Tanks being shipped to Washington, DC, for the June 14 military parade. Photo: AP
From Revolution | Original Article
June 14—Trump’s 79th birthday—will be marked by a massive military parade. 1
Nearly 7,000 U.S. soldiers will march in Washington, DC. Twenty-eight huge Abrams tanks and more than 100 other military vehicles will roll down the streets. At least 50 military aircraft, including Vietnam-era helicopters and aircraft from each U.S. war, will do flyovers. In the evening, the Army’s “Golden Knights” parachute team will descend from the sky and then present Trump with a folded American flag.
This kind of public display of military might is unprecedented in modern U.S. history. But what is being displayed most of all is not just weapons of mass destruction and the soldiers who wield them. More than that, this parade is a public “coming out” party for a U.S. military that is being rapidly transformed into an armed force that is loyal to Trump above all else, including above the U.S. Constitution. Parading troops and weapons for the Leader’s birthday is an obscene and unmistakable symbol of fealty (groveling loyalty) and obedience.
To be clear, the U.S. armed forces have been and are the backbone of the power of the ruling system of capitalism-imperialism in the U.S. and worldwide. As such, they are responsible for horror after horror, over hundreds of years, including genocidal assaults against whole peoples.2 This army that Trump is celebrating was carrying out genocide as early as four years into its existence, when none other than George Washington led a campaign to intentionally starve the Haudenosaunee people of upper New York and as recently as the time you’re reading this, with its full-out arming of Israel in Gaza. But its transformation into an outright instrument of the fascist section of the ruling class which Trump leads—with its program of utterly unrestrained white supremacy, male supremacy, xenophobia (hatred of foreigners) and enforced ignorance, and its gutting of even the most basic constitutional rights, due process of law, and the rule of law—will make things far worse for the masses of people, in the U.S. and around the world.
Trump’s First Term
Trump’s first term (2017-2021) represented the rise to dominance of fascist forces in the ruling class. But their control was not complete. In particular, Trump faced considerable opposition from different parts of the bureaucracy, and from top leaders in the military apparatus who were more aligned with the “mainstream (non-fascist) imperialist” section of the ruling class mostly concentrated in the Democratic Party.
This presented real problems for the fascists in suppressing opposition to their agenda. Trump wanted to use the military to shoot protesters during the George Floyd uprising in 2020, but was blocked by then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, both of whom publicly spoke out against Trump. Trump wanted to stage a military parade as a show of strength in D.C., but was blocked again. And after he lost the 2020 election, some military leaders actively worked to prevent him from trying to remain in power illegally.
How to Forge a Fascist Military
Even before taking office for his second term, Trump gave major attention to putting hard-core fascists and personal loyalists into key positions. In December 2024, he pushed the appointment of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News commentator, as secretary of defense through the Senate, in spite of numerous personal scandals and the fact that he had absolutely no experience leading anything remotely on the scale of the Department of Defense.
To clear the way for Hegseth, Trump fired Lloyd Austin III, a retired four-star general; Austin is Black.
What Hegseth had going for him was that he is a fanatical Christian fascist who believes that “right-thinking” Christians like him have to wage a holy war to restore white male supremacy and U.S. world domination. He actually came to Trump’s attention because of his spirited defense of a number of U.S. soldiers who had been convicted of war crimes so serious that their own men had turned them in. Now that was somebody Trump could trust to ruthlessly transform the military!3
Purging Military Leadership of Women, Black People, and Anyone Who Recognizes Racism Is Bad
Once in office, Hegseth and Trump carried out a major purge of military leadership. On February 21, they:
- Fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr. Brown is a highly respected general—but Brown is Black, and he had publicly expressed sympathy for the protests against the police murder of George Floyd.
- Replaced Brown with retired Air Force General John Daniel Caine, a white man who Trump claimed had once told him that “I love you, sir, I think you’re great, sir, I’ll kill for you sir.”4
- Fired the chief of naval operations (and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to hold that position. Trump had previously fired another high-ranking female military leader—Coast Guard commandant Admiral Lisa L. Fagan.
- Fired vice chief of staff of the Air Force, General James Slife, who, though a white male, made the “mistake” of urging airmen to think about institutional racism after George Floyd was murdered.
Freeing Up the Troops to Commit (More) War Crimes and Atrocities, at Home and Abroad
In addition to this leadership purge, Hegseth also fired the existing Judge Advocates General (JAGs)—the top legal officer in each branch of the military.
JAGs play a key role in the prosecution of war crimes; Hegseth’s position is that paying any attention at all to the international rules of war (things like you can’t murder unarmed prisoners or civilians, can’t torture people, etc.) are the reason “why America hasn’t won a war since World War 2.”
Not only that, JAGs also have the power to determine that an order is illegal or unconstitutional, and that soldiers or officers have the obligation not to obey it. So for instance, if Trump or Hegseth ordered troops to open fire on peaceful protesters, the JAG could determine that was an illegal order and tell the relevant commanders not to execute it.
