Not A Good Look

Steve M believes Donald Trump's military parade "will just be a pointless moment of excess" and warns

Don't get worked up about this. If you get worked up about this, your resentment will be the story: There go the liberals, hating America again. Don't give them the satisfaction. Seventy-two hours after it's over, we'll be chasing some ridiculous Trump tweet, and no one will remember the parade even happened.

A reader recognizes that a parade would be "exactly the kind of brutish symbolism that turns out to be very important indeed" but Steve M responds

they'll forget all about it a few days later, and Trump will go back to watching television, while his administration and Congress go back to transferring even more money and power to the rich from the non-rich. That's where the danger lies. Apart from the pro-Russia skew, which is alarming, the real danger of this administration is not that it's fascist, but rather that it's Republican in an effective way.

So far, that is. Admittedly, in this first term of the Trump reign, the Administration hasn't been fascist but instead dangerously "Republican in an effective way."

But this is the first term.  If this extravaganza comes off without major opposition from Democrats or the military- and the GOP maintains control of Congress, thus hindering the Mueller investigation- it might not be the last.  Trump will contrast the event with the Obama "apology tour" and declare that America has been made great again. We might even get to hear that it's "morning in America" again, an actor borrowing from the (successful re-election bid) previous actor-President, as he borrowed the "MAGA" slogan.

President Trump, elected over the objection of a majority of voters and remaining unpopular, has had no mandate to turn the USA into a police state or otherwise.  Although as Steve M. notes he has put into effect a radically conservative policy agenda, his lack of knowledge of how government works, coupled with a Special Counsel's investigation that has kept him off-balance, has blocked any real chance of imposing an authoritarian regime... yet.

Imagine, however, a re-elected Donald Trump, perhaps even with a majority of votes.  At that time, Bill Maher's insightful comment (beginning at 6:35 of the video below) from Friday night's Real Time might prove eerily prescient:

And now tanks in the streets. You know, I mean, I laugh, too. It's a funny premise- comedians, we like a premise like that, too. Ha, ha, ha. I don't- it's not really funny. The idea- because you shouldn't get used to the look of tanks in the streets. We don't have that look in America and when I've seen that look anywhere else in the world it's never been good and to me this is like, hey, better get them used to that- tanks in the streets.









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