U.S. and Israel were now in lockstep on the Israeli military operation that the U.S. didn't initially back. "Nobody does it better than the good ol' USA," he added. It was the latest diplomatic swerve from Trump, who has responded in recent days to Israel's offensive by veering to nearly every possible position—from a hands-off approach to pressing for a diplomatic off-ramp to claiming total ownership of Israel's barrage and threatening Iran's annihilation. Ever one for theatrics, Trump this week even urged millions of Iranians to evacuate their capital ahead of suggested wasteland strikes. His Vice President, J.D. Vance, on Tuesday seemed to hint at further escalation—even as the architects of the MAGA movement he is usually more aligned with are pushing Republicans to climb down from scorched-earth rhetoric. There remains a window for this moment to deliver a clear political victory for Trump. Iran clearly wants to de-escalate its hot war with Israel, which is now in its fifth day and ostensibly over a nuclear program Israel sees as an existential threat. Israel pushed pause on plans to assassinate Iran's Supreme Leader after U.S. officials—including Trump—called it too outrageous. A return to a deal with Iran to put limits on its nuclear programs could give Trump diplomatic cache he has sought in that region since his first foreign trip as President in 2017. And nothing would shut down his haters faster than an objective win for U.S. interests. But the political realities Trump finds himself navigating are different from the ones he has dispensed with in the past. As he pushes for Iran's surrender, here are the specific factions that are trying to guide his next steps. Trump and the GOP Traditionalists Trump ran in 2024 on rich promises of fast ends to conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, pledging peace deals were on the horizon if only he could get back into the White House. As he railed against his predecessors' meddling into international affairs and flex of American might, the GOP traditionalists largely bit their tongues. After all, the alternative of Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris was still seen to them as less desirable than Trump—who proved pretty pliable on the global stage during his first term. But it's an unbendable fact in GOP orthodoxy that the United States stands linked with Israel. As Washington's strongest ally in the region, support for Israel has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy since modern Israel's founding. To the dismay of critics of Israeli's governments over the years, that has sometimes been mistaken for a blank check. But the Establishment-minded Republicans are not going to be quiet if Trump is seen even hinting at a split with Benjamin Netanyahu's government. That said, those same Republicans are keeping a close eye on signals coming from the White House. It's no secret that Trump and Netanyahu do not have a terrific relationship. (Though Netanyahu hasn't exactly been besties with any of his U.S. counterparts, dating back to Bill Clinton.) Yet for the moment, the GOP's hawks are trying to signal optimism. 'The Iranians are about to get their asses kicked,' Fox host Mark Levin said this weekend. Trump and the MAGA Isolationists The core of Trump's MAGA base is far more distressed. Trump came to power by openly dinging internationalism from administrations of both parties. He vowed to retreat from foreign entanglements that began decades ago, wind down interventions that left Americans Googling for maps an ocean away, and double-down on a domestic agenda that better served his base. It was a clear play to a constituency that was unhappy with a creeping American reach. Trump on Tuesday was testing the limits of that cohort's support, as he posted on social media that he knew where Iran's Supreme Leader was bunkering down and threatened his life unless Iran agreed to 'UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.' 'We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,' Trump posted. This puts in motion a slow-rolling collision with Trump's base of supporters who thought they were walking away from other people's problems. Former Fox host Tucker Carlson, MAGA evangelist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Sen. Rand Paul have all spoken out against unequivocal support for Israel's actions. Rep. Tom Massie, a Republican who has bucked Trump with glee, on Tuesday introduced a resolution that would block military escalation from the U.S. side. After promising an end to entanglements that have bedeviled Trump's predecessors, Trump now seems on the cusp of joining the fray in a region where 40,000 Americans are deployed and there are scant off-ramps. Trump and the Pro-Israel Activists How the country feels about Israel belies party labels, even as Republicans are often the most vocally supportive. Trump owned the pro-Israel space in his campaigns. While Americans are pretty evenly split on the three-way question of whether U.S. support for Israel is just right, too weak, or too strong, there was a clear imbalance on how those camps voted