Trump
yearned for a show along the lines of North Korea or the Soviet Union.
Mercifully, America doesn't do that. He's wanted this for a long time,
probably since he was a kid. Like his BFF Kim Jong-un, he believes that Big
Military Pageants are a sign of strength and will instill fear in the hearts of
his enemies.
The U.S. doesn't do that stuff for a
variety of reasons, not the least of which is that we aren't supposed to be a
military dictatorship that uses military pageants to scare its own citizens.
Donald Trump may be the only person on the planet who believes the United
States of America needs to prove its military might to the world with a big
show of heavy armor and airplanes. Everyone else is fully aware that the U.S.
has the most advanced, sophisticated and fearsome military on earth.
In the days leading up to Trump's July
4 event, the press reported that the administration was scrambling to put this
thing together at the last minute. The military wasn't receiving intelligible
instructions. It was revealed that the White House had enlisted the Republican
National Committee to pass out VIP tickets to donors and friends of the
president's re-election campaign, just one in a long list of examples of using taxpayer
money for political purposes.
On Thursday at the Lincoln Memorial he used military
officers as cheap props, forcing them to stand beside him on the dais,
appropriating their apolitical status for his own partisan purposes.
Donald Trump is basically a carnival barker and a circus
promoter. He's just not a very good one. Just as his wildly expensive and
amateurishly produced inaugural was basically a bust, so too was his big
"Salute to America." In fact, it was a sad and pathetic flop. What he
had imagined as a grand display of military might along the lines of the
Soviet-era May Day parades or Kim Jong-un's North Korean tributes to Dear
Leader ended up being a half-hearted air show with a handful of aircraft from
each of the branches, accompanied by a fifth-grade primer on American history.
It wasn't a normal Trump rally, but it wasn't a moving patriotic moment either.
He stumbled over facts of history in his speech, too. When speaking of the Revolutionary War:
"Our Army manned the air, it
rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do,
and at Fort McHenry, under the rocket’s red glare it had nothing but
victory. And
New postwhen dawn came, their star-spangled banner waved defiant."
Whoa— Airports in the 18th century? Plus, mentioning Fort McHenry and the
rocket’s red glare and star-spangled banner all reference the War of
1812, not the American Revolution.
www.salon.com
