The top news item about the president’s recent address at Fort Bragg was that the Army vetted the soldiers who appeared behind Donald Trump so that only his supporters were seen in video of the event.

The second news item was that none of them were fat.

All that is terrible enough, but it isn’t the worst part.

The worst part is what the event suggests about the enduring appeal of Trumpism, which is to say, the power of America’s totalitarian drift.

Is it temporary or permanent? Will it die with Trump? 

The president’s public breakup with billionaire Elon Musk seemed to suggest it might. Writer Daniel Roberts told me recently that it exposed the fragility deep in the heart of the Trump coalition. 

“Without Trump as a unifying figure (and, again, I use ‘unifying’ loosely), it has always seemed obvious to me that this coalition collapses,” Dan said. “They might all still vote Republican, but without Trump, it’s going to be constant internecine warfare between them.”

But then, less than a week later, Musk relented, saying that he went too far. The Trump coalition may be more resilient than we think.

Then there’s Fort Bragg.

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Trump goads troops at Ft Bragg into booing Biden

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-06-10T20:35:15.533Z

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It was basically a campaign rally featuring all the familiar gripes and grievances. The difference was the audience, men and women in uniform who enthusiastically cheered and jeered. Trump slandered Joe Biden. He smeared American cities. He railed against “wokeness.”

And they roared in response.

The backdrop, of course, was Los Angeles. The president had dispatched 500 Marines. He commandeered 4,000 of California’s National Guard. ICE and Border Patrol are acting like the president’s secret police, snatching people in the night, attacking citizens for expressing their right of free speech, wearing masks to hide their identity and prevent any attempt at accountability. And officials are using the language of warfare to describe their intended goals. 

“We are not going away,” Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem said. “We are staying here to liberate [Los Angeles] from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

This is in addition to the hard-to-pin-down sense that politics is coming to an end and that disagreements will be settled by force. This sense has been ambient, but it snapped into hard focus yesterday. Instead of answering questions raised by US Senator Alex Padilla during a press briefing, Noem had him thrown out and handcuffed.

Liberals looked on that moment in disbelief in the same way they disbelieve the regime can accomplish what it’s setting out to do, namely, making America white again. The country is just too diverse, liberals tell themselves. It can’t get rid of millions of people. For that reason, state violence in LA is really the outcome of its impotence. 

Yet the president is reportedly planning to expand the use of the Guard in a broader immigration crackdown. In his Fort Bragg speech, he smears Los Angeles, calling it a “trash heap,” invoking the memory of “enemies within” that are, he has said, worse than enemies abroad. 

And they whooped and hollered, like the president’s personal army.

Then there’s the fact that Trump is spending tens of millions of dollars on a military parade this weekend, on his birthday, in the wake of his regime’s illegal impoundment of congressionally approved money for everything from cancer research to public libraries. And if you have a problem with the parade, he said, forget about expressing dissent. 

Any protest will be met with “a very heavy force,” he said.

If you think handcuffing Padilla was bad, just wait.

“Understand: Nothing Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America,” D. Earl Stephens told me. “Everything Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America. Will he succeed?

Earl publishes the newsletter Enough Already and is a regular contributor to Raw Story. “We are at the most dangerous juncture in America since the beginning of the Civil War,” he told me Thursday.

Let’s start with the basics. Why is it bad for the president to put on a military parade on his birthday? Spell it out for us dummies.

Think of how you asked the question, John. The initial question months ago should have been from the White House: Would it look bad if I had a military parade on my birthday? The answer for the first 240 or so years of our democracy would have been, “Are you crazy?” This kind of authoritarian nonsense has been normalized.

The cost of the parade is in the hundreds of millions. I seem to remember an administration that wanted to root out waste, fraud and abuse. I guess that only applies to cancer research.

Just saw a poll – I know, I know – saying 60 percent of Americans don’t see it as a wise use of our money. I will guess the other 40 percent are maga, who’d rather watch a fascist parade than see a kid cured of cancer. That’s a problem.

Do you think Trump is going to succeed in making the military loyal to him personally? His speech at Bragg was not encouraging.

We are at the most dangerous juncture in America since the beginning of the Civil War. I typed shortly after his galling win in November that we needed to prepare ourselves for what was most assuredly coming with his attempted takeover of the military, and the residual end of our democracy. Understand: Nothing Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America. Everything Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America. Will he succeed? In many ways, he already has. The speech at Bragg was appalling, and should have led every newscast. Apparently, too many journalists these days missed what happened in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.

Charlotte Clymer told me that Americans will put up with a lot, including a surveillance state and even a stolen election, because in most ways, those are abstract. A steady military presence in cities nationwide is different, she said, and Americans won’t tolerate it. Honestly, I think that’s optimistic. What do you think?

Helluva question. Charlotte is as astute an observer of our current condition as we have in America, and I tend to think she’s right, if only because the military would want nothing to do with this, either.

To what extent is Trump trying to resegregate the military? Wouldn’t that effort have some impact on public trust in the military?

When I served decades ago, the military wasn’t colorblind, but it was an example of a place where people from all backgrounds could come together and literally march as one. That said, I do think we will continue to see Trump exploit race as a divisive tool in the military and elsewhere, because he is a divisive bigot, who sees things through a black-and-white lens. As long as he’s dividing, he thinks he’s winning. I just wish he’d stay the hell away from our military, John. After all, that’s exactly what he did, when he was eligible to serve.

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