From Fort Bragg to LA, Trump enlists the military in a slow-motion coup

One can’t help but wonder if Braxton Bragg — the infamous and incompetent Confederate general who owned 105 enslaved African Americans, waged war on Mexicans, and was so awful his own troops tried to assassinate him ... twice — was looking up from his fiery eternity and smiling.

Nearly 149 years after Bragg’s death — and four months after a U-turn that involved a juvenile ploy to reattach this traitor’s name to the sprawling U.S. Army base in his native North Carolina — here came the 47th president of the nation that trounced Bragg up and down the Civil War battlefield. Yet, on Tuesday, Donald Trump all but promised a sea of beret-wearing soldiers a return to Confederate values, under a large banner that read, “THIS WE’LL DEFEND.”

The insurrectionist Bragg surely would have been heartened when Trump used his powerful platform to rally an entire army against democratically elected public officials like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — and when the uniformed troops of a once proudly apolitical U.S. Army answered with thunderous applause.

Like everything else about Trump’s strongman regime, the cheers had been manufactured. Military.com later reported that the chiseled forces of the storied 82nd Airborne Division behind Trump’s podium had been picked, in part, for their right-wing political views and also — according to one email obtained by the news site — to satisfy our allegedly 224-pound (lol) president with “no fat soldiers.” (Yes, Trump’s Tinder ad for his dream-date U.S. soldier essentially read, “No fatties.”)

“If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,” read another email. No wonder Trump’s audience not only laughed and cheered at ugly diatribes against their prior commander in chief, Joe Biden, and a free press, but also lined up for a vendor who was somehow allowed into Fort Bragg to sell items such as “Make America Great Again” chain necklaces and phony credit cards labeled “White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything.”

This we’ll defend?

It’s not an exaggeration to say that June 10, 2025, will go down in American history as a day of infamy, when an authoritarian president made clear that the world’s largest and most lethal fighting force now exists to enforce his personalist political agenda, and not to defend the nation’s people.

And it’s no surprise that Trump’s harshest critics came from the outraged ranks of patriotic veterans like Hurricane Katrina relief hero and retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who called the “damn” speech “inappropriate” in a tweet, adding that “I never witnessed that S..t [sic] like this in 37 years in Uniform.”

But while Trump’s blatant politicizing of the U.S. military was a horrific crime against democracy in its own right, this fateful moment did not occur in a vacuum.

Although the ostensible purpose of the Fort Bragg speech was to kick off the 250th birthday party for a U.S. Army launched in 1775 to oppose (irony alert) a cruel and arbitrary monarch, the real mission seemed to celebrate the two-day anniversary of Trump’s crossing-the-Rubicon decision to federalize the National Guard and call out Marines on the American soil of Los Angeles.

Under legal justifications that seemed invented from whole cloth, the California National Guard operation that Trump now commands against the will of Newsom — whose state is suing the regime — to quell protests against federal immigration raids that the White House falsely calls “an insurrection” is already seeing heavily armed troops detaining LA residents.

The added call-up of 700 Marines — troops trained not to enforce public safety but to kill people — is making clear that an increasingly botched American Experiment is entering a terrifying new phase in which the might of our grossly oversized military is deployed to silence domestic dissent.

The shocking video this week of a train carrying scores of Army M1-A1 Abrams tanks past the Washington Monument and into the center of Washington, D.C., where a 250th Army anniversary parade on Saturday night coincidentally falls on Trump’s 79th birthday, makes clear the real point: Trump has been planning a military junta style of undemocratic government from Day One.

This week, Rolling Stone reported that the military is likely to remain on the streets of LA for weeks, accompanying agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as they increase raids on Home Depots, car washes, and farms to meet the regime’s arbitrary mass deportation goal of one million migrant arrests this year. A source told the magazine that “it is hard to imagine that protesters would stay home for this, and that escalation in such a scenario is all but inevitable.”

» READ MORE: L.A., Abrego Garcia, and the Big Lies of Trump tyranny | Will Bunch Newsletter

And yet, it’s disturbing the extent to which even smart and good pro-democracy politicians and pundits still aren’t seeing this. Wednesday night, I heard Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin — fresh off a well-deserved grilling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Capitol Hill — go on MSNBC and still insist that Trump sending in the Marines in Southern California is “a distraction” from his failed economic policies.

No.

This is not a distraction from the essence of the 47th presidency. This is rather what Trump’s MAGA movement was always all about, imposing his will on the divided nation that just barely elected him in November as the kind of “red Caesar” dictator that extreme-right “thought leaders” have been pleading for, and using brute force to get there.

A president whose disastrous first term ended with a violent attempted coup to block the peaceful transfer of power is now moving quickly in his second term to consolidate power, to accomplish the form of autocracy he sought on Jan. 6, 2021.

What we are watching this week, from the chaos in downtown LA to the Mussolini-like strutting at Fort Bragg to the soon-to-be-pothole-ravaged streets of D.C., is nothing less than Trump’s second attempted self-coup against the United States. And this one offers a much greater chance of success, unless the resistance mobilizes quickly.

It’s true that — as the brilliant New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and others have noted — Trump and his henchmen, like anti-immigrant guru Stephen Miller, are making their move now less because he is a strongman, and more because his nearly five months in office have revealed him as a weak man.

His “Big Beautiful Bill” that would devastate U.S. healthcare and other public goods is not surprisingly foundering in Congress. Scores of judges — some appointed by Trump in his first term — are striking down his worst dictatorial moves. Most importantly, the president’s public support is plunging rapidly toward Nixonian levels, with a new Quinnipiac Poll showing 56% of Americans oppose his mass deportation, while his overall approval has sunk to 38%.

What would Chairman Mao or Comrade Lenin do? The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, an expert on authoritarianism, nailed it in her latest essay: “Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors. Give up — or radicalize. Find compromise — or polarize society further. Slow down — or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to promote violence.”

What’s happening in Los Angeles is bad, but it’s only the beginning. It was reported this week that ICE is planning to send militarized “tactical units” into Democratic-run cities, including Philadelphia — as well as Chicago, New York, Seattle, and northern Virginia. It’s noteworthy that the Trump regime’s open-ended orders federalizing National Guard members in California weren’t limited to the Golden State, suggesting that we could see armed troops patrolling past Independence Hall sooner rather than later.

With all the scary stuff that’s happening right now, arguably the most alarming is the Trump regime’s efforts — amplified by the predictable Fox News tape reels of the few cars that burned last weekend in LA — to claim that any form of dissent is now a terrorist threat against “the homeland.” From the Oval Office, the president said of the D.C. tank parade: “If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force.”

Not rioters. Not looters. Protesters. American citizens exercising their First Amendment right to air their grievances with the government and voice dissent would be greeted in the nation’s capital with tanks, just as happened in Tiananmen Square 36 years ago this month.

This is a 10-alarm fire for American democracy that screams out for action.

As it happens, there is a protest slated for Saturday — a huge one. It’s called, beyond fittingly, No Kings, and marches and rallies are now planned for more than 1,800 cities, state capitals, and small towns in all 50 states. Everywhere except Trump’s childish D.C. birthday party in Washington. If you are able to attend No Kings and rekindle the spirit that threw off one monarchy here in Philly in 1776, I’d urge you to do so.

A general who once fought to defend a tyrannical regime of slavery predicted in 1861, “We shall show you that we are stronger than you, and that we will beat you in the long run.” That was, of course, Braxton Bragg, on his buffoonish journey toward the dustbin of history. The most important thing about reactionary movements and the dictators who lead them is that they fail.

Donald Trump’s second coup will fail, too — but only after we the people make clear that this will not stand.

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