On Saturday, US President Donald Trump delivered a fascistic, campaign-style speech to the 2025 graduating class at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York. In his speech, he defended his proposed $1 trillion war budget and the use of the US military to carry out his mass deportation operation.
Before delving into Trump’s guttural tirades, it must be noted that the fascistic content of his speeches over the weekend is being deliberately buried by the corporate media. CBS News, for example, headlined its coverage: “Trump praises West Point cadets, takes credit for U.S. military might in commencement address.”
ABC News ran the headline, “Trump praises West Point graduates, touts ‘golden age’ of US military in commencement speech,” while the Associated Press offered: “Trump’s speech to West Point graduates mixes praise, politics and grievances.”
These anodyne headlines are aimed at chloroforming the population to the immense dangers of dictatorship and global war.
In his remarks before roughly 1,000 cadets, Trump—wearing his red “Make America Great Again” hat—boasted, “We have that Army geared up … we just want [a] $1 trillion military budget.” He added, “Some people say, ‘Could you cut it back?’ I said, ‘I’m not cutting 10 cents.’ There’s another thing we can cut. … We can cut plenty of other things.”
Last week, Republicans in the House passed a sweeping tax and spending bill that allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to the US military and the immigration Gestapo, while imposing onerous work and reporting requirements on Medicaid and food assistance programs, measures deliberately crafted to strip benefits from eligible workers and their families.
Later in his speech, boasting of the massive war budget, Trump declared:
My administration has begun a colossal buildup of the United States Armed Forces—a buildup like we’ve never had before.
While millions are poised to lose healthcare coverage and go hungry, Trump boasted that the US government is purchasing “new airplanes, brand-new, beautiful planes,” “the best missiles,” “drones and much, much more,” including what he called the “Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield.”
The massive expansion of what is already the largest military budget in the world coincides with an ideological purge of curricula at the military academies that do not conform to the MAGA agenda.
Following executive orders from Trump and directives by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth targeting so-called “un-American” and “Marxist” content, instructors at the military academies have been ordered to remove from their syllabi books, courses and terminology that address past US military atrocities or examine issues related to race and gender.
In his speech, Trump justified the purge by accusing educators of “abusing our soldiers with absurd ideological experiments.” He boasted, “All of it’s ended. … They’re not even allowed to think about it anymore.”
Turning to his mass deportation operation and the deployment of thousands of troops along the US-Mexico border to repel a non-existent “invasion,” Trump said:
They subjected the Armed Forces to all manner of social projects and political causes while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars. We fought for other countries’ borders, but we didn’t fight for our own border.
Repeating his “Great Replacement Theory” talking points, Trump claimed the country had been “invaded for the last four years,” and declared that he now had a “great mandate” to carry out mass deportation. Undercutting the arguments currently being made by his own Justice Department lawyers—that the US is under active invasion by Tren de Aragua—Trump said:
On day one, I deployed our military to the southern border, and since that day we’ve reduced the number of illegal border crossings. Where there used to be hundreds of thousands of people coming into our country a day, we had nobody come in in the last week and a half.
Turning to the role of the US military overseas, Trump—after claiming to oppose “nation-building crusades” in a line later clipped and promoted by the Trump White House on social media—repeated, in cruder terms, decades-old conservative talking points that the job of the US military is to “spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun.”
The last 30 years of US imperialist interventions around the world—including in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria—make clear that the US military does not invade, bomb and starve entire societies to establish “democracy,” but to advance the interests of the American ruling class and secure control over strategic resources.
Trump is not only continuing this policy—he is preparing for a massive escalation of imperialist violence across the globe.
On Monday, Trump, joined by Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Hegseth, delivered overtly Christian nationalist remarks at the Memorial Day observance at Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia. Amid tributes to “warriors” and “warfighters,” both Hegseth and Vance quoted from the Bible, with Hegseth explicitly comparing the sacrifice of US soldiers in imperialist wars to that of Jesus Christ.
Hegseth said:
As Jesus taught his disciples, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
In his remarks, Trump again attacked immigrants, falsely accusing the previous administration, which carried out a vicious campaign of deportation, of allowing people to pour “through borders unchecked. People doing things that are indescribable and not for today to discuss…”
Trump touted his planned fascist military parade—scheduled for June 14, 2025, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army and his own 79th birthday—as a “great celebration” that “blows everything away, including the World Cup and including the Olympics.”
He added:
In some ways, I’m glad I missed that second term where it was because I wouldn’t be your president for that most important of all. … Can you imagine I missed that four years, and now look what I have. I have everything. Amazing the way things work out. God did that.
According to reports from NBC News and the Washington Post, the planned large-scale military parade will cost up to $45 million and feature approximately 6,600 soldiers and 150 military vehicles. In addition to flyovers, the event will include sanitized “historical” reenactments of past US military battles.
This fascist propaganda is aimed at glorifying the military and normalizing the presence of troops and tanks on city streets, both abroad and at home, against immigrants, students and workers, the so-called “home growns” who resist the fascist agenda of Trump and the financial oligarchy.