Protests are erupting across the United States. Sparked by mass ICE raids and aggressive, racist, immigration arrest quotas, the unrest has spread far beyond Los Angeles. But LA remains ground zero, where Trump’s crackdown has been the most militarized—and expensive. The deployment there alone, featuring the notorious 'War Dogs' Marine unit, has reportedly costing US taxpayers $134 million to date. With the president now threatening to expand the same tactics nationwide, the potential costs—in dollars and democracy—are staggering.

And this is only the prelude. This Saturday, Washington will host a $45 million military parade, ostensibly to honor the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army’s founding. In reality, it doubles as a birthday celebration for Trump himself. Activists in no mood for such Pyongyang-style self-aggrandizement are rallying for demonstrations across the US pointedly titled "No Kings."

While Trump’s cracking down ever more heavily at home, though, he’s hailed — however reluctantly — as a supporter of freedom in some quarters abroad.

In Syria, after years of crippling sanctions that devastated the lives of people already enduring tyranny, terror and siege but barely dented the lavish lifestyle of their intended target, the former dictator Bashar al-Assad, Trump’s administration suddenly eased the pressure. The sanctions rollback offered Syrians who’d just heroically won freedom from tyranny, their first real economic breather in years and opened the door to rebuilding the nation Assad did his utmost to destroy in a frenzied but futile effort to cling to power.

Irony, it seems, is Trump’s only ideological throughline: here’s a Kremlin-affiliated US president derided for embracing authoritarians, eroding norms, and empowering white supremacism. Yet in Syria—newly liberated by revolution revolution of a Kremlin-backed hereditary dictatorship beloved of white supremacists including David Duke — Trump’s gained genuine goodwill. Nobody’s naïve enough to believe he’s motivated by humanitarian empathy. If Assad had succeeded in crushing the revolution and remained in power, Trump, who’s made no secret of his admiration of tyrannical strongmen or his disdain for human rights, would have gladly done business.

The decision to ease sanctions wasn’t about supporting Syrian democracy, of course. It was about cutting costs and pulling back from overseas military deployment. Isolationism disguised as realism. Trump’s foreign policy isn’t guided by liberty or principle—it’s about business, disengagement, and political self-preservation.

Not that liberty or principle guided Trump's predecessors. From Richard and Pat Nixon posing together with Hafez and Anisa for cosy family holiday snaps with the kids to ‘extraordinary rendition’ of War on Terror suspects to the Assads’ network of torture facilities, Washington had no problem with dictatorship in Damascus or elsewhere, with Syria just one more pawn in superpower games. Trump just dropped the pretence.

Similarly, Putin’s backing of Trump is pure power calculus. His support for Assad wasn’t about ideology—it was about control and leverage. Supporting Trump is no different. It’s not personal. It’s useful. As the late Henry Kissinger, a longtime valued friend of Putin’s, would surely recognize, this is realpolitik.

Syrians, all too familiar with being at the sharp end of this kind of monstrously cynical 'foreign policy realism', aren’t fooled. No one mistakes Trump for a freedom fighter. But his realpolitik brought a rare reprieve: sanctions lifted, space to breathe. A pause, not a promise, but a real step on the road to reconstruction.

Back home, meanwhile, only six months into his second term, Trump’s already unleashing the authoritarian theatrics. Drones over cities. Journalists roughed up. Protesters kettled and gassed. And now the War Dogs are prowling American streets. Greatness, for Trump, isn’t democracy. It’s domination. If it works in Moscow, why not Memphis?

Overseeing all this is National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard—a vocal Assad admirer and proponent of Kremlin-friendly narratives. It's almost too symmetrical: Trump, buoyed by Putin, advised by an Assad apologist, aids those who overthrew Assad's Kremlin-backed dictatorship abroad while mimicking the toppled tyrant's authoritarianism at home.

But while Syrians cautiously reconstruct a free nation after decades of tyranny, Americans livestream flashbangs outside their windows as Trump escalates the repression of dissent.

Syrians remember how it starts—tanks in the streets, protests labeled threats, protesters vilified and freedoms strangled in the name of order and ‘stability’. They know where it leads. And they know nowhere is immune.

As the War Dogs roll through LA and fighter jets prepare to roar above a birthday parade, we’re left with a twisted contrast: a president whose indifference helped a distant nation breathe, while he strangles his own.

This weekend's event in Washington isn’t a parade. It’s a warning.

Photo: Tanks arriving in Washington DC for this weekend's military parade