On June 14, I wrote Raining on Trump’s Military Parade, an article about the Washington, D.C. military parade that marked both the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary and President Donald Trump’s 79th birthday. The event revived debates about the politicization of military spectacle, fiscal priorities, and democratic norms. Six months later, those same themes are resurfacing in new forms — not on the National Mall, but in Congress, the courts, and foreign policy.
The House of Representatives passed the roughly $900 billion military policy bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2026, in a bipartisan vote of 312-112 on Wednesday. The bill now heads to the Senate for approval. Key provisions of the legislation include:
- A pay raise for troops (a 4% raise for enlisted service members).
- An overhaul of how the Department of Defense buys weapons and significant acquisition reforms.
- Authorization of $400 million for Ukraine as part of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and restrictions on reducing U.S. troops in Europe.
The final vote passed 312-112. It is expected to garner bipartisan support in the Senate.
Trump’s reliance on military spectacle has extended beyond parades. This week, U.S. forces seized an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast and conducted fighter jet flyovers in the Gulf of Venezuela. These actions project strength internationally, but they also raise questions about whether military force is being used as political messaging — a continuation of the parade’s blending of commemoration and presidential authority.
“We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela — a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually,” Trump said during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, reported CNBC
The president declined to provide information on who owned the tanker or its destination, but said it was “seized for a very good reason.”
Meanwhile, a federal judge has ordered Trump to end California National Guard deployments in Los Angeles, ruling he exceeded his authority. This legal battle underscores the same tension highlighted in June: the balance between presidential power and democratic checks when the military is deployed domestically.
NPR reported that the Trump administration has argued that after initially federalizing a state's National Guard, any extension should be allowed, without review.
"That is shocking," Judge Breyer wrote in his ruling on Wednesday, saying that adopting that interpretation of the law would "permit a president to create a perpetual police force comprised of state troops, so long as they were first federalized lawfully."From the June parade to today’s defense bill, Venezuela operations, and court rulings, the through‑line is clear:
Trump’s presidency continues to use military spectacle and force as both a symbolic celebration and a political instrument. The debates sparked in June — about cost, authority, and democratic norms — remain unresolved, now playing out in policy and law rather than parade grounds.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.