Trump Wants You to Get Used to This

Opinion|Trump Wants You to Get Used to This

President Trump, a former reality television star whose administration includes several former Fox News personalities, knows a good image can go far.

In the space of a week, the American public has been treated to two highly unusual sights: first, federalized National Guard members and active-duty Marines dressed for combat on the streets of Los Angeles, ready to stand opposite civilians protesting ICE roundups; then an extravagant military parade in Washington on the 250th anniversary of the Army’s founding — and on Mr. Trump’s birthday — generating footage of tanks massed on the streets in numbers more often seen in countries where a coup is underway.

Mr. Trump appears eager to create optics that support his claim that public dissent constitutes an existential threat to the nation. He also apparently seeks to get the American public used to seeing our armed forces in a new light. In the president’s version of America, the military should be seen less as an apolitical body loyal to the Constitution. Rather, it should be viewed as an institution that serves at the behest of a leader and his ideological and political agendas, regardless of how much these depart from democratic understandings of the military’s role.

Security forces have often been the public face of the violence and moral collapse that can pervade societies when strongmen come to power. Armed enforcers can play fateful roles, both in ending a weakened regime, as Syrian soldiers did by deserting in the twilight of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, and in speeding up autocratic consolidation by complying with a leader who wants to use them against his own citizens, as in Chile during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.

Whether the United States will ever stand as an example of the latter phenomenon is an open question. On Thursday, a judge blocked the Trump administration’s mobilization of the National Guard, ordering the return of authority over the Guard to California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, but an appeals court put that ruling on hold a few hours later.

The scale of the mobilization in Los Angeles throws the Trump administration’s strategies into stark relief. The Los Angeles Police Department, the third largest force in the country, clearly stated it could handle the protests. A localized response by the L.A.P.D. would generate only a spate of familiar images, however; it could never capture the drama of a foreign invasion, or the history-making moment when Los Angeles became “occupied territory,” as the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller wrote on X after protests began.