The big parade of the Berlin S.A. before the Kanzler in the Wilheimstrasse, Berlin, on New Year's Day 1935. CREDIT: AP Photo
The big parade of the Berlin S.A. before the Kanzler in the Wilheimstrasse, Berlin, on New Year's Day 1935. CREDIT: AP Photograph

In a feature well-nigh Donald Trump's infamous "Make America Slap-up Again" slogan, the Washington Post'due south Karen Tumulty asked the president-elect almost how "greatness" tin can be measured. What does he mean past "great"?

Trump responded by citing the sort of spectacles that were commonplace in autocracies like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia — military parades.

"Being a great president has to practise with a lot of things, but 1 of them is being a great cheerleader for the country," Trump told the Post. "And nosotros're going to show the people as we build upward our military machine, we're going to display our military."

"That military may come up marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades. I mean, we're going to exist showing our military," he added.

The portions of the interview published by the Mail don't bespeak Trump mentioned anything else while discussing his definition of greatness. For Trump, making America great is about spectacles, not policy achievements, but creating and capitalizing on glasses is what Trump's brand of politics has always been about.

Trump made beefing upwardly the war machine a theme of his campaign. In August, he told a oversupply in Philadelphia that "we want to deter, avert and prevent disharmonize through our unquestioned military say-so." He's since outlined a spending programme that would cease the sequester on military spending and thereby add nearly $450 billion to the federal deficit over the adjacent 10 years.

It'southward arguable whether it'southward a good thought to turn that sort of money into the military machine. While hawks like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) argue sequestration has weakened the American military machine, the U.Due south. is already past far the biggest defense spender in the globe. Last year, the financial policy-focused Peter G. Peterson Foundation, citing numbers from the Stockholm International Peace Inquiry Institute, put together this graph showing that the U.S. spends more on defense than the adjacent seven highest-spending countries combined:

That debate aside, information technology'due south telling that Trump's immediate response to a question well-nigh his goals for the land is to talk over his desire for armed services parades, which haven't been a significant function of American history.

As Time's Ishaan Tharoor detailed in a piece about the history of military parades in 2009, they have historically been used by "rulers" who "projected their power through displays of forcefulness and awe, going dorsum to humanity's first civilizations."

"As empires dissolved into nation-states, these spectacles of power swapped their air of mysticism for a more tangible tone of aggression," Tharoor writes. His piece goes on to cite this quote nearly the Nazi goosestep from George Orwell, who lived in England while it was besieged past the Nazis: "[The goosestep is] one of the most horrible sights in the globe. It is simply an affidavit of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a kicking crashing downwards on a face up."

"Beyond a certain point, military brandish is merely possible in countries where the mutual people dare not laugh at the army," Orwell added.

In 2013, David Waldstreicher, a professor of history at Temple Academy, told the History News Network that the reason war machine parades haven't regularly occurred throughout American history is because the Revolutionary War itself was about removing standing armies from cities.

"American national liberty, at abode at least, is associated with liberty from men in arms marching through the streets," Waldstreicher said.

But Trump has repeatedly raised questions about his commitment to the traditional notion of "liberty." In September, he praised Russian despot Vladimir Putin as "a leader far more than our president [Obama] has been." During the campaign, Trump also commended erstwhile Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein considering he effectively "killed terrorists" without due process and expressed appreciation for the ruthless way North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un took power.

An advert the Trump squad ran in the final months of the campaign ended by claiming, "DONALD TRUMP WILL PROTECT You. HE IS THE ONLY ONE WHO Can."

That sort of rhetoric has prompted a number of scholars to compare Trump with fascistic leaders like Mussolini, who told Italians while he was in the procedure of consolidating power that "Italy wants peace and quiet, work and at-home. I will give these things with honey if possible and with strength if necessary."