It may have been billed as a military parade to celebrate the American military’s history, but it said even more about the country’s present and future under Donald Trump.
Soldiers, tanks and even robot dogs paraded along Constitution Ave. on Saturday, as paratroopers swooped in from overhead and military aircraft buzzed past the Washington Monument for the first major military parade held in the US capital since the victory after the first Gulf War of 1991.
Or was this all a celebration for Trump’s 79th birthday? As the president took the stage under ominous stormclouds, it appeared that the celebrant could not have beamed any wider, his eight-year-old dream of holding a military parade in the capital finally coming to fruition.
For both his supporters and opponents who flocked to the National Mall on Saturday, this was “Trump’s parade” (he even billed it as his own in a fundraising email this week). “This could only happen under President Trump,” bellowed one voice after the Star-Spangled Banner played on the National Mall as families queued to sit in Army helicopters and atop anti-aircraft batteries. It felt like it could have been a scene from Moscow.
Such is the line-blurring taking place as America’s military finds itself at the centre of the most contentious legal fight in decades. While the Trump administration has vowed to limit the military’s footprint abroad, it has also greenlit the deployment of hundreds of marines to Los Angeles in a controversial move that has led to legal battles and the eruption of protests around the country against the aggressive use of law enforcement to arrest and deport immigrants.
For Trump, the parade is an opportunity to signal the ambitions of his administration’s second term: no longer constrained by concerns over a price tag estimated as high as $90m or the concerns of comparisons to authoritarian leaders who also love to parade their tanks and missiles.
“Every other country celebrates their victories. It’s about time America did, too,” Trump said on Saturday night. “That’s what we’re doing tonight.”
It is also a paradox: Donald Trump campaigned on the premise of ending foreign wars, and yet what Americans got was a show of strength in the heart of Washington DC. JD Vance, the voice of Trump’s anti-interventionist foreign policy, spoke to that contradiction, telling the assembled soldiers that the parade was a sign of the administration’s respect for America’s servicemen and women.
“To our soldiers, we’re so proud of you,” he said. “And let me tell you, the way that we honor and respect you, number one, we never ask you to go to war unless you absolutely have to.”
Trump’s love of military pomp is well known. His desire for a parade goes back at least to his attendance of the French Bastille Day parades in 2017, when he was so in awe of the event that he said it was a “tremendous thing for France and for the spirit of France.”
“We’re going to have to try to top it,” he added. Whether he succeeded in that is a question that will be fought on cable television and in internet forums. There were sour notes, as when several second world war-era tanks creaked past the tribune. Yet many of the attending faithful appeared overjoyed at the spectacle.
Administration officials have pushed back at criticism that it is a reflection of an authoritarian turn under Trump. “No one ever calls Macron a dictator for celebrating Bastille Day,” one official told CNN.
Yet Trump has also indicated that his parade is meant to keep up with the real heavyweights, including the yearly Victory Day parade in Russia meant to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany. “We had more to do with winning World War II than any other nation,” he said this week. “Why don’t we have a Victory Day? So we’re going to have a Victory Day for World War I and for World War II.”
Parades do not exist in vacuums – they expand and change to reflect the political times in which a country lives. Russia’s Victory Day celebrations became muted marches under the administration of Boris Yeltsin. In 2008, Putin reintroduced the T-90 tanks and heavy ballistic missiles to recognise Russia’s resurgent military might and geopolitical ambitions. Months later, Russia invaded Georgia in a war that many say presaged the later invasion of Ukraine.
Yet sitting in front of the assembled crowds on Saturday evening, the president managed to hold his event – defying the skepticism over the spectacle and even the forecasts of a downpour that would rain on his parade.