Hegseth himself put it this way: he didn’t want JAGs who would pose any “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”
In other words, firing JAGs is a way of throwing open the door to even more atrocities, at home and abroad. The serving Air Force JAG told Military.com that “I think amongst the community, there’s just a lot of concern about who’s going to come next. People are very scared.”
Banning Anti-Racist Books; Hanging on to Hitler’s Mein Kampf
The military has also been “purging” libraries of books that go against MAGA-thought by acknowledging racism, past crimes of the U.S. military, the oppression of women and so on. At the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, the library purged nearly 400 books, including Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Memorializing the Holocaust, a book about how women victims of the German Nazi genocide have been portrayed.
Still on the shelves: The Camp of the Saints, a virulently racist and anti-immigrant book beloved by MAGA and white supremacists generally; The Bell Curve, a long-ago debunked attempt to scientifically “prove” that Black people were less intelligent than whites (books debunking The Bell Curve have also been removed) … and, Mein Kampf, Hitler’s infamous manifesto that paved the way for the Holocaust that killed tens of millions of “inferior” people.5
And More…
All of the above is only a sampling of the fascist moves taken by Trump and Hegseth. On May 6, the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead on a Trump order to expel all transgender people from the military. Hegseth responded gleefully and contemptuously: “No more dudes in dresses. We’re done with that shit,” and set a June 6 deadline (the first week of Pride Month) for trans people to leave.
In Trump’s May 24 speech to the West Point graduating class, he declared that they were the first class graduating in a “golden age” when all attempts to mitigate (lessen) racist oppression and male supremacy had been tossed in the garbage heap. In today’s military, Trump bragged, “All of that’s ended. It’s ended strongly. They’re not even allowed to think about it anymore.” (Italics added.) He also said that the military was going to be completely focused on its “core mission”: “killing America’s enemies” and “spread[ing] democracy to everybody around the world, at the point of a gun.”
Taking in the whole sweep of what we’ve laid out above, the words of Bob Avakian, from two months ago, ring out with particular force:
Trump fascism is a regime that openly and aggressively strips away basic rights and blatantly declares that there is no rule of law and due process of law other than what it dictates, and that raw destructive power is what must rule in the international arena, without even the pretense of adherence to international law or concern about the sovereignty, or even the right to exist, of less powerful peoples and countries.
The Situation; The Challenge
June 14 will be a “celebration” of the forging of reactionary armed forces openly cohered around loyalty to Trump and increasingly open white supremacy and male supremacy, and reckless belligerence and perverted bloodlust. This is not just “theater”—the organizational changes as well as the ideological bombardment (such as the banning of books, the promotion by leaders of a MAGA view of the world, etc.) have a real impact on the military as an institution, and the individual members.
That said, the military is still, and even more, riddled with contradictions. It is still mainly made up of people from oppressed sections of society—43 percent nonwhite, 17 percent female—and almost certainly sharply divided on the MAGA takeover.
As is, it has become a much more deadly weapon against the people in this country and around the world. But if and as society as a whole is marked by a growing movement of determined, persistent and courageous nonviolent struggle against this fascism, this will reverberate inside the military as well, and the brazen, open and shameless attempts to impose fascist order and fascist ideology may ricochet in unexpected ways. Note well: the combination of mass upsurge from below coupled with splits in key government institutions have been one important way that fascist and other extremely repressive and lawless regimes have been driven from power in other countries. This makes it all the more important to expose and oppose the transformation that Trump is intent on forcing through, especially on days like June 14 when “the whole world is watching.”
So this underscores the need for a real leap in the fight to drive out the MAGA fascist regime of Trump. There have been major protests called around the country for June 14—it is of life-and-death urgency that between now and then, protest and resistance mount in every sector of society, with the orientation that “The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go NOW!” and that on June 14, that is what has initiative and momentum.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Officially, the parade is commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States Army. [back]
2. See the revcom.us feature American Crime for many examples including, just to name a few: August 6 and 9, 1945—The Nuclear Incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Vietnam, March 16, 1968—The My Lai Massacre; U.S. Invasion of Korea—1950; 1915-1934: The U.S. Invasion, Occupation and Domination of Haiti; “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 2003; The U.S. Invasion of Panama, 1989-1990; America’s War in Vietnam and the Sexual Subjugation of Women; Wounded Knee Massacre, 1890. [back]
3. For the full story on Hegseth, see Trump’s Cabinet: Forging the Fascist Machine: Part 3: Pete “Pig-of-Death” Hegseth: Trump’s Christian Fascist, Crusade-Loving, Armageddon-Mongering Nominee for Defense Secretary at revcom.us. [back]
4. While Caine has denied saying this, he has never made a big public disavowal for a story that Trump has told repeatedly. [back]
5. After a storm of protest from many quarters, the Navy (as well as other branches of the armed forces) “reviewed” their original purge and now claim to have put all but about 20 books back on the shelves… for now. [back]
