Trump’s transparent insecurity

The following is an excerpt from a column in the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland:

The genius of Donald Trump, it has long been observed, is to turn subtext into text. What was hinted at or hidden is, with him, brought shamelessly to the surface.

So it is with his latest scheme, his instruction to the top brass of the U.S. armed forces to lay on a military parade in the nation’s capital, perhaps on July 4. He’d been nagging the generals about this for a while but, according to the Washington Post, he gave the order at a meeting at the Pentagon last month.

No need for us to deconstruct the motive behind this instruction. It came after Trump was the guest at France’s Bastille Day parade, where he stood at Emmanuel Macron’s side and watched tanks, gun trucks and column after column of starchly uniformed soldiers. “We’re going to have to try and top it,” Trump said afterwards. (The actual order to military chiefs was phrased in the language of a spoiled child: “I want a parade like the one in France.”)

By his own admission, then, Trump is engaged in a familiar, mine’s -bigger-than-yours, macho competition, with military hardware his chosen measure. Recall the equally uncoded tweet directed at Kim Jong-un last month, when the president urged someone to tell the North Korean dictator that Trump’s “nuclear button” is a “much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

Opponents can react to this in one of two ways. Mockery is the obvious response, seeing in Trump’s desire to display tanks and rocket launchers on Pennsylvania Ave. the same transparent insecurity as the mid-life crisis neighbour who suddenly turns up with a Ferrari in the driveway.

Or we can be more sober, and regard this as just the latest and potentially most spectacular demonstration of Trump’s authoritarian instincts. Just as he has expressed admiration for strongmen in the Vladimir Putin mode, so this is yet more proof that Trump’s instincts are those of the autocrat.