No Kings! Trump’s Military Parade Couldn’t Drown Out America’s Tradition of Protest

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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, the punk rock festival down the road near RFK Stadium. They were the only “black shirts” to be seen, and they couldn’t have been less threatening.

That’s not to say there was no politics. On the lush residential streets around Lincoln Park, Pride flags were displayed on people’s homes alongside the Stars and Stripes. A Lutheran church had bunting in the colours of the trans rights tricolore. A sign on one person’s house called for an end to “the fascist Trump regime”. 

Even by the Mall there was spillover from the ‘No Kings’ protests around DC. As a handful of military planes and helicopters flew overhead in the fog and drizzle, a man on a bicycle did the rounds with a tall flag bearing the polite request: “Donald, Please Stand With Ukraine”. 

Later that night, on the streets of the bohemian Adam’s Morgan area of town, a car of Black kids led a chant of “Fuck Donald Trump!” as they drove by the restaurants and bars. Some diners joined in.

Their spirit was matched by the protests, which according to the New York Times were held in all 50 states. The one in Minnesota paid tribute to their slain representative and the other victims, dead and injured. 

In this and their slogan ‘No Kings’, the protesters did a far better job than the president of honouring the best of what Americans have fought and died for, and its imperfect tradition of opposing tyranny. 

The variety and dissonance I saw in Washington was the living refutation of the image of Soviet-style uniformity the president was hoping to project. 

As with the protests, it suggests a kind of software incompatibility between Trump’s fascist ambitions and actually-existing America. Of course, “keep calm and carry on” is a risky strategy with a hostile government. 

But just as people can’t pretend Trump is not in the White House, the president can’t make objective reality disappear – or drown it out with tanks and planes. This weekend proved that the US won’t go down easily, or without a fight.