On MMMWA: Making the Male Military White Again for dear leader

 

A few years ago, this was a US Army recruiting poster. While I'm not much of a fan of armies, I kind of liked it when I passed it on the street.

 

Fintan O'Toole, an Irish journalist writing in the New York Review of Books, offers some insights into the role of the military cosplay and reality in the Trump regime. 

... For now at least, the primary goal of Trump’s deployment of troops on the streets of Los Angeles is not the violent suppression of dissent. It is the remaking of the army itself. Trump is instructing the troops on how they must think of themselves and of the nature of the country they are pledged to defend. 

 

[The TV-jabberer who Trump installed as Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth writes in his best seller The War on Warriors (2024) that he “didn’t want this Army anymore.” This army is the one that actually exists: of its 1.3 million active-duty troops, 230,000 are women, and more than 350,000 are Black. 

Trump appointed Hegseth to make many of these soldiers invisible. The War on Warriors is subtitled Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. It offers “to recover a true vision of the value of strong men.” These are “red-blooded American men,” men who “respect other strong, skilled, dedicated men” and not “men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa.” ...

Strange posturing from a guy who installed a makeup studio at the Pentagon to prep for his TV appearances, but there we are.

The Trumpian reimagining of the US Army has nothing to do with fighting foreign wars. It is all about reasserting the innately white and male nature of America. According to Hegseth, the military’s “key constituency is normal men”: “Normal dudes have always fought, and won, our wars.” His vision, as he explains it, is to restore not just the value of strong men but also “the importance of normality.” ...

In this regard, putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation. Soldiers are being retrained for loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution. They are meanwhile becoming accustomed to confronting that deviant and anomalous America. ... Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy.

O'Toole sees Trump as a would-be dictator trapped in a contradiction. 

As his dithering over whether to bomb Iran showed, Trump has a problem: fascism bends inexorably toward war, but much of his appeal lies in his promise to end America’s foreign conflicts. 

Part of the solution is to mount one-off spectaculars: B-2 stealth bombers dropping 30,000-pound bunker busters. 

The other part is to repatriate the idea of boots on the ground. Like iPhones and pharmaceuticals, that kind of war will no longer be made abroad. It will be manufactured all over America. 

Let's try to get rid of our tinpot Mussolini before he blows all of us up. His Iranian adventure was bad enough. We face a test.