The president declined at Fort Bragg to hum a tune of virtue and valor \u2013 instead it was a tour of his darkest horizons<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Donald Trump was hundreds of miles away from the White House on Tuesday, visiting one the country\u2019s most venerable military bases, Fort Bragg in North Carolina, partly to big-up Saturday\u2019s forthcoming celebration of America\u2019s armed might in Washington \u2013 a parade spectacular ostensibly held in honor of the US armed forces\u2019 birthday. But also his own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With a new setting came the chance for a new theme. Instead the president chose an old one \u2013 American carnage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was the same discordant melody he had gone off on in his memorably dark first inauguration speech of January 2017, prompting George W Bush \u2013 who has kept an otherwise sphinx-like silence on things Trumpian in recent years \u2013 to murmur that it was \u201csome weird shit\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Given the martial setting, it would have been worthier, though unquestionably duller, to hum a tune of virtue and valor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But with Los Angeles<\/a>, long his favourite city whipping boy, in the spotlight \u2013 by dint of his having dispatched 4,000 national guards troops there on dubious pretext to confront protesters against his immigration roundups \u2013 there was never a chance of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Confrontation on the streets of what is sometimes called Tinseltown but is more noted by the president\u2019s Maga followers as the capital of \u201cwoke\u201d handed Trump the chance to adopt his most favoured posture \u2013 the president of permanent emergency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having used economic emergency powers to adopt, against all sound advice, tariffs, and other legislation designed to be applied only in wartime to unleash the furies on undocumented migrants, he now had the perfect setting to expound on the extraordinary measures he planned to take against domestic unrest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI want to say a few words about the situation in Los Angeles, California<\/a>,\u201d he told his audience of uniformed active servicemen. Context and setting, you understood, was everything here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What were once considered policing matters would require, not to put too fine a point on it, military solutions. \u201cThe police in LA, who are very good, but they weren\u2019t aggressive, like our soldiers. Our soldiers really were aggressive,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Weird shit indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The national guard and active Marine Corps deployments in LA, he strongly hinted, would not be the last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI will be calling you early, as I see this happening,\u201d he said, expanding his horizons to other settings, taking the opportunity to target Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota \u2013 running mate of Kamala Harris, Trump\u2019s defeated Democratic opponent in last year\u2019s presidential election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBecause, you know, in theory,\u201d he said, warming \u2013 revealingly \u2013 to his theme, \u201cI guess you could say a governor could call, but they don\u2019t call. They let their city burn, like in Minneapolis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Walz, Trump went, had refused to deploy the national guard in Minneapolis after violence flared in the city amid protests in 2020 following the murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI called the guard and I saved it, but I wish I would have called it the first day,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, local media reports\u2002<\/a>say records confirm that it was Walz who called in the national guard. But no matter, Trump had made his intent clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n