When President Trump first sought to stage a military parade in Washington, a four-star general argued against it, telling him that “it’s what dictators do.” Mr. Trump was unbothered by the comparison, and so on Saturday tanks will roll down the streets of the nation’s capital for the first time in decades.
Nor was Mr. Trump evidently concerned about being accused of authoritarian excess for deploying troops to Los Angeles to quell violent protests against his immigration crackdown. If anything, he seemed to revel in the moment, vowing to “hit” anyone who so much as spit at a police officer and even threatening “very big force” against protesters in Washington.
Yet as a real war broke out this week in the Middle East, Mr. Trump seemed reluctant to get involved, declining to join Israel in its aerial blitz against Iran’s nuclear facilities despite years of chest-thumping threats of “obliteration” against the Islamic regime. While he authorized U.S. forces to help defend Israel from Iran’s subsequent retaliation, in keeping with past practice, Mr. Trump made clear that he would not target Iran himself, at least for now, and instead urged it to return to the negotiating table.
The seemingly disparate postures of recent days — strongman at home, peace-seeker abroad — speak to Mr. Trump’s complicated relationship with the military. He has ordered more troops to Los Angeles and Washington than he currently has stationed in Syria and Iraq combined. He seems more willing at the moment to use the military against Americans than against Iranians. He celebrates a show of force on U.S. soil even as he denounces “endless wars” outside its borders.
Mr. Trump has always been an contradictory commander in chief, one unlike any other in American history. A graduate of a high school military academy, he never actually served in the armed forces, avoided being drafted for Vietnam thanks to a dubious bone spurs diagnosis, publicly denigrated Senator John McCain’s wartime heroism and was quoted privately dismissing veterans as “suckers” and “losers” (which he denied).
Yet as president, Mr. Trump has used the military to serve his political goals. He surrounded himself with “my generals” and purged those he deemed insufficiently loyal. He entertained a recommendation to impose a form of martial law to overturn the 2020 election that he lost. In recent days, he has given speeches at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Fort Bragg, N.C., that sounded like campaign rallies.
Mr. Trump enjoys strong support among many active-duty service members and veterans who appreciate his vocal backing and admire his unvarnished bravado, according to polls and analysts. Yet some career officers said the president clearly does not understand the ethos of service or the nonpartisan tradition of the American armed forces.
“As in all things Trumpian, there is a fundamental contradiction in how he looks at the military,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired Navy four-star admiral who served as NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe.
“He loves the uniforms and the pomp and circumstance, and the ability to apply direct power without boundaries,” Mr. Stavridis said. “But he also thinks that those who serve in the military could be making a lot more money and gain more prestige in the civilian world, and I think he wonders what drives their sacrifice.”
Mr. Trump and his aides have long insisted that he has deep respect for service members and contend that his eagerness to showcase hardware and troops marking the Army’s 250th birthday — and, in what they call a coincidence, his own 79th birthday — demonstrates pride in the history and accomplishments of the American armed forces.
“This parade will honor all of the military men and women who have bravely served our country, including those who made the ultimate sacrifice to defend our freedom,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “No event can fully capture our gratitude for those who have worn the uniform, but this grand parade will ensure our veterans and active-duty service members are recognized with the respect and magnificence they deserve.”
This is the day Mr. Trump has coveted for years. He wanted a similar display of military might for his first inauguration in 2017, and when that did not work out, he grew even more fixated on the idea later in the year when he visited France for its Bastille Day celebration. But military officers, including his second White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, resisted, convinced that it was not in keeping with American tradition and would instead evoke the kinds of displays favored in autocratic countries like Russia, North Korea and Iran.
Mr. Kelly concluded that Mr. Trump had a warped view of the military. The president grew frustrated that senior officers were not in his view loyal to him politically and personally. “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” he once asked, referring to Hitler’s generals, according to Mr. Kelly. Once, during another trip to France, he skipped a visit to a cemetery for American troops killed in World War I, saying it was “filled with losers.” Mr. Trump denied both accounts.
In the final year of his first term, he wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act to send active-duty troops into the streets of cities where protests against the murder of George Floyd had become violent, only to be rebuffed by Mark T. Esper, his defense secretary, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
After the 2020 election, retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn and other allies showed up at the Oval Office urging him to order the military to seize voting machines and rerun elections in states where he lost, an idea he considered but did not follow through on, knowing that General Milley would resist.
