Before a crowd of soldiers who applaud at an event that looked more like an electoral rally than to an address to the troops, Donald Trump defended his decision to welcome the first major military parade in Washington since 1991.
“Many people say that we don’t want to do that. I say yes,” he told Fort Bragg soldiers in North Carolina this week at the approval of the crowd. “We want to show a little.”
The commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the army on Saturday – which coincides with the president’s 79th anniversary – will be an insufficient projection of power by a commander -in -chief who revel in staging.
Trump will chair a procession of military equipment in the wide streets of the American capital while military aircraft fly over the head – all at 45 million dollars to American taxpayers.
The apparatus reflects the president’s growing fascination for military power while he tests his ability to deploy the armed forces to implement his national program in a way that echoes the authoritarian regimes that have long been criticized by Washington.
Earlier this month, Trump ordered the deployment of Marines and the National Guard to Los Angeles for the objections of Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, to suppress protests against the expulsion campaign of his administration.
Trump said that the presence of troops was necessary to repel “the attacks of a vicious and violent crowd, and some on the radical left”.
But Newsom insists that federal intervention was not necessary and violates a law stipulating that orders to put the national guard under federal control must be issued through state governors.
The stamped standards established by law which prohibit the use of the federal army for police officers, domestic civil spaces are “how autocrats work,” said Harold Hongju Koh, professor of international law at Yale Law School.
“They militarize domestic space. That’s it [Russian President Vladimir] Putin does it.
This echo of autocrats is also seen in the growing will of the Trump administration to use the police against its political opponents.
Alex Padilla, an American Democratic Senator of California on Thursday, was abused by federal agents and trained by a press conference organized by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security.
“What happened yesterday was part of a much more important effort to try to silence anyone who dares to ask what the Trump administration does,” wrote Padilla on X.
The adoption by Trump of the army as an agent of the national police is not unprecedented. Previous presidents have used federal troops on American soil – in particular to enforce the legislation on civil rights in the face of the resistance of the segregationist states of the South.
But historians say that he comes up against a long -standing reluctance to deploy the armed forces at home, even during the periods when Washington was willing to bend his military power abroad.
“The Americans since the Foundation were very uncomfortable with the soldiers used national,” said Lindsay Cervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library.
“The presidents really joined this previous one, and it is only when there is really an extreme uprising, to protect citizens, they left,” she added.
Trump’s apparent ease with the upheaval of these standards has sparked vocal opposition to the Saturday parade. Hundreds of demonstrations are planned in the Cities of the United States.
“It is fascism. It must be opposed, not violently, but with determination, in the streets of DC and everywhere in the country,” said Sunsara Taylor, one of the protest organizers, in a statement.
The optics of the parade on Saturday and the military deployments in California were amplified by the attack of Israel against Iran. The president presented himself as a non -interventionist peacemaker – unlike traditional republican military hawks – claiming that he would end conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine as soon as he took office.
But he now chairs a new war in the Middle East which threatens his main message from foreign policy.
Its actions at home also test the limits of its constitutional authority and the brake and counterweight system that have supported American democracy for more than two centuries.
In Los Angeles, Trump “federalized” the National Guard – or carried it under national control rather than by the State – by a rarely used status aimed at fighting against rebellions or foreign invasions, or helping presidents “unable to make regular forces to execute”.
He could try to justify his decision to deploy Marines in Los Angeles by invoking his power to protect federal goods, said legal experts. The administration could also cite a memo from 1971 from the United States Ministry of Justice, which argues that presidents can use troops to protect federal functions and property.
Trump even floated to invoke the 1807 insurrection law, which was promulgated to remove the rebellions, although he has not yet made this stage.
But several legal researchers believe that the president exceeds his powers. Calling the army was “very unusual and really contrary to our standards and traditions since we have no insurrection here,” said Laura Dickinson, professor at George Washington University Law School.
“They are trained for foreign wars,” she added.
Two hundred American navies – out of 700 deployed by Trump – are in Los Angeles, with the National Guard.
“They will focus on the protection of federal police staff” and “hold[ing] Crowds out of the crowd when they exercise their federal law application of the law, ”said Maj Gen Scott Sherman on Friday.
Sherman said the troops had been “mobilized with their assigned weapons” and “standard crowd control equipment”, including headsets, shields from front, batons and gas masks – scenes that Americans can be used from the police of the state and the local police, but not the military.
“Trying to keep the military out of domestic affairs … is a tradition that has been confirmed through generations because people have understood how important it was,” said dearvinsky.
“If we lose that, then it changes the character of our Republic.”