last year. Trump carried 4 in 5 of those seeking more backing for Israel, according to exit polls. (Vice President Kamala Harris, by contrast, carried two-thirds of the share who thought Washington was too pro-Israel.) Trump clearly owes this constituency a chit. The pro-Israel lobby in Washington is highly organized to the point of sparking conspiracy theories. The clout is real and the consequences are significant. It reaches across the aisle, which is why even some of the most reliably liberal lawmakers still make the hike to AIPAC's policy conferences. Trump has mastered the pander here. Despite his deep, deep antipathy toward Netanyahu, Trump understands the transactional nature of his relationship with those voters who prioritize Israel's future over any domestic U.S. priorities. Given that constituency's heft on the Hill, Trump gets that falling short with them could complicate everything else on his agenda, from tax cuts to immigration enforcement to crypto regulation to his beloved tariffs. Trump and the Christian Right There is some overlap with the pro-Israel cohort here, but for very different reasons. The Christian Right has a long-seeded allegiance with those who want U.S. support of Israel to be absolute. Trump carried Evangelicals and born-again Christians last year, again, by a 4-to-1 margin, according to exit polls. For many on the Christian Right, Israel's survival is a necessary component to Jesus' return to the physical earth. In some readings of the Bible, a modern state of Israel is destined and will be where Jesus makes his second coming as prophesied in the so-called End Times. For many on the Christian Right, anything but fealty to Israel is an affront to their faith. The overlap between Trump's isolationist base and his Israel-at-all-cost Evangelicals seems destined for a conflict, one with deep contradictions that has zero apparent resolution. The balancing act is not one that comes naturally to Trump, but he has time and time again proven capable of digging himself out of seemingly impossible dead ends. Trump and the Democrats Democrats have so far been measured in their response to the current strikes into Iran. No fans of a nuclear Iran, Democrats recall the landmark deal the Obama Administration negotiated with Tehran that Trump quickly abandoned in his first term. But Democrats also have pointed memories of how Netanyahu all but campaigned against Obama's re-election in 2012 in favor of Mitt Romney, a former colleague. And the long-festering frustrations with Netanyahu's administration cannot be overstated, even among Israel's strongest defenders in the Democratic caucus. The opposition party is far from united in how they want to see the U.S. engage in the Middle East in this moment. Some voices, such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have urged restraint against rushing to defer to Israel's efforts—putting leading leftists in an odd confluence with folks like Carlson and former Trump counselor Steve Bannon. While the Jewish vote was just 2% of the total electorate last year, it was pretty unified for Democrats; 78% of Jewish voters backed Harris, according to exit polls. Trump is no fool when it comes to optimism that Democrats would be natural allies here. But even his allies make for unsteady partners. Ultimately, Trump will need to figure out how to cobble together a coalition that permits him to execute a choice that he alone can make.
Time Magazine
4 days ago
- Politics
- Time Magazine
‘They Just Walked Away': New Poll Shows How Badly Democrats Are Losing Christian Voters of All Stripes
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. For years, Doug Pagitt has been sounding the alarm to fellow Democrats about a perceived hostility toward voters of faith within the party, flagging a fetishing of secularism that is reshaping the electoral map to their detriment. Now, he's sending around the receipts to prove his point. Pagitt is a progressive pastor and the executive director of Vote Common Good, which focuses on mobilizing voters of faith. Recently, he commissioned one of the largest polls of Christian voters ever to quantify the mood of the nation's largest voting bloc. (Change Research, which counts major labor unions as clients and veterans of both Bill and Hillary Clinton as top hands, crunched the numbers last month. It runs with a standard margin of error of under 3 percentage points.) The results from more than 1,700 self-identified Christians—including Catholics and Mormons—offer plenty of reasons for Democrats still digging out from last year's electoral thumping to question some of their foundational assumptions about the voters they are struggling to win over. A shocking 75% of these Christian voters say that they have little or no trust in the Democratic Party, according to the data shared first with TIME. (By contrast, Republicans just about break even on that question.) A stunning 70% of these voters have little to no confidence in the federal government. And 61% of these voters think life in America is harder today for people of faith than it was 10 years ago. Taken as a whole, this dataset on 60 specific questions should set off flares for Democrats, who lost this group by a two-to-one margin in last year's presidential contest. 