The commander in chief could not contain himself. He did not even try.
He stood on a stage at the end of a long pier and looked out upon a sea of starchy white polyester, neckerchiefs and aviator sunglasses.
“Let’s face it,” President Trump told thousands of U.S. Navy sailors Sunday afternoon, “this is a rally.”
Actually, it was meant to be a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Navy, but the president treated the occasion as though it were just another Trump rally, but with better toys (there were aircraft carriers and fighter jets).
He kept veering off script to rail about a “rigged” election and “woke” stuff. There was a group of MAGA true believers who follow him around the country seated by the stage. He called out to them. And he slammed the news media and his Democratic predecessors and inveighed against “transgender for everybody,” which has become his latest over-the-top maxim meant to invoke liberal lunacy.
The scene on Sunday provided the latest look at how Mr. Trump melds his savage partisan politics with his role as head of the armed forces.
His attempts to politicize the military have become more blatant at a time when he is flexing his power over that military in ever new ways. This is a dynamic that has taken on urgent new significance in the past week.
Over the weekend, Mr. Trump sent National Guard troops from Texas to Chicago, against the wishes of the Illinois governor, a Democrat. The president also ordered hundreds of out-of-state National Guard troops into Portland, Ore., setting off a showdown with a federal judge who blocked the administration’s moves on Sunday night.
Judge Karin Immergut (who was appointed by Mr. Trump) wrote in her ruling: “This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law. Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power — to the detriment of this nation.”
And on Friday, his administration carried out another strike on what it described as a drug trafficking ship in international waters; these strikes have alarmed a range of legal specialists in laws governing the use of force.
Mr. Trump boasted about the strikes and the troop deployments to the sailors on Sunday. “Now we’re in Memphis,” he said. “And we are going to Chicago.” He talked about how he sent troops into Washington.
“We send in the National Guard,” he told them. “You know what? We send in whatever is necessary. People don’t care. They don’t want crime in their cities.”
Most of the sailors hearing this were quite young. They had come from all over the country to do all sorts of jobs for the Navy on this base in Norfolk. Some of them were fans of this president. Others were not.
In the days leading up to Mr. Trump’s arrival address, one Navy official explained, at least some of these sailors had been spoken to by their superiors, who reminded them that when they joined the Navy, they swore an oath to the Constitution. The military is meant to be nonpartisan. It is not meant to serve one party or political leader or any ideology. It is meant to serve the nation.
This is one of America’s oldest and most sacred democratic traditions, devised by the founding fathers, but it is not one for which Mr. Trump has historically had much time or respect. He almost always behaves as the political animal that he is.
That instinct — that disregard for tradition — was also on display five days earlier, when he was in Quantico, addressing hundreds of top military commanders. Mr. Trump acknowledged then that he understood the commanders were not supposed to clap or laugh or react much. He told them to forget about those old rules. “You just feel nice and loose,” he told them. But they sat mostly stock still as he delivered a partisan speech for 73 minutes.
So he couldn’t crack the brass. Maybe a pier full of youngsters would be easier?
He made one hell of an entrance, landing in Marine One on the deck of an aircraft carrier while the theme song from “Top Gun” blared. A squadron of fighter jets flew low overhead in a tight formation as he spoke his first words — “God bless the United States Navy”— and the sailors roared with delight.
“I think he’s a great president,” said Josie Reyna, a 25-year-old aviation boatswain’s mate from Wyoming. Asked what she thought about Mr. Trump sending the National Guard into cities over the weekend, she replied, “I mean, I know that he just wants to do what’s right.”
Just then, a 37-year-old sailor named Ruben Reed who works in the Navy’s public affairs department, which helped stage the event, appeared and flashed her a warning look.
Mr. Reed proceeded to shadow me through the crowd, monitoring the young members of the Navy as they tried to communicate as best they could what they thought of Mr. Trump without sounding too wildly partisan. Even though their commander in chief had brought politics onto the pier, they knew they were not supposed to talk the way he does.
Megan Rush, a 26-year-old from Lafayette, La., who works as an electrician on aircraft carriers, said she came out to the pier because she’d never seen a president before. What does she make of this one?
“Ummmmm,” she said, pausing for a moment. “I don’t know what to say.”
Mr. Reed piped up. “Are you happy to be here?” he asked, rhetorically.
“I’m happy to be here supporting the Navy,” Ms. Rush said pointedly.
“It’s OK to support the president,” Mr. Reed said slowly. “Its OK to support your president, Donald Trump.”
A trio of baby-faced rescue swimmers standing nearby were far more enthusiastic.
“I just like Trump because of how kind of out there he is, you know, and aggressive,” said one of them, a 22-year-old from Chandler, Ariz., named Alex Guerra. “I love Pete Hegseth, because he’s enforcing strict military standards. I think it’s just going to make the military better. He’s kind of bringing it back to how the old days were.”
The sailors whooped loudest when Mr. Trump promised he’d secure them all back pay after the government shutdown ends and that he would throw in a pay raise while he was at it.
The crowd also liked his talk of the Navy’s “swagger” and “sheer attitude” and how he described state-of-the-art submarines that “prowl” and “strike from crushing depths unseen.” They enjoyed, too, the way he talked about the guts and the glory of “leatherheads” and “jarheads” and “devil dogs” and the epic tales he told about Commodore Sinclair and Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima.
“I like your life better than mine, I have to be honest with you,” Mr. Trump said at one point. “Sailing on those beautiful waters all the time, you’re so lucky.”
But tales of nautical heroism and good old-fashioned patriotism eventually gave way to a litany of vintage Trumpian grievances, which landed with mixed results.
The crowd stared back silently as he complained, implausibly and as he has done many times before, that one year before the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center he tried to warn the world about Osama Bin Laden, but no one gave him credit for this warning because no one ever gives him enough credit.
He talked about suing The Associated Press. Many sailors laughed when Mr. Trump began to mock former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for falling down steps. And there was some cheering when the president said “we’re not politically correct anymore.” But there were other reactions, too.
When Mr. Trump said that “we are getting ‘wokeness’ the hell out of our military,” one Black woman looked at another with arched eyebrows; they shook their heads as they walked away from the stage toward the other end of the pier. Many other members of the Navy who looked like they’d heard enough slowly followed suit.
It ended a little while later with Mr. Trump dancing onstage to “YMCA,” as he often does at his political rallies. He and the first lady climbed aboard the aircraft carrier, got into their helicopter and disappeared over the horizon. Some of the sailors went back into the ship, and the rest began to shuffle off the pier back toward the base.
Michael Dube, a 36-year-old who works for the chapel as a religious program specialist, was one of them. He went to a Trump rally once years ago and has since watched many of them on television. He said he agreed with the president that the day was a lot like one of those rallies. Which was fine by him.
“It was,” he said, “great as always.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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