It’s reassuring to see fairly widespread critical coverage of the president’s politicized interactions with the military during his trip to Iraq, but there’s nothing new or surprising in Donald Trump’s attempts to cloak himself in the iron mantle of a militarized nationalism. As so many times before, something utterly predictable, and in fact, familiar, has happened, seeming to provoke astonishment when the more proper response might be a poise of grim confirmation vis-a-vis the man’s authoritarian tendencies. Nestled darkly inside the spectacle of his actions and the outraged response is a sense that vital assumptions about American democracy are coming undone, or at least being severely challenged, and of an urgent need to revisit first principles lest they be replaced by insidious new ideas about the nature of our country.
The main issue is not that members of the military might have brought campaign paraphernalia to a meet and greet with the president, and that the president signed MAGA hats, although this is in fact highly problematic in and of itself. The idea of members of the military endorsing a particular political candidate cannot be reconciled with either the idea of a non-partisan military or the cornerstone idea of civilian control over the armed forces. Though the rank and file who engaged in this behavior deserve some form of reprimand, the harsher punishment by far should be levied against their superiors, who never should have allowed such activities.
Yet it is a president and his team who encouraged and indulged such a display who carry the greatest culpability, and who merit the strongest condemnation. Trump abetted the erosion of keeping the military in its proper place in order to boost his own standing, effectively leveraging his position as commander-in-chief to orchestrate a performance of adulation by those he commands. However, he went a dangerous step farther by using the event to accuse the opposition political party not only of being feckless, but of being outright anti-American. When he told the service members that “You’re fighting for borders in other countries, and they don’t want to fight, the Democrats, for the border of our country,” he effectively recruited his military audience into the cause of attacking his political rivals. Moreover, his lies to the assembled service members that they hadn’t received a pay raise in ten years was an obvious attempt to incite anger against the Obama administration and Democrats more generally, and adds to the obscenity of his behavior.
The president’s subsequent attempts to turn the criticism into an attack on the military — he tweeted that “CNN & others within the Fake News Universe were going wild about my signing MAGA hats for our military in Iraq and Germany” — would have the public ignore the overall context and scope of his anti-democratic efforts to use military support for his personal ends. Having engaged in activity antithetical to the norms of American democracy, he has tried to turn the conversation to a false narrative about the media hating the military.
Trump’s behavior is that of a generalissimo in a banana republic. This is not a coincidence, because like other leaders of authoritarian tendency, once you have sloughed off a commitment to democracy and the archipelago of decency, mutual respect, and collective endeavor that it involves, all that is left is a worship of power and violence, and the aggrandizement of the self. Our president is such a man; to not see this is to be either a dupe or a co-conspirator.
Yet Trump can dare to do what he has done because the United States has long been drifting into an unhealthy and unexamined relationship with its armed forces, both in terms of the political system’s and the public’s attitudes towards the military and the missions it has been given. Since 2001, the U.S. has put war-making at the center of its foreign policy, launching invasions of an unconquerable country, in the case of Afghanistan, and a country innocent of the crimes of 9/11, in the case of Iraq, and eventually expanding military operations to dozens of countries. And through the last 17 years, most of the public has been satisfied to outsource the sacrifice required to a tiny subset of the population. As service members’ sacrifice has come to seem more and more pointless in some ways — witness the undeniable disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq — and yet more and more commendable in others — there have been no more 9/11’s, and isn’t that what our leaders promised would be the result of launching wars in the Middle East? — Americans have arrived at an attitude of fetishization of the armed forces. Polls show that the military is one of the most respected, if not the most respected, institution in the United States, and the mere suggestion that not every last American service member is an outright hero earned NBC host Chris Hayes a public shellacking (even though it is obvious to the non-befuddled that a Marine who slogged his way through Fallujah and was wounded along the way is a hero, whereas a paper-pushing general playing politics in the Pentagon is not). In a grotesque turn of events, you could count yourself as a supporter of the military not because you engaged in serious debate and prolonged consideration of why and where Americans were dying and whether it was worth it, but because you brooked no criticism of the service members and engaged in blissful ignorance of the whereabouts of American troops as your just reward.
The idea, then, that service members are not only heroes, but also simultaneously fragile victims, is never far below the surface, as the public at large has not been able to fully suppress the awareness that it has chosen not to examine too closely the sacrifices of their fellow Americans, and is ever plagued with an unexamined combination of guilt and doubt. Not surprisingly, Donald Trump picked up on this strain of victimhood, when he suggested that he could never turn down service members who asked him to sign their MAGA hats. The notion that warriors would somehow be bereft or heartbroken by the lack of an autograph not only lays bare once again the president’s fundamental narcissism, but this generalized double sense of soldiers as both superhuman and super fragile.
Trump understands our unhealthy fetishization of the armed forces, and is attempting to use it to burnish his own lagging credibility. It may not work with most Americans, but the largest danger is that it resonates with his base, for whom Trump has further normalized the idea that the military should be considered a legitimate conservative bastion that might support a good Republican president like Donald Trump when the political establishment turns on him. It is naive to think that Donald Trump is currying military votes; rather, he is toying with the idea that his legitimacy may not rest on the support of a majority, or winning an election, but on the support of the truest Americans of all, the men and women of the armed forces.
It is a final bit of sickening bullshit that this episode occurred at a base in Germany, a country in which U.S. troops have been stationed ever since kicking the shit out of a regime that is the poster child for the perils of militaristic Fuhrer worship.