'You can't be the majority party if you ignore the majority faith in this country,' Pagitt tells me. 'We know there's this tension in the party.' Democrats have long struggled to make a space for faith within the party, or overcome a sense—especially in the consultant class and very-online activist set—that any embrace of religion is a threat to the party's brand of inclusivity. For millions of voters who hold their faith as a core piece of identity, this has created a political stumbling block. 'Republicans have made a concerted effort,' Pagitt says. 'Democrats have done everything they can never to name that identity. They have a built-in bias against these identities in the Democratic Party.' The polls are definitely trending away from Democrats on this question. In 2016, a full 75% of voters fell into the broad definition of Christian voters, according to exit polls. Trump carried the 27% of voters who identified as Protestants by a 59-36 margin and won the 23% of Catholic voters by a 50-46 split, while winning the 24% who called themselves 'Other Christian' by a 54-43 margin. In 2020, these voters accounted for 68% of the electorate, with Joe Biden—the nation's second-ever Catholic President—winning Catholics by a 52-47 split. Among other Christians, though, Donald Trump dominated with a 60-39 division, according to exit polls. And last year, with Christians accounting for 64% of the electorate Trump dominated Kamala Harris: he carried the 21% of the electorate that identifies as Catholics by a 59-39 margin, and the 43% of the electorate that identifies as generically Christian by a 63-36 margin, according to exit polls. To put all that in context, recall that Black voters are the most reliable members of the Democratic coalition and the Black Church is the only reason these numbers aren't even worse. While it is clear that the share of the electorate formally aligning with organized faith is shrinking, Pagitt smartly notes that membership with a local house of worship is not a prerequisite to being counted as a voter of faith. For a lot of Americans who have perhaps cut ties with local churches, that piece of their identity remains surprisingly durable. It's why the imprint of faith traditions last longer than any church directory. Grievance is certainly part of this puzzle. Pagitt's survey finds a full 50% of Christians say religion is losing influence in American life. And 60% of these Christian voters say they reliably back Republicans; 62% say they would never consider voting for a Democrat. Both the Democratic Party and its voters are seen as unfriendly toward Christianity. In Pagitt's survey, 58% of Christians see the Democratic Party as hostile to Christianity and 54% see the same traits among Democratic voters. By contrast, the same voters say the Republican Party is friendly to the tune of 70% and say the same about GOP voters at the rate of 72%. Pagitt is clear-eyed about what is possible given how much partisanship is baked into all this and how tough it is for brands to reboot. He's been working with candidates since Vote Common Good launched in 2018 to help progressive efforts connect with faith traditions and constantly has to face reluctance to tell their personal stories. But in training sessions regardless of locality, Pagitt boils down his message on faith outreach to six very simple words: 'I like you' and 'we need you.' Once that respect is signaled to voters of faith, Pagitt says, a conversation on substance is a whole lot easier. Still, it's not like Democrats are going to turn around trends in this super-majority voting bloc easily. 'They squandered it,' Pagitt says of the Democrats. 'They just walked away.' In turn, so too did Christian votes walk away from Democrats.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Picked the Worst Possible Time to Hold a Military Parade
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. It's sometimes easy to go numb living here in Washington. On most days, the Vice President's motorcade rumbles under many of our office windows, traveling from the Naval Observatory to the White House in the morning and back shortly after his workday ends. It's not uncommon to spot a trio of white-topped helicopters zipping over the Potomac while crowds are having dinner down at The Wharf; one is transporting a head of state while the other two are decoys. And was that the Irish Taoiseach hanging out at Little Gay Pub and Kiki on St. Patrick's Day weekend? Yes, that nation's then-leader was visiting from Dublin and making the rounds on the LGBTQ circuit after his official day ended. But the scene in my neighborhood the last two nights stood as a stark reminder that this weekend is shaping up to be surreal, even by D.C. standards. It's been hard to miss the military tanks rolling by on flatbed trucks around Eckington, Bloomingdale, and Shaw, heading past the city's convention center to get in position for a pricey parade on Saturday ordered