Trump Wants You to Get Used to This

By Ruth Ben-Ghiat
"Dr. Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.”
President Trump, a former reality television star whose administration includes several former Fox News personalities, knows a good image can go far.
In the space of a week, the American public has been treated to two highly unusual sights: first, federalized National Guard members and active-duty Marines dressed for combat on the streets of Los Angeles, ready to stand opposite civilians protesting ICE roundups; then an extravagant military parade in Washington on the 250th anniversary of the Army’s founding — and on Mr. Trump’s birthday — generating footage of tanks massed on the streets in numbers more often seen in countries where a coup is underway.
Mr. Trump appears eager to create optics that support his claim that public dissent constitutes an existential threat to the nation. He also apparently seeks to get the American public used to seeing our armed forces in a new light. In the president’s version of America, the military should be seen less as an apolitical body loyal to the Constitution. Rather, it should be viewed as an institution that serves at the behest of a leader and his ideological and political agendas, regardless of how much these depart from democratic understandings of the military’s role.
Security forces have often been the public face of the violence and moral collapse that can pervade societies when strongmen come to power. Armed enforcers can play fateful roles, both in ending a weakened regime, as Syrian soldiers did by deserting in the twilight of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, and in speeding up autocratic consolidation by complying with a leader who wants to use them against his own citizens, as in Chile during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.
Whether the United States will ever stand as an example of the latter phenomenon is an open question. On Thursday, a judge blocked the Trump administration’s mobilization of the National Guard, ordering the return of authority over the Guard to California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, but an appeals court put that ruling on hold a few hours later.
The scale of the mobilization in Los Angeles throws the Trump administration’s strategies into stark relief. The Los Angeles Police Department, the third largest force in the country, clearly stated it could handle the protests. A localized response by the L.A.P.D. would generate only a spate of familiar images, however; it could never capture the drama of a foreign invasion, or the history-making moment when Los Angeles became “occupied territory,” as the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller wrote on X after protests began.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former Fox weekend host, also depicted the L.A. protests as a collusion between an external enemy and the “violent mob” of protesters supporting this “dangerous invasion.” To show the public that order was being restored, Mr. Hegseth turned to a Marine infantry division that served in Iraq and Afghanistan, rendering Los Angeles into an open-air studio for the production of a show of force.
The Trump administration is now using the second-largest city in the country as a backdrop for its efforts to create the perception of a national crisis. Doing so could allow it to justify measures that would empower the government to act against its own citizens.
This is concerning enough. Even more worrying is what history shows us: that all too often, such crises become semi-permanent — “not the exception but the rule,” as the anti-Nazi philosopher Walter Benjamin once observed.
There is perhaps no clearer example of this trajectory than in Chile after 1973, the year Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government in a U.S.-backed coup and initiated a nearly 17-year military dictatorship. The previously trusted military quickly became key to the use of violence to achieve the regime’s goal of bringing about “a profound change in the mentality of the country,” in the words of one Chilean official. It eventually became a symbol of the Chilean reign of terror, and torture by military officials became state practice.
The junta also fell back on the evergreen authoritarian narrative of invasion to justifythe repression to the public and the international community; the specter of foreign criminals flooding into the country proved useful to Pinochet, as it does to Mr. Trump, who positioned himself during the election campaign as the savior of a “very, very sick country.”
America in 2025 is not Chile in 1973. Mr. Trump returned to power in a free and fair election, not a coup. He made no secret during his campaign of his desire to carry out mass deportations and willingness to involve the military on domestic soil in the project.
Nevertheless, what Chileans endured is a cautionary tale for Americans today. When the rule of law is replaced with normalized lawlessness, security forces and the military can all too easily become hollowed out. Codes of military conduct and ideals such as duty and valor can disappear into the void as the military becomes a tool of the quest for absolute power. The Chilean military, which enjoyed so much respect before the coup, left the dictatorship in 1990 stripped of its integrity.
The current administration is charging ahead with its attempt to empower the executive branch to impose Mr. Trump’s will in ways that track with the history of authoritarianism. Flooding our screens with images that habituate us to a new reality of federalized state militia members standing opposite civilian protesters is part of it. So is mobilizing our armed forces for a parade staged on Mr. Trump’s birthday."
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