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It was meant to write itself. The tanks. The planes. The marching soldiers. The Dear Leader on the podium, the roar of the cheering crowds.
President Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington DC on June 14, which just happened to coincide with his 79th birthday – was expected to confirm people’s worst fears; a North Korea-style display of military power, all to the greater glory of a would-be dictator. It was meant to show America and the world who’s boss.
On the ground in Washington, I found a different story. First, the plans had to be moved up a half hour to avoid reports of thunderstorms. It almost literally rained on Trump’s parade.
Meanwhile, the nationwide anti-Trump protests, organised under the slogan ‘No Kings’, made the DC weather look positively MAGA-friendly by comparison. They also dwarfed the modest turnout for the event on the Mall, where TV cameras caught the president looking bored as he watched the troops and tanks.
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All of this was happening at what felt like a hinge moment for the United States. Just days before, President Trump had sent the National Guard to California to put down protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Los Angeles.
Then, in the early hours of Saturday morning, Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were assassinated in their Minnesota home. Vance Boelter, 57, has since been charged with murder.
The Fog of Boredom
This political weather was neatly mirrored by conditions in Washington. The nation’s capital was overcast for most of the day. As the start time for the parade approached, a thick cloud of white-grey fog descended on the Mall.
Watching from a rooftop bar next to the US Treasury building, the steady creep of the fog had an eerie quality, moving over the memorial buildings of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and towards the great obelisk of the Washington Monument.
Country club types in the hotel bar, drink in hand, watched as the black cars of the presidential motorcade snaked their way from the White House to the specially-erected stage on the Ellipse, resembling a funeral procession. Cannon fire signalled the start of the festivities and sent a light thrill across the room.
But these weren’t hardcore Trump supporters. True, there were a few loyalists around town, like the family I saw on the street with a toddler wearing a ‘Trump 2024’ t-shirt.
But much like the people queuing up on the Mall, (who will have applied for tickets on the US army’s official website), the parade watchers resembled the type of people who would attend an RAF fly-by or a Royal Wedding in the UK. Many were military families, (I saw at least one amputee). Some were actually in town for Father’s Day, and were hoping to catch a glimpse of the parade as a bonus.
The military parade was apparently inspired by Trump seeing a Bastille Day event in France. It also happened to coincide with King Charles III attending the ‘Trooping of the Colour’ outside Buckingham Palace.
These British events are the sort Wendy Cope poked fun at in ‘All-Purpose Poem for State Occassions’, where onlookers can “feel patriotic and proud”. While conservative in nature, they survive as rituals of harmless kitsch precisely to the extent that they have been rescued from their links with absolutism and foreign conquest. Meanwhile, France’s Bastille Day celebrations are explicitly republican, and mark the 1789 revolution which declared universal human rights.
This is some distance from the blood-and-soil nationalism Trump hopes to revive. After the display of soldiers, tanks, and aircraft – which was rather paltry, given US military power, and Americans’ talent for spectacle – the President stood up to declare:
“For two and a half centuries, our soldiers have marched into the raging fires of battle and obliterated America’s enemies. […] Our army has smashed foreign empires, humbled kings, toppled tyrants, and hunted terrorist savages through the very gates of Hell.”
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The Other America
For all the rhetoric, what struck me walking around Washington was how marginal Trump’s dictator cosplay was to the life of the town. Tourists visited the Library of Congress and other tourist spots (the ones not cordoned off for the parade) as they would on any other day.
On the suitably-named Constitution Avenue there was a street market with Mexican and Jamaican food, craft stalls, and music, all seemingly unrelated to the official event. People whizzed around on scooters and bikes, almost as if they didn’t realize it was the Dear Leader’s birthday.
The most dedicated crowds I saw were the tattooed millenials heading for the Warped Tour, th