24 October 1789 could have been the most extravagant day of George Washington’s career. The hero of the American Revolution entered free Boston on the back of a handsome white horse. But as it turned out, that was the only hint of glamour the new commander-in-chief allowed himself. Rejecting the pomp and circumstance of Old World kings, and the parades, feasts and fireworks his young country was keen to bestow, America’s first president instead entered Boston in plain civilian dress — even refusing to review the militia he once led.
This weekend, the city that bears George Washington’s name will witness something different. On Saturday, Donald Trump will oversee a large military parade through the streets of DC, commemorating both the 250th birthday of the US Army and the 79th of Trump himself. The spectacle isn’t entirely unprecedented — the end of the Gulf War also saw an ostentatious military parade through the streets of the US capital. Yet, as the comparison with the 18th century implies, it is not exactly central to the American tradition either.
No wonder, then, that the parade, with its thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks and aircraft, is causing a noticeable sense of unease in America — not least because it is unclear exactly what it is meant to celebrate. If there is anything central to the self-conception of the military, after all, it is that it is different and better compared to the rest of the world, an institution that stands above and apart from the rest of society. Large military parades to celebrate the birthday of the Dear Leader are fairly common elsewhere, but never in the land of the free. Now, though, those old republican certainties are slipping away, implying a military that’s less the guardian of liberty and more the tool of a coercive state. Dovetailed by Trump’s actions elsewhere, notably around deploying the National Guard in California, and the United States suddenly feels very far from Washington’s ideal.
It’s easy to attack Trump’s parade on practical grounds. After all, it comes at a moment where America’s finances are a mess, and the military itself is declining. The Navy recently announced that it is scaling back plans to purchase new ships, cutting its shipbuilding budget for the coming years by nearly half. The hope is that Congress will find supplementary money somewhere to make up for these cuts, but it’s a signal that things are still going in the wrong direction, and that the US is in fact losing readiness in the Pacific theatre rather than gaining it. All that obviously makes Saturday’s $45 million festivities hard to justify, especially when DC isn’t built to handle the massively heavy M1 Abrams tank, potentially damaging the city’s roads.
In truth, though, the real impact here is theoretical. As George Washington so vividly showed, America has always prided itself on its soldier-citizen ethos, where service inside the military was a civic duty that transcended party or faction. In this, the US modelled itself on Rome. The Roman Republic, just like its American successor, was proud of keeping the generals out of politics. In the Roman case, that ethos was slowly undermined from within, as the growth of the city’s nascent empire caused the military to shift in both size and social makeup. The Marian reforms, meant to make the Roman army more effective, also had the effect of making military service a career for a certain social strata of Roman society rather than a civic duty for every citizen. Thus transformed, the military quickly became just another tool to be used by ambitious politicians like Caesar, who used legions personally loyal to him to overthrow the Republic.
The risk of following down the same route occupied the minds of America’s Founding Fathers, and they had a healthy distrust of standing armies as a result. Well, America’s military has now undergone the exact same transformation that Rome’s military once did: starting as a small, ad hoc citizen-soldier militia, then growing in size to deal with larger and larger battles, only to become a permanent institution staffed by career soldiers with very little understanding of the vicissitudes of civilian life.
Thus, rather than being a simple celebration of America’s vaunted military, the parade being planned for this weekend is a source of some cultural unease. That the Founding Fathers themselves wouldn’t have liked it all that much is probably a foregone conclusion, but the fact that it coincides with the President’s own birthday further blurs the line between the Republic and the leader at the top of it. It’s ominous, too, that the anti-Trump protests being planned to coincide with his parade are now billing themselves not as being against wars, or against the US military, but against the coming of any American kings.
Here, too, there is a resemblance between Rome and America. Rome, in its early days, saw a rejection of kings as one of its most foundational aspects; to be a true Roman was to be a member of a republic, not merely a member of an ethnic tribe on the Italian peninsula. The same sort of identification has been equally important to Americans: to be an American monarchist is a contradiction in terms, in a way that an Italian or Serbian monarchist wouldn’t be. As Republican senator Rand Paul recently put it: “We were always different than the images you saw from the Soviet Union or North Korea. We were proud not to be that.” Now, though, as political polarisation increases, and Americans lose trust in their own institutions, these once obvious differences seem to be vanishing.
