Army 250th anniversary parade marches on despite weather worries
President Donald Trump’s controversial military parade kicked off 30 minutes early to avoid inclement weather.
President Donald Trump’s military parade was just eight blocks long.
And heard round the world.
That’s true even though the June 14 parade itself turned out to be a damp and relatively low-key affair. Thousands of spectators lined a stretch of Constitution Avenue in an off-and-on drizzle to applaud a slow-moving procession of troops, tanks, drones, a robot dog and a real dog marking the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army.
At the end, they joined in a rendition of “Happy Birthday” for the president, who happened to be turning 79 years old.
“Every other country celebrates their victories,” Trump said at the start of his brief speech, defending his controversial decision to stage the parade. “It’s about time America did, too.”
But the parade may prove to be less consequential than the “No Kings” marches it sparked. In the biggest and broadest protests of his second term, millions of Americans in about 2,000 communities gathered to object to his assertion of unprecedented presidential powers, which critics say violate the Constitution.
Photographs of protesters across the country filling plazas and marching across bridges were reminiscent of scenes from historic debates over the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and more.
After an aggressive start by the 47th president that has shaken up the federal government and the nation’s global alliances, Saturday may have signaled the start of a new chapter of his tenure.
That is, a new chapter of pushback amid a sense of growing peril.
Flummoxed in Congress, organizing back home
The pushback to Trump has been slow in starting as congressional Democrats, outnumbered in both chambers, continue to struggle to devise the strongest message and most effective tactics to use against the Republican president. There was no repeat of the immediate and massive demonstrations in Washington that marked his first inauguration, in 2017.
In contrast, the “No Kings” rallies were deliberately local and light on policy prescriptions beyond support for democracy’s guardrails and opposition to Trump’s hardline approach to deporting immigrants in the country illegally.
The sense of peril was underscored by a flood of violent and alarming news through the day.
A manhunt was underway in Minnesota for the suspect in the assassination of a state legislative leader and her husband. Another state legislator and his wife were wounded in a separate attack. A hitlist of Democratic officials and abortion-rights advocates and a sheaf of papers labeled “No Kings” was found in the back seat of the suspected gunman’s car.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrats’ 2024 vice-presidential nominee, called the persistence of political violence a “precipice moment” for the nation.
Meanwhile, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel, and Israel responded with a new wave of attacks on Iran in a spiraling conflict that would risk drawing the United States into a regional war.
So much was happening, and so fast, that Saturday’s news overshadowed Thursday’s political conflagration, when federal law-enforcement agents forced California Sen. Alex Padilla to the ground and handcuffed him after he tried to interrupt a press conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
The bristle of force, in DC and LA
The day seemed to bristle with the display of force and the threat of its use.
In Washington, dozens of 70-ton Abrams tanks rolled down the tree-lined avenue while 50 military helicopters flew overhead, the biggest public display of U.S. military hardware outside of war in memory. The official route was bookended by the capital’s revered sights, beginning at the Lincoln Memorial and ending just past the White House, with the Capitol visible ahead.
“Time and again, America’s enemies have learned that you threaten the American people, soldiers are coming for you,” Trump said in an eight-minute speech delivered in the twilight between the parade and the fireworks. “Your defeat will be certain, your demise will be final, and your downfall will be total and complete.”
The reaction by critics of the parade − mostly on grounds that it seemed more suitable for a dictatorship than a democracy − had been sharpened in recent days by the president’s deployment of U.S. Marines as well as Army National Guard troops to Los Angeles in the wake of immigration protests. He acted over the objections of the city’s mayor and the state’s governor.
The protest in Philadelphia was estimated by police at nearly 100,000. In Chicago, protesters marched past Trump Tower. In Atlanta, one sign showed the Statue of Liberty weeping and another displayed a demand familiar from Trump campaign rallies: “Lock Him Up!” In Los Angeles, some marchers carried an oversized Constitution, and others inflated a 20-foot balloon that depicted Trump as a baby in a diaper.
In Nanuet, New York, a hamlet in the Lower Hudson Valley, more than 1,000 protesters lined a central intersection known as the “Four Corners.” “People think people have given up,” said Ciara Sweeney of nearby Pearl River, holding a hand-painted sign showing Trump behind bars. “That’s not true.”
The protests were mostly peaceful, and many had a celebratory air.
However, police in Los Angeles and in Atlanta dispersed chemical irritants to control the crowds. In Culpepper, Virginia, police arrested a man who they said accelerated an SUV into a crowd of protesters, hitting at least one person.
‘Trump saves America’
There was a festive vibe on the National Mall before and during the parade, too. But the mood of the mostly pro-Trump crowd wasn’t as energized as the capital’s last military parade, in 1991, after the triumphant end of the first Gulf War.
When Trump spoke, many in the crowd rallied, but some already left through the security fences and barriers that surrounded the area.
The president spoke for eight minutes, less than usual, and he stuck to a script praising the Army’s history. Unlike his appearance at Fort Bragg a few days earlier, when he had ridiculed former President Joe Biden by name, Trump didn’t veer into his favored political tropes.
Some of the president’s supporters found it an apt coincidence that Trump’s birthday fell on the date of the Army’s founding in 1775, as the Revolutionary War was beginning. They cited his support for a muscular military.
At the protests, too, there were reminders of the revolution, where the “No Kings” slogan has its roots. In Philadelphia, a protester in colonial dress carried a sign quoting John Adams: “Liberty Once Lost Is Lost Forever.”
It was in Philadelphia that the Continental Congress voted to create an Army after battles against the British crown in Lexington and Concord. As Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote in a poem memorializing those opening conflicts, “Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.”
Contributing: Gary Stern, Nancy Cutler
