Today is the 5,000th birthday of our dear and glorious narcissist-in-chief, Donald John Trump. Or at least it feels that way because it seems that we may never be rid of him. As narcissists do, he is throwing himself a “happy-birthday-to-me” militarized parade, fit for a tyrant.
While this is the first gazillion-dollar militarized parade that he has ever thrown for himself, and in fact the first time that any United States president has thrown himself a militarized parade, it is certainly not the first time that the moral midget in the White House has tried. During his first term, in January 2018, Trump assembled top military brass at the Pentagon and proposed a large display of militarized might as part of the November Veterans Day celebration in Washington, D.C.—but the parade never happened.
Why? Undoubtedly, the Pentagon leadership (in those days, there were still a few adults left in the room) nixed it. They knew, along with the rest of us, that military parades featuring grand displays of goose-stepping soldiers and war weaponry, while common in totalitarian regimes like China and Russia and Nazi Germany and North Korea, are not in keeping with our American values. They also knew it would cost a fortune. In short, they saw that such a spectacle would be both unaffordable and unseemly.
Those days are over, and those particular adults have not just left the room; they are also in the process of being persecuted as part of Trump’s “It’s a Bad Idea to Ever Say No to Me” revenge-a-thon. The adults have left the room and have now been replaced by a gilded playpen full of emotionally disturbed teenagers wearing flak jackets, MAGA hats, and Rolexes. And unlike their predecessors, they never say “no” to Trump. In fact, they have been hand-picked on the very basis of having previously and repeatedly demonstrated a complete lack of character.
It should surprise no one that Trump’s idea of throwing himself a gazillion-dollar “happy-birthday-to-me” militarized extravaganza is to make the soldiers themselves foot the bill. The price tag for his Putin-esque parade is estimated to be $45 million, along with another $16 million to repair the streets in D.C. damaged by the grinding weight of armored tanks and rocket launchers and warheads-on-wheels, according to NBC News.
The president who, along with Pete Hegseth, is in the process of gutting the Veterans Administration in order to fund even more tax cuts for him and his merry band of Kleptocrats, is paying for his Sieg-Heil birthday party on the backs of the same soldiers who will be marching in his self-aggrandizing spectacle; the same soldiers whom he recently insulted at West Point with his boorish remarks; the same soldiers whom he will expect to violate their oath to the Constitution when he orders them to enforce his domestic agenda against their fellow citizens; and the same soldiers who will receive entirely substandard care, if they can access any care whatsoever, after they retire from the military, because their sociopath of a president would rather spend $60 million to be crisply saluted by them on his birthday than direct that the funds be spent, instead, on the provision of care to those who serve.
Trump’s actions in Los Angeles last week were just the opening salvo in his plan to maintain power by military force. He usurped the authority of the governor of California and activated the California National Guard, in an order that was not just illegal, since the California National Guard is under the purview of California’s governor, but made a bad situation—masked storm troopers in downtown L.A. throwing brown people into unmarked cars while bystanders freaked out—exponentially worse. He did the same thing in Portland, Ore., during the Black Lives Matter protests. His pathological racism and his impulse toward authoritarian suppression had the effect of pouring kerosene on a campfire in a dry forest during a windstorm.
Let us not forget that the man who was happy to deploy the National Guard, illegally, to do his bidding in Los Angeles last week somehow forgot to deploy them in Washington, D.C., after he sent a rabid mob of insurrectionists to storm the Capitol, kill his vice president, kill the speaker of the House, beat the crap out of Capitol Police, and subvert the outcome of a free and fair election that he happened to have lost.
The National Guard deployment in California was just the beginning. It was only an hors d’oeuvre, a nibble, a nosh. Shortly thereafter, Trump decided to deploy the United States Marines against the residents of Los Angeles as well. The Marines were deployed against United States citizens exercising their First Amendment right to free speech, peaceful assembly, and peaceful protest. It is the presence of Trump’s military that has escalated those protests into a national flashpoint, because that is what Trump wants. The anti-democratic, unconstitutional, obscene exercise of brute force is for the gratification of one person only, our current president, because Donald John Trump gets off on violence. It is his favorite form of porn.
But here is what Trump loves even more than brutishness: adoration. If violence is his porn, adoration is his mother’s milk. How elegantly he has managed to combine the faux adoration of thousands of soldiers marching in lock step while saluting a man who is unfit even to scrape the mud off their boots, with the thunder of military aircraft filling the friendly skies above the White House and weapons of mass destruction rumbling through the streets of D.C.
So, the president is throwing himself a $60 million militarized birthday bash because that is what a dictator does. I am confident that he will be accompanied by his entire cabinet and his extended family, along with every MAGA-fied member of Congress. It is their job to sit primly in the bleachers with brittle smiles on their faces as they endure yet another disgusting, demoralizing day in Trump’s America.
But it is not your job to attend, nor is it mine. We do not have to attend in person, and we do not have to attend virtually by turning on the television. Nothing takes the savor out of a malignant narcissist’s birthday party more quickly than no one showing up.
Let’s give the criminal in the White House the birthday he really deserves: a party attended only by those who have been compelled to attend, and no one else. Let every other person in America turn off the television set, grab a sign, and go to one of the thousands of “No Kings” rallies that are being held nationwide.
Trump’s malignant narcissism compels him to check his media ratings incessantly. It would be absolutely poetic if attendance at the “No Kings” rallies were to eclipse attendance at the fascistic “military-force-and-fealty” birthday party that he has arranged for himself at our expense.
