Donald Trump has asked the Pentagon for a military parade. “I want a parade like the one in France,” he said, referring to a Bastille Day procession he attended, according to the Washington Post. This can hardly tell us anything new about the President; he has expressed his wish for a display of American military might repeatedly over the course of many months. That his perseveration has gradually transformed into an order is an important lesson in the way Trumpism turns the most absurd rhetoric into reality. But the most important aspect of the likely future parade is the meaning it will acquire in American culture and politics.

In the imagination of the Cold War era, military parades were the thing that the Soviets did. This notion was not entirely historically accurate—the United States paraded its own might in Washington on a couple of occasions during the Cold War. But it made for a powerful image. I still have a mounted copy of a New Balance poster from the late nineteen-eighties or early nineties, depicting a jogger—the very picture of Americanness, rendered in color—running in the opposite direction of a black-and-white Soviet parade in Red Square. The tagline: “Why runners make lousy communists.” Military parades, it went without saying, were a feature of totalitarian regimes and the opposite of freedom. (In 2016, the New Balance owner and chairman, Jim Davis, gave nearly four hundred thousand dollars to the Trump campaign.)

Around the time of that ad campaign, the Soviet Union held the last of its military parades—on May 9, 1990, to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of victory in the Second World War (these parades had taken place on the big anniversaries, in 1965 and 1985) and on November 7th, to mark the seventy-third anniversary of the October Revolution (these parades had been held annually). After that, the parades were discontinued until, in an effort to mend a torn and disillusioned society, President Boris Yeltsin haltingly brought back the Victory Day parade. The step was politically fraught, both domestically and internationally. It made clear that Yeltsin was abandoning any hope of forging a Russian identity that wasn’t tied to notions of imperial greatness. Also, Western leaders, including Bill Clinton, did not want to take part in parade festivities in 1995, when Russia was prosecuting its first brutal war in Chechnya. Yeltsin had the parade moved off Red Square and separated from the official celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The next parade wasn’t held for another four years.

Vladimir Putin, by contrast, has relished the parade and weaponized it. For my most recent book, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” I made myself sit through video recordings of the military parades held in Red Square on May 9th every year since Putin came to power. The display is subject to inflation: five thousand troops took part in 2003 (I couldn’t find earlier numbers) and fourteen thousand did so in 2012. Pieces of military equipment—tanks and rockets—were added in 2008. An air show was added in 2010. The parade is the central event of the Russian political year, and it reflects contemporary Russian identity: great, frightening, built entirely around the victory in the Second World War. The Russian sociologist Lev Gudkov has said that the victory is a perfect national myth, because it shines its light both on the past and on the future: it explains how the U.S.S.R. became a twentieth-century superpower, and it justifies the terror that preceded and accompanied the war.

The Bastille Day military parade in France that apparently inspired Trump is not exactly free of connotations of terror, but its over-all symbolism is more appealing. It celebrates the power of the people who overthrew the monarchy and won freedom (though they certainly didn’t wear uniforms or march in lockstep).

What would an American parade signify? Trump’s understanding seems clear on the surface: he thinks that parades go with the Presidency like gold-leaf furniture goes with wealth. Also, Trump wants it seen that he—and not the generals who are charged with taming him—is the Commander-in-Chief. Plus, his button is bigger than Kim Jong Un’s.

But, demagogue that he is, Trump is also tapping into something deeper: a sense of lost American greatness, and, even more, a sense of a lost American story. In this way, the United States isn’t different from the rest of the Western world, which has suddenly discovered that its post–Second World War story is no longer as convincing as it used to be, and can’t serve as an anchor for its identity. The rise of the right in Europe is a symptom of this phenomenon. Sweden, which in the wake of the war forged an identity as a humanitarian superpower, has seen that story punctured by the meteoric rise of an anti-immigrant right. Germany has seen the unthinkable: the rise of a far-right party that explicitly rejects the idea that Germany must continue to reckon with the ghost of Nazism. And the United States has a President who has no use for stories like “America is a nation of immigrants,” and who is trying to make America great again by ordering a military parade.

The Post reports that the Pentagon wants the parade to be held on Veterans Day, which originated with the victory in the First World War. It’s hard to imagine an emergent identity story tied to the triumph of 1918. Independence Day has apparently been floated as an option; this would most closely resemble the symbolism and the season that Trump observed in France. What if the parade is scheduled on Memorial Day? Given that holiday’s origins, it might occasion a conversation about the place and symbolism of the Civil War in American history. With this President leading the conversation, one shudders to imagine it.