by President Donald Trump. And if that spectacle were not shocking enough on its own, these giant weapons of war have been rumbling through residential streets in the U.S. capital at the same time as U.S. troops are deployed in the nation's second-largest city to help advance deeply unpopular immigration raids that have sparked protests across the nation. The jarring split-screen reality is one that is arriving at perhaps the most tone-deaf moment so far of Trump's second term. Ostensibly, the parade is marking the quarter-century birthday for the U.S. Army. (It also just happens to be Trump's 79th birthday, which is a very convenient coincidence that has even some of the President's apologists rolling their eyes at the cover story.) On the West Coast, as many as 2,000 National Guardsmen have been ordered up for active duty in Los Angeles, in direct violation of protocols that defer to each state's Governor, who is nominally the commander in chief of their reserve military. Trump also sent 700 Marines to Los Angeles to add to the uniformed legions that, to this point, have inflamed tensions, not quelled them. And there are whiffs that Los Angeles is merely a test case to see just how compliant Americans will be to see the world's greatest fighting force turn against the very people who pick up its tab. As Trump told reporters on Tuesday, those choosing to object publicly may come to regret it: 'For those people that want to protest, they're going to be met with very big force.' So as Trump stands in Washington this Saturday, watching M1A2 tanks, Stryker armored vehicles, and M109s tear up some of D.C. iconic boulevards, an actual live military operation stands to be unfolding on the streets of Los Angeles—and maybe other cities as well, given Trump's orders are not limited to that one locality. D.C.'s airspace will be shut down for hours to make way for flying fortresses to buzz overhead. And a trick parachute troop plans to airdrop to the viewing platform to deliver Trump an American flag that is destined to land in his future presidential library. It's one thing to watch a military display for show; it's another to watch live ammo be fired into the air to put down domestic demonstrations. The disconnect between Trump's stagings of brute force is striking and more than a little worrisome for those who have long thought civilian control of the military would have stopped such a craven choice. Trump has long fetishized the military hardware he controls. During his first term, he sought to flash this power after seeing a similar demonstration on a visit to France for Bastile Day; his military brass convinced him it was a bad idea and not worth the price. Given his long-standing obsession with autocratic regimes, it's little surprise that he is plunging ahead with a flex that feels more like something we'd see in Moscow or Pyongyang. The public is far from covering Trump's flank here. Trump's standing in polls sank underwater in March and hasn't recovered since, according to Nate Silver's modeling. A Quinnipiac poll out Wednesday puts Trump's approval rating at a measly 38%. He's even drawing a decided deficit on immigration and deportations—previously thought to be his best issues. Going back through post-World War II polling indices, Trump is faring worse than any President since 1953, save for how he was doing during his first term, according to analyst G. Elliott Morris. So as D.C. streets are clogged with war tools staging for Saturday's pricey pageant—6,600 soldiers, 50 aircraft, and 150 military vehicles at a price of as much as $45 million—it's worth reminding ourselves that this is a show that seems to have little purpose beyond boosting Trump's ego. But as his legions of supporters like to say, forget your feelings. The American public is not behind this show, let alone the policies that the White House is hoping it distracts from. The split screen between Washington and L.A. is disturbing, the implications dire. It's easy to forget that the nation and the world watch what happens in Washington far closer than the folks who live it day to day, and the war footing being adopted in a city fast approaching warzone timbre is not one that inspires confidence in America as the world's peacemakers. In fact, Trump's birthday blowout could be seen as a reboot of the entire post-Cold War ethos America has strived to convey for the last three decades—all over a parade coinciding with a domestic military crackdown. Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter. Write to Philip Elliott at
Time Magazine
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
Trump Picked the Worst Possible Time to Hold a Military Parade
