Trump Wants To Copy the Military Prowess of ... the French?

Trump sat with French President Emmanuel Macron and watched a big showy military parade when he was in Paris last Bastille Day in July.

It was the greatest military parade Trump had ever seen. The glitz, the gleam, the precision, the costuming, the showmanship of it all!

I want me a parade like that, Trump said. In fact, yesterday in New York when Trump saw President Macron again, Trump said in front of reporters, “I was your guest at Bastille Day, and it was one of the greatest parades I've ever seen. It was two hours on the button, and it was military might and, I think, a tremendous thing for France and the spirit of France. To a large extent because of what I witnessed, we may do something like that on July Fourth in Washington down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Trump wants to stage a spectacle of "military strength" on the Fourth of July. He thinks it'll make him bigger, and indispensable.

So let's review: France, the nation whose strutting has attracted the admiration of Trump, has gotten chewed all to hell and gone in war after war. The Bastille Day parade that Trump saw recalled the glories of Napoleon, not any military adventure in the 20th Century -- really not any military adventure since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. So the French military braggadocio is mythology. Harmless, since France doesn't threaten its neighbors or the world with military bullying.

That won't be isn't the case with Trump.