The imperial presidency: Trump sends in the tanks
“When Donald Trump develops a fixation, he doesn’t give it up easily,” said Karen Tumulty in The Washington Post. Since even before his inauguration in 2017, he has been obsessed with the idea of holding a military parade in Washington DC. Last week, on Independence Day, he finally got his wish. There were tanks and armoured vehicles; there was a flyover of military aircraft, including a B-2 stealth bomber and one of the planes used as Air Force One; there was a performance by the navy’s elite Blue Angels team. And to accompany this “Salute to America” event, there was – as Trump promised in a tweet back in February – a “major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favourite President, me!” So much for the tradition of keeping this holiday strictly “non-partisan”, said Michelle Cottle in The New York Times. By “hijacking” America’s birthday party, Trump has shattered yet another political norm.
It could have been worse, said Joshua Keating on Slate. Trump did not, as some had feared, “go full authoritarian” and use his speech to condemn undocumented migrants or vilify journalists as enemies of the people. And the tanks were parked on the National Mall, not driven through the city as Trump had initially wanted (the last time they drove on the streets of DC, after the first Gulf War, it caused some damage to the roads). Even if tanks had been paraded through the capital, it would hardly suggest the US was “sliding into a dictatorship”, said Jim Geraghty in the National Review. France holds big military parades on Bastille Day, yet “nobody’s worried about Emmanuel Macron becoming an authoritarian dictator”.
The problem here is not that Trump “intends to become Chairman Mao”, agreed Charles C.W. Cooke in the same magazine. It is, rather, that America’s executive branch has become “overbearing and imperial”. In an ideal world, the president would effectively be our chief bureaucrat, a public employee who we’d rarely hear from. Instead, the position has become ever more glorified over the past century, to the point where the occupant of the White House has become “an omnipresent politico-spiritual leader through which all is to be filtered”. The US president in 2019 is “more present in the lives of the citizenry than the British king was in 1775”. So naturally “he wants to be the centrepiece of our July 4 parade. He’s the centrepiece of everything else.”