Trump's Militarization of America
By Robin Wright- June 14, 2025 The New Yorker
There’s
a raw ache and sense of unease in Washington as the President hosts a
military parade amid nationwide pushback against his immigration raids.
In
1865, a month after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, the newly
re-United States of America celebrated the end of its Civil War with two
daylong military parades in Washington, D.C. A hundred and forty-five
thousand troops—many on foot, others on horseback or horse-drawn
wagons—filed along Pennsylvania Avenue, yet unpaved with asphalt, to a
reviewing stand in front of the White House. The main hazard back then
was errant horseshit.
Tonight, Donald Trump will host his own
military parade to mark the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
U.S. Army. It is also, perhaps not by coincidence, the President’s
seventy-ninth birthday. On Truth Social, he promised that “thundering
tanks and breathtaking flyovers” will “roar through our capital city.”
Yet amid the ongoing protests in Los Angeles and a dozen other cities in
response to the Administration’s immigration raids, America seems
closer to civil strife than ready for a celebration of the world’s
mightiest military.
The President has already federalized four
thousand members of the California National Guard, without the state’s
consent, and ordered seven hundred marines to L.A. He has also
considered invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would allow U.S.
troops to police the country’s own citizens, and has threatened to
deploy the military to demonstrations in other cities. On Monday, he
warned, “IF THEY SPIT, WE WILL HIT, and I promise you they will be hit
harder than they have ever been hit before.” The Washington Post claimed
that escalation would be “the most extensive use of military force on
American soil in modern history.”
America today is distinctly
un-united. Activists from an array of causes have coalesced behind the
“No Kings” movement, which rejects “authoritarianism, billionaire-first
politics and the militarization of our democracy.” It is orchestrating
almost two thousand “Day of Defiance” rallies from coast to coast to
coincide with Trump’s parade. On Instagram, the group wrote, “The
wannabe dictator wants a party? Well then, let’s show him some ‘love’. .
. in every location that Trump isn’t. Because in America, we have no
kings.” The President has since threatened to deploy “very heavy force”
against demonstrators. They “hate our country,” he said this week. The
organizers are preparing for millions of people to turn out, which may
end up dwarfing the spectacle in Washington.
“Trump’s regime has
broken so many laws, threatened so many people, and ruined or damaged so
many institutions that it is no longer ‘legitimate,’ ” David Blight, a
historian at Yale and Pulitzer Prize-winning expert on civil war, told
me this week. “As a society, we have to take back our government. Yes,
this means mass protest and a challenge to power that we have not seen
since the sixties.” He noted that the Declaration of Independence
affirms the right “to alter or to abolish” government when it has abused
its people excessively and forfeited its legitimacy. “That Declaration
of Independence sits there, a living thing, breathing at us, beckoning
us to read it and in the spirit of our founding, act upon it,” Blight
said.
Last weekend, I drove the parade route along Constitution
Avenue. Long flatbed trucks were offloading pallets of metal plates to
help protect the streets from dozens of M1Abrams battle tanks, which
weigh up to seventy tons (nearly twice the street’s weight limits). They
will slowly grind their way from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington
Memorial, alongside missiles, rocket launchers, howitzer cannons, and
Bradley and Stryker fighting vehicles. Sixty-seven hundred troops will
also participate.
The Pentagon has estimated the cost for the
ninety-minute procession at somewhere between twenty-five million and
forty-two million dollars. That’s at least three million dollars per
block. The event will take place against the backdrop of DOGE’s firing
of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and civil servants,
including at the Pentagon, and the slashing of social services, from
Medicaid to school lunches for low-income children.
There’s a raw
ache and sense of unease in Washington. Eighteen miles of fencing has
been put up on the National Mall and beyond. A hundred and seventy-five
magnetometers were installed to screen parade attendees. (Tickets had to
be booked in advance.) Passenger flights are due to be suspended for
several hours at Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport to
accommodate military flyovers and paratroopers dropping from the skies.
Trump’s birthday parade might make the city feel more like it is
experiencing a coup d’état than it is honoring soldiers who have well
served the nation.
All of this feels somewhat hypocritical. In
the past, Trump disparaged more than eighteen hundred military personnel
who died in the Battle of Belleau Wood—which stopped the German advance
in France during the First World War—as “suckers.” He balked at
visiting the nearby cemetery where they were buried, reportedly because
the rain would mess up his hair. John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff
during his first term, said that the President did not want to be
pictured with amputees because it didn’t “look good.” In 2023, Kelly
told CNN that Trump “has no idea what America stands for and has no idea
what America is all about.”
Even Republicans seem dubious of the
parade. In a survey by Politico, only seven of the fifty G.O.P.
lawmakers who responded said they would attend. Among those skipping it:
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Majority Whip John Barrasso, and
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. Senator Roger Wicker, of
Mississippi, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told
Politico that he “would have recommended against the parade” after he
heard the costs.
In a televised address on Tuesday, Gavin Newsom,
the Democratic governor of California, warned that Trump’s decision to
circumvent state authorities to deploy the military to L.A. was a
“brazen abuse of power” that had “inflamed a combustible situation,
putting our people, our officers, and even our National Guard at risk.”
California “may be first,” he went on. “But it clearly will not end
here.” Democracy, he added, “is next.” Washington certainly felt that
way this week.