Fort Bragg, North Carolina
CNN
—
When President Donald Trump returned from a Bastille Day visit to Paris during his first term, he asked his military brass to organize a parade akin to the one he’d watched march down the Champs-Élysées.
His defense secretary at the time, James Mattis, said he’d rather “swallow acid,” according to a book written by a former staffer.
Trump later received a comparable response from another defense secretary, Mark Esper, when he floated using active duty troops on American soil to quell violent protests.
“The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations,” Esper told reporters in 2020.
Times have changed.
“We will use every asset at our disposal to quell the violence and restore law and order right away,” Trump said on Tuesday during a visit to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he defended sending the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles.
“We’re not going … to wait for a governor that’s never going to call and watch cities burn,” he added.
Free of advisers who acted as guardrails to his most extreme impulses, and more determined than ever to demonstrate strength, Trump has reshaped how a president uses the US military during his second term in office.
This week’s troop deployments in Los Angeles, which come ahead of a major military parade through Washington, DC, on Saturday, illustrate just how much the restraints once placed on Trump’s use of US servicemen and women have evaporated.
No longer does Trump appear convinced, as he did in 2020, that activating a state’s National Guard troops against the wishes of governors is against the law.
Nor does he seem particularly bothered by the view of some former military leaders, who told him during his first term that major military parades are the purview of dictators, not democratically elected leaders.
Some former military officials, along with some current officials speaking privately, have voiced concern about the juxtaposition of tanks parading through Washington potentially at the same moment US troops are deployed on California streets.
“For me, it’s a negative split screen moment,” retired Adm. James Stavridis, the former NATO supreme allied commander, told “CNN This Morning.”
“You’re doing this pretty unusual visual of tanks rolling through our capital, and across the country in Los Angeles, you’re putting US Marines — the best combat shock troops in the world… they’re being deployed against largely peaceful protesters,” he said. “I think that’s a troubling split screen. It will be difficult, appropriately difficult for the American people to digest what they’re looking at.”
Trump heralded the weekend spectacle in front of a sympathetic crowd on Tuesday.
“And Saturday is going to be a big day in Washington, DC, and a lot of people say we don’t want to do that. We do. We want to show off a little bit,” he told service members and their families.
The event was arranged like a typical political-style rally, albeit comprised of hundreds of uniformed troops, military families and others, some of whom booed in agreement when Trump criticized former President Joe Biden.
Upon entering the event site, attendees were greeted with the sight of military tanks and fighter vehicles spread out across the large field as part of a demonstration of the Army’s capabilities — known as a static display, members of the Army on the ground told CNN.
An Avenger Stinger missile vehicle, Sentinel radar and different types of Army tanks were included in the display. When he arrived, Trump watched demonstrations of special operators and paratroopers.
In interviews with CNN, several members of the military in the crowd showed appreciation for the president’s visit and dismissed concerns that he’s overstepped in ordering the National Guard and US Marines to Los Angeles to respond to the protests in the city without request from the governor – an action that’s without recent precedent.
George Ahouman, a mechanic specialist in the Army’s 91 Bravos group, told CNN of the move: “It’s always a tough decision to make. We have to do what we have to do regardless, you know. So if the bad guy is acting bad, we gotta, you know, knuckle down and do what we’re supposed to, that’s what we signed up for.”
Toby Cash, in the same division as Ahouman, said: “It’s a tough topic to talk about. At the end of the day we’ve just got to follow orders.”
Ahouman added, however, that he’s grateful Trump came to visit Fort Bragg and will hold a parade to honor the Army’s 250th anniversary. “I feel like he’s kind of showing his love to the troops and to the Army. You know, we usually don’t get recognition like that in the past, so I think it’s pretty good.”
Will Schmidt and Raymond Cervantes, both members of the Army’s 57th Sapper company in the 27th engineer battalion, made similar arguments.
“Personally, I’m in support of it,” Schmidt told CNN of Trump’s decision to deploy troops to Los Angeles. “It’s kind of like one of the reasons we have a National Guard, and a lot of it is disaster relief, but it’s also civil unrest and stuff.”
Cervantes argued the president’s visit to the Army base – which serves as headquarters for US Army Special Operations Command, where Green Berets and the Rangers are based – and his plans to host a military parade in Washington, “shows he cares.”
“Even for those who don’t like him as an individual, he’s still showing he appreciates us,” Cervantes said.
Fort Bragg itself has come to embody some of the ways Trump is working to move the military away from what he views as the liberal excesses of the previous administration. Originally named for Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general, it was renamed to Fort Liberty in 2023 amid a push to strip names of Confederate leaders from military installations.
But Trump’s administration reversed the decision, restoring the Fort Bragg name earlier this year — but now citing World War II paratrooper Roland Bragg as the namesake. On Tuesday, Trump announced his administration would be changing back the names of several other bases originally named after Confederates.
Trump’s visit to Fort Bragg was intended as a kickoff to a week of celebrations marking the US Army’s 250th birthday, which will culminate in Saturday’s parade in Washington.
That event will see a massive amount of military hardware and personnel being paraded through Washington, including 28 Abrams tanks weighing 70 tons each rolling down Constitution Avenue. Local officials have voiced concern about potential damage to the city’s streets, which could cost millions of dollars to repair.
Military officials have downplayed the cost of the parade, which is also set to include a World War II-era B-25 bomber, 6,700 soldiers, 50 helicopters, 34 horses, two mules and one dog.
But even some Republicans have expressed skepticism about the parade.
“Well, look, it’s the president’s call. I wouldn’t spend the money if it were me,” Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy said when asked about the event.
“The United States of America is the most powerful country in all of human history. We’re a lion. And a lion doesn’t have to tell you it’s a lion. Everybody else in the jungle knows,” he said.
Unlike his predecessors during Trump’s first term, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has demonstrated only enthusiasm for Trump’s parade plans.
Nor has Hegseth voiced any misgivings over Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles over the objections of California’s Democratic leaders.
Trump has long mused about using military force to clamp down on protests or riots in the United States, including during his first term as violence broke out following the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
His aides drafted a proclamation that would send thousands of active duty troops using the Insurrection Act, but top advisers at the time — including Esper, Attorney General Bill Barr and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley — encouraged him against taking that step.
Trump appeared in 2020 to have been persuaded that activating the National Guard without a governor’s request would be illegal.
“Look, we have laws. We have to go by the laws,” Trump said during an ABC town hall at the time. “We can’t move in the National Guard. I can call insurrection, but there’s no reason to ever do that.”
“We can’t call in the National Guard unless we’re requested by a governor,” Trump went on to explain.
Trump later came to regret following that advice.
“You have to remember, I’ve been here before, and I went right by every rule,” he said Tuesday before departing the White House for Fort Bragg. “And I waited for governors to say, send in the National Guard. They wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t do and they just wouldn’t do it. It kept going on and on.”