In this second term, Mr. Kelly, Mr. Esper and General Milley are all gone, and Mr. Trump feels freer to pursue his own instincts. In sending troops to Los Angeles, he federalized the California National Guard over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom, the first time any president has done so since the civil rights era. Mr. Trump has vowed that he will do the same elsewhere around the country if protests merit it, raising the prospect of a wider military presence in American cities.
To critics, Mr. Trump, who uses words like “invasion” and “occupation” to justify the troop deployment to Los Angeles, is manufacturing fake wars at home to suppress domestic dissent, heralding what some fear is a creeping military dictatorship. What is striking is that Mr. Trump does not seem to worry about giving that impression. He has done nothing to dispel it or reassure Americans that his use of the military against domestic unrest is a limited effort that should not concern them.
“They say, oh, that’s not nice,” Mr. Trump said of his critics during his speech this week at Fort Bragg. “Well, if we didn’t do it, there wouldn’t be a Los Angeles.” He added: “Under the Trump administration, this anarchy will not stand. We will not allow federal agents to be attacked, and we will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy. And that’s what they are.”
Coming shortly after his West Point commencement address, where he wore a campaign hat and gave a rambling talk that included discussion of a “trophy wife” and the various criminal investigations against him, Mr. Trump’s Fort Bragg speech caused concern among senior officers about the politicization of the military.
During the speech, Mr. Trump celebrated his own 2024 election victory, disparaged Democrats like Mr. Newsom and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., lied about the 2020 election being rigged and told soldiers to lobby Congress for his tax cut and spending bill, with the troops responding enthusiastically to his partisan jabs. Such an overtly political speech would have been considered out of bounds by previous presidents, but Mr. Trump makes no such distinctions.
None of which should be a surprise given his history. Discussing threats to the nation during last year’s campaign, Mr. Trump said that “the enemy from within” was more dangerous than foreign adversaries and advocated using the military to deal with “radical left lunatics” who in his view got out of control.
Yet the demonstration of military might on American streets this week feels jarring coming at the same time as a full-blown Middle East crisis in which the United States has taken a backseat. Mr. Trump has been trying to negotiate an agreement with Iran to end its nuclear program peacefully, only to be overtaken by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who decided to take matters into his own hands with a ferocious bombardment.
Mr. Trump publicly complimented the Israelis on their success on Friday but did not endorse further military action, instead reaching out to Iran to resume talks. Some Republican hawks expressed consternation that he would not be willing to more directly support Israel’s military campaign.
“Trump is more focused on his birthday parade, or so it seems, than on helping Israel and the West to eliminate a serious nuclear threat,” said Charles M. Kupperman, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term. “Trump can keep mouthing ‘peace through strength,’ but just mouthing doesn’t make it real, and words don’t eliminate threats. Actions do.”
Mr. Trump has at times been willing to use force overseas, notably in assassinating a top Iranian commander in his first term and striking Houthi militants in the early months of his second. But his “America First” foreign policy has emphasized extracting the United States from foreign wars, not starting new ones.
During his first term, Mr. Trump signed a pact with the Taliban to pull U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, a deal that his own former national security adviser called a “surrender agreement” and that Mr. Biden carried out disastrously in 2021, creating a vacuum that enabled the Taliban to take over the country. Mr. Trump has also repeatedly sought to bring home American troops from Germany, South Korea, Syria and other places around the globe.
Mr. Trump faces pressure from his own Make America Great Again isolationist base that grew disenchanted by U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and does not want him to help Israel.
Jack Posobiec, a right-wing activist, warned before the Israeli attack that a “direct strike on Iran right now would disastrously split the Trump coalition.” Indeed, Charlie Kirk, another influential voice on the right, polled his followers online about whether the United States should take part, and nearly 90 percent voted no.
Even Mr. Trump’s limited support for Israel was enough to draw fire from another important supporter, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, who has long lobbied against military action against Iran. After the Israeli attack, Mr. Carlson wrote in a newsletter that Mr. Trump was “complicit in the act of war,” saying that “years of funding and sending weapons” to Israel “undeniably place the U.S. at the center of last night’s events.”
All of which makes for a complicated moment at Saturday’s parade as the commander in chief directs U.S. troops to fight in America but try to avoid fighting overseas.
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.
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