I Tried to Stay Quiet. But Apparently We’re Doing Tanks Now.

(originally posted on my Facebook page)

I’ve been taking a break from posting on here. You’re welcome.

It’s been nice, honestly. Less doomscrolling, fewer arguments with people I went to high school with, and a brief, beautiful window where I could pretend that maybe things were just… normal. But then I saw the day getting closer: Trump is throwing himself a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue this weekend.

Yes. Tanks. Planes. Flags. The whole third-world-dictator aesthetic. And I figured, alright—time to crawl out of the bunker and say a thing.

The excuse is that it’s the Army’s 250th birthday, which is technically true. But it also happens to be Trump’s 79th birthday. So… yeah. It’s less “honoring the troops” and more “celebrating Dear Leader with flyovers and a cake shaped like Trump Tower.”

But hey, if you’ve ever looked at D.C. and thought, “What this place really needs is a little more North Korea,” your moment has arrived.

And just to make the timing extra bleak, this is happening one week after Trump sent the National Guard into Los Angeles—over the objections of California’s governor. First time that’s happened in sixty years. Back then, it was LBJ sending troops to protect civil rights marchers. This time, it’s Trump sending troops to protect… his reputation. From protesters.

You know, real freedom-loving stuff.

And the executive order he used to do it? Doesn’t even name LA. Doesn’t have to. It’s written vaguely enough to let him send troops anywhere that doesn’t clap on the one and three.

So no, this isn’t just about Los Angeles. This is a test balloon. See how far he can go, how many people shrug, and how many cameras he can get pointed at himself while the Constitution quietly wheezes in the background.

And I know how this sounds. I really do. If you had told me ten years ago I’d be writing about a U.S. president using the military to intimidate his own population, I’d have assumed I’d finally lost the plot and was living in an asylum somewhere yelling at soup cans. But here we are.

ICE is already ramping up raids. The deportation push is real. The mass roundups? They’re not a scare tactic. They’re part of the plan. Trump’s asking for $185 billion for immigration enforcement—which is more than the UK and France spend on their entire militaries. That’s not border security. That’s infrastructure for authoritarianism.

Stephen Miller—who still looks like he was carved out of cold deli meat—is already talking about deporting 3,000 people a day.

The thing that makes this moment so dangerous is how normal it all feels now. A few years ago, something like this would’ve sparked national outrage. Now it’s just another Tuesday. Another broken norm. Another test to see what we’ll tolerate. And spoiler: it’s a lot.

Democrats are out here debating whether it’s too “alarmist” to use the word fascism, while Republicans are busy making sure they’re not the next ones to get publicly humiliated by Trump’s Truth Social posts. At this point, he could replace the Lincoln Memorial with a sculpture of his meme coin and they’d all show up to applaud.

Anyway. I didn’t want to break my non-posting streak for this. I was trying to keep the blood pressure in a manageable range and pretend the world was just weird, not dark. But the tanks are coming. The flags are flying. The script is writing itself. And if we’re not careful, we’ll look up four days from now and realize we just watched the next chapter of American decline roll down the street while we argued about gas prices.

Happy almost-birthday, Mr. President. Hope your little party goes great. I’ll be over here, quietly panic-Googling “how to spot the early signs of soft authoritarianism” like a normal person.