“To be an American monarchist is a contradiction in terms.”
None of this is helped by the military’s actions elsewhere. That’s especially true in California, where anti-ICE riots have led the President to nationalise parts of the state’s National Guard, taking away control from Governor Gavin Newsom. Even more strikingly, the White House also announced that it would both deploy thousands of Guardsmen to the streets of Los Angeles, to be joined by active duty Marines.
To say that this is controversial would be a massive understatement. It’s long been accepted convention that the National Guard shouldn’t be deployed over the heads of sitting governors. The last time this happened was roughly 60 years ago, at the height of America’s desegregation crisis, when President Eisenhower used the military to enforce school integration. And even then, civil rights represented a truly monumental political crisis. That’s in stark contrast to the unrest in LA — which doesn’t appear serious even compared to the George Floyd protests. No wonder Newsom has taken to the airwaves, essentially saying that the constitutional order of America is being broken by Trump’s arbitrary use of America’s military, and suggesting that the country is now devolving into tyranny.
These are heated words, to be sure, but they do get at something real. There is, after all, something quite strange about the way in which these troops are being used. Quite aside from the lack of historical precedents, the actual riot in the City of Angels doesn’t seem to be especially severe. After being theatrically mobilised, California’s guardsmen are now sitting about doing nothing: the Pentagon couldn’t handle the paperwork needed to actually pay them. The 500 Marines, for their part, were called up in equally dramatic fashion. But then they failed to even appear in LA, pending several days of extra training. In a sense, that’s unsurprising. Marines are combat troops, unsuited for domestic policing. Yet, rather than sending out a detachment of military police, Trump instead went with the bruisers.
Just like in Rome, then, what were once America’s citizen-soldiers are now increasingly becoming mere pawns for grubby power plays. And if Trump’s antics have sparked a political storm, with other Democratic governors signing an open letter in support of Newsom, what’s to say Trump won’t employ similar tactics elsewhere? With the anti-ICE protests spreading to New York and other cities, and Texas already calling up its own National Guard to deal with its own protests, using troops to settle domestic law enforcement issues is about to become the new norm.
That matters — if nothing else for the Army’s own character. One of the strongest political traditions inside America is the very clear line between the military and partisan politics. That line is clearly being blurred by these deployments, and they’re not the only example. In a recent visit to Fort Bragg, for instance, Trump gave a speech to an audience of soldiers where he managed to whip up audible boos against Governor Newsom. At first, this might have appeared as a completely organic show of support, a sign that the troops were so exhausted of liberal politicians that they were willing to break decorum.
But as journalists reported later, the entire event was in fact a stage-managed ploy. Internal memos from inside the 82nd Airborne show that Trump’s audience was screened in advance. People who, for whatever reason, didn’t agree with his policies were told to talk to their unit commander, and request to excuse themselves from participating. Fat soldiers were apparently also banned from participating, presumably because they didn’t look photogenic enough. In ordinary times, a soldier cheering or booing a politician for any reason would be harshly punished: the Pentagon has long-standing rules against that sort of thing. The fact that indiscipline was not only indulged by encouraged is therefore remarkable, particularly given Trump was accompanied to Fort Bragg by a vendor hawking MAGA merchandise to the assembled troops.
Unsurprisingly, that in and of itself broke many internal Pentagon rules aimed at preventing open displays of partisanship. But once again, the real shift is in mindset. To anyone unfamiliar with the US military, soldiers cheering, jeering, and booing a politically partisan speech might not seem like a big deal. But the US military, and especially its officer class, was — until recently anyway — sincerely proud of its detachment from politics and its dedication to civil service without fear or favour.
To be fair, Trump isn’t the first president to try to entangle the US military in partisan political fights. Joe Biden did so too, delivering a fiery speech in late September 2022, attacking Donald Trump as a budding authoritarian while flanked by two Marines in dress uniform. But those Marines, at least, were mercifully silent, while Republican criticisms of Biden’s actions were scathing. Today, less than three years on, Trump himself is now envisioning a role for America’s servicemen that goes far beyond what Biden ever dreamed of. Combined with Saturday’s parade, one thing is clear: America’s traditional relationship with its own military is slowly crumbling. What that means for the future of Washington’s republic is anything but good.
