America Is Finally Getting A Fascist Dictator Parade, Courtesy Of Donald Trump

WASHINGTON — After years of admiring autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping and envying the sort of military parade they get to enjoy, President Donald Trump is finally getting one of his own.

America’s capital city will resemble Pyongyang, Beijing and Moscow’s Red Square on Saturday evening, with tanks and missile launchers rolling down the street, thanks to Trump’s $45 million birthday gift to himself at taxpayer expense.

“I don’t really think the symbolism of tanks and missiles is really what we’re all about,” Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul told HuffPost. “If you ask me about a military parade, all the images that come to mind, the first images, are of the Soviet Union and North Korea.”

Trump and his administration claim that the parade was actually organized for the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, not Trump’s 79th. Both the Navy and the Marines also have founding date anniversaries this year, however, and there has been no discussion about holding $45 million celebrations for either. White House officials did not respond to HuffPost queries on the matter.

Democracy advocates warn that Trump’s use of the military to honor himself should not be downplayed as harmless, particularly given his deployment of thousands of troops in Los Angeles to put down protests against his deportations, his repeated attacks on judges, his use of his executive power to attack critics and his willingness to defy a Supreme Court order for months.

“The military parade is a blatant adoption and celebration of authoritarian power display,” said Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz who is now with the group Protect Democracy. “Given this is coupled with the deployment of U.S. troops to police American streets, by no means should it be considered as only optics.”

John Bolton, Trump’s third of four national security advisers during his first term, said Trump has been infatuated with the idea of his own parade after attending France’s Bastille Day celebration in 2017 at the invitation of that country’s president, Emmanuel Macron.

Bolton said Trump’s advisers were able to talk him out of ordering one back then. “He was dissuaded by a number of factors, not the least of which was how much it would cost, and how bad that would appear, and what damage the tank treads would do to the streets of Washington,” he said.

Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, reportedly told Trump that a military parade was “what dictators do.”

The United States has had few military parades in its history, the last one taking place in 1991 during the presidency of George H.W. Bush after U.S. forces successfully pushed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, which he had invaded.

“It was a parade to celebrate winning the war, which is a good reason to have a military parade,” Bolton said. “That’s not what this is about. It’s about Donald Trump.”

Patty Murray, a Democratic senator from Washington state, said during a hearing Wednesday that Trump’s casual use of the military should alarm Americans.

“President Trump is promising heavy force against peaceful protesters at his D.C. military parade. Those sorts of actions and that sort of rhetoric from a president of the United States should stop every one of us cold. Threatening to use our own troops on our own citizens at such scale is unprecedented,” she said. “It is unconstitutional and it is downright un-American. We should all be speaking out against this and demanding accountability now.”

Despite his frequent claims of support for the armed forces and service members, Trump has a decades-long history of disrespect, even disdain, for both.

As a young man, Trump had the opportunity to fight in the Vietnam War but instead avoided service with a diagnosis of “bone spurs” from a doctor who was a friend of his father.

In 2015, running for president, Trump declared that Arizona Sen. John McCain, who spent nearly six years in a Hanoi prison undergoing routine torture, was not a war hero just because he was captured. Trump said he preferred those who were not captured.

During his first term in office, when he was unable to get fellow Republicans running both chambers of Congress to approve billions of dollars for a border wall he had repeatedly promised Mexico would pay for, Trump instead raided a Pentagon fund for service members’ housing and schools to pay for it instead.

Also in those years, Trump disparaged those in the military who had died for the United States as “suckers” and “losers,” according to his own chief of staff.

And just months into his second term, Trump broke the tradition of the commander-in-chief shaking the hand of every graduating cadet at a military academy by immediately leaving West Point after his speech and returning to his golf resort in New Jersey.

Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden spent 70 minutes congratulating each graduate last year, as Trump himself had done five years earlier, although he later complained about how many times he had to raise his arm to salute.

To this day, Trump still does not seem to understand military protocol. On his recent trip to the Middle East, Trump saluted Saudi military officials, just as he had saluted North Korean officers during his summit meeting with Kim in 2018.

Protect Democracy’s Carpenter said Americans need to take Saturday as a warning of things to come. “Americans should see this plainly for what it is: Troops in the streets are troops in the streets, whether it’s a parade or a raid,” she said.