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. It's sometimes easy to go numb living here in Washington. On most days, the Vice President's motorcade rumbles under many of our office windows, traveling from the Naval Observatory to the White House in the morning and back shortly after his workday ends. It's not uncommon to spot a trio of white-topped helicopters zipping over the Potomac while crowds are having dinner down at The Wharf; one is transporting a head of state while the other two are decoys. And was that the Irish Taoiseach hanging out at Little Gay Pub and Kiki on St. Patrick's Day weekend? Yes, that nation's then-leader was visiting from Dublin and making the rounds on the LGBTQ circuit after his official day ended. But the scene in my neighborhood the last two nights stood as a stark reminder that this weekend is shaping up to be surreal, even by D.C. standards. It's been hard to miss the military tanks rolling by on flatbed trucks around Eckington, Bloomingdale, and Shaw, heading past the city's convention center to get in position for a pricey parade on Saturday ordered by President Donald Trump. And if that spectacle were not shocking enough on its own, these giant weapons of war have been rumbling through residential streets in the U.S. capital at the same time as U.S. troops are deployed in the nation's second-largest city to help advance deeply unpopular immigration raids that have sparked protests across the nation. The jarring splitscreen reality is one that is arriving at perhaps the most tone-deaf moment so far of Trump's second term. Ostensibly, the parade is marking the quarter-century birthday for the U.S. Army. (It also just happens to be Trump's 79th birthday, which is a very convenient coincidence that has even some of the President's apologists rolling their eyes at the cover story.) On the West Coast, as many as 2,000 National Guardsmen have been ordered up for active duty in Los Angeles, in direct violation of protocols that defer to each state's Governor, who is nominally the commander in chief of their reserve military. Trump also sent 700 Marines to Los Angeles to add to the uniformed legions that, to this point, have inflamed tensions, not quelled them. And there are whiffs that Los Angeles is merely a test case to see just how compliant Americans will be to see the world's greatest fighting force turn against the very people who pick up its tab. As Trump told reporters on Tuesday, those choosing to object publicly may come to regret it: 'For those people that want to protest, they're going to be met with very big force.' So as Trump stands in Washington this Saturday as M1A2 tanks, Stryker armored vehicles, and M109s tear up some of D.C. iconic boulevards, an actual live military operation stands to be unfolding on the streets of Los Angeles—and maybe other cities as well, given Trump's orders are not limited to that one locality. D.C.'s airspace will be shut down for hours to make way for flying fortresses to buzz overhead. And a trick parachute troop plans to airdrop to the viewing platform to deliver Trump an American flag that is destined to land in his future presidential library. It's one thing to watch a military display for show; it's another to watch live ammo be fired into the air to put down domestic demonstrations. The disconnect between Trump's stagings of brute force is striking and more than a little worrisome for those who have long thought civilian control of the military would have stopped such a craven choice. Trump has long fetishized the military hardware he controls. During his first term, he sought to flash this power after seeing a similar demonstration on a visit to France for Bastile Day; his military brass convinced him it was a bad idea and not worth the price. Given his long-standing obsession with autocratic regimes, it's little surprise that he is plunging ahead with a flex that feels more like something we'd see in Moscow or Pyongyang. The public is far from covering Trump's flank here. Trump's standing in polls sank underwater in March and hasn't recovered since, according to Nate Silver's modeling. A Quinnipiac poll out Wednesday puts Trump's approval rating at a measly 38%. He's even drawing a decided deficit on immigration and deportations—previously thought to be his best issues. Going back through post-World War II polling indices, Trump is faring worse than any President since 1953, save for how he was doing during his first term, according to analyst G. Elliott Morris. So as D.C. streets are clogged with war tools staging for Saturday's pricey pageant—6,600 soldiers, 50 aircraft, and 150 military vehicles at a price of $45 million—it's worth reminding ourselves that this is a show that seems to have little purpose beyond boosting Trump's ego. But as his legions of supporters like to say, forget your feelings. The American public is not behind this show, let alone the policies that the White House is hoping it distracts from. The splitscreen between Washington and L.A. is disturbing, the implications dire. It's easy to forget that the nation and the world watch what happens in Washington far closer than the folks who live it day to day, and the war footing being adopted in a city fast approaching warzone timbre is not one that inspires confidence in America as the world's peacemakers. In fact, Trump's birthday blowout could be seen as a reboot of the entire post-Cold War ethos America has strived to convey for the last three decades—all over a parade coinciding with a domestic military crackdown.
