Donald Trump is so comfortable with authoritarianism that he shamelessly embraces practices that until now were more typical of autocracies like North Korea. He used the 250th anniversary of the US military as an excuse. to treat himself, on his 79th birthday, to a military parade $134 million. These types of events are unusual in the US. Washington hasn't held a military parade like this since 1991, when George Bush wanted to celebrate victory in the Gulf War. In fact, Trump's whim has, from the outset, two dangerous implications: that he's neither afraid nor ashamed to adopt the aesthetics of dictators, and that he has the Pentagon under control. He had already wanted to hold a parade like this during his first term, but then military officials prevented it because they saw it as excessive politicization of the armed forces. Now, within the Pentagon, there is no longer enough opposition to the president's wishes; those that had lost strength or have surrendered.
The parade doesn't come at any random time: it comes in the context of the militarization of Los Angeles, where Trump has deployed the National Guard and 700 marinas to quell protests against the anti-immigration raids that he himself has ordered and hours after a shooting of two Democratic senatorsThe man who often displays the flag of liberty has deployed the military within his own country, attacked universities and law firms that dared to disobey him, and questioned judges who believe what he does is illegal. His administration carries out violent raids to arrest undocumented immigrants at their workplaces, has handcuffed a senator, and arrested a judge. Freedom, for the president of the United States, is a marketing argument, a political propaganda device, not a value he creates or a right that citizens should have. Donald Trump is behaving increasingly like an absolute monarch and is managing to undermine his own country's democracy at a forced pace.
But Trump's authoritarian tendencies don't only have consequences in his own country. There was a time when the United States was proud to present itself to the world as a bastion of freedom and democracy. Now they will surely continue to do so, but hardly anyone believes it anymore. Their president has not only undermined both of these values in his own country, but also the international prestige that these two ideals, deserved or not, have given it since World War II. Donald Trump's United States is left with the power of force, which is not inconsiderable and allows it to get away with more or less extravagant operations such as imposing widespread tariffs on countries that sell more products than they buy. But this situation is pushing Europe to seek a way to secede from the Atlanticist alliance, not because it lacks faith, but because the United States can no longer be trusted. They have become a hotbed of instability, a dangerous powder keg for international security.
