Remember how back during Donald Trump’s first term, our Orange King wanted a giant military parade through the streets of Washington DC? It was a big deal at the time. America’s own bargain basement Caligula has never met a spectacle he couldn’t make bigger and tackier. Plus his insecurity about his manhood pushes him to overcompensate in every possible way.
In this case, he wanted to take the capital’s annual July 4th celebration, with its fireworks and symphonies playing “God Bless America,” and tack on a huge military parade with soldiers and tanks and armored troop carriers marching in formation through the streets. He was talked out of it by various advisers who were horrified at the idea. Giant peacetime military parades are just not something the United States does. Such an event is for authoritarian dictatorships like Russia and North Korea and … France? Okay, France has a parade on Bastille Day. Très bien, peu importe.
But America generally finds ways to celebrate its military without sending squadrons of Abrams tanks and ballistic missiles on flatbed trucks rolling up Pennsylvania Avenue.
Trump’s advisers talked him out of the idea in his first term by finding a bunch of excuses such as that tank treads would chew up Washington’s streets, and that the cost of staging such a parade would be exorbitant. The Orange King may love a spectacle, but only if it can be done on the cheap. It’s why the Golden Dome national missile defense system he has so grandiosely announced will probably wind up being a dozen slingshots and an old TRS-80 running Pillbox to calculate firing angles.
But in his second term, there are two factors favoring a parade that are irresistible to Trump.
The first factor is that this June 14 is the 250th birthday of the United States Army. The nation’s first armed force was formed in 1775 as the Continental Army, briefly disbanded after the Revolutionary War, and then quickly reconstituted when the Founders realized a standing military was needed to wipe out all the Natives who had the temerity to think their land belonged to them simply because they had lived on it for centuries.
BREAKING: Classless Trash Acts Like Classless Trash
As it happens, Donald Trump’s birthday is also on June 14. Since the Army was already planning a whole birthday celebration for itself in DC, albeit without the parade, it was easy enough for the White House to turn it into a bigger spectacle as a present for America’s own dollar store Julius Caesar. After all, what’s a birthday without a parade of armed soldiers? We always had one! (By armed soldiers, we mean those little green plastic army men, and what is our president but an overgrown child?)
The second factor in favor of a parade is that anyone who will tell Trump no on anything has been exiled from the White House, and he no longer gives a fuck.
Now, we have not yet seen any reporting saying definitively that Trump demanded he get his parade. But given history and circumstances and the fact that he seems to want to spend a chunk of his second term producing cultural events like shows at the Kennedy Center, it stands to reason that this is all coming from him or the people in his immediate vicinity.
The Associated Press got hold of the Army’s plans, which include 6,600 soldiers, at least 150 vehicles, and 50 helicopters. It wouldn’t be a party if Washington didn’t sound like the invasion of Iraq for a day!
The Army’s original vision for its birthday was much smaller:
Some equipment and troops were already going to be included in the Army’s birthday celebration, which has been in the works for more than a year. The festival was set to involve an array of activities and displays on the National Mall, including a fitness competition, climbing wall, armored vehicles, Humvees, helicopters and other equipment.
See, the fitness competition and climbing wall sort of stuff we can get behind, that’s basic festival stuff. Especially since we are sure Defense Secretary Pete (Hic) Hegseth would insist on participating and likely get crushed by any actual soldiers he’s competing against. And parking a few Humvees and helicopters on the Mall? Eh, fine, whatever. A little more jingoistic than we would like, but we’re not in charge.
But soldiers marching in formation while the nation’s leader sits in a reviewing stand, probably surrounded by uniformed military officers, beaming beneficently at the spectacle like a little boy making all his GI Joe dolls shoot each other? That’s grotesque.
Presumably, however, this parade will not include any permanently wounded soldiers, because we know being anywhere near them gives Trump the ickies. And presumably it won’t include anyone who was ever a POW in one of our past wars, since Trump only likes soldiers who don’t get captured.
And forget about it if there is any rain on June 14, Trump can’t mess up his hair.
The United States, for all its military sins, used to have enough confidence in itself as a democratic force to skip out on this sort of military pageantry, at least on such a national scale. But then we elected an insecure fascist with a warped vision of manhood, and suddenly we have to spend tens of millions of dollars embarrassing ourselves to feed his self-esteem.
How does our army feel about all this? We can’t say for sure, but this, from journalist Dara Lind, is telling:
The giant parade is not the only news on Friday about Trump taking his military fetishism and outsized jingoism out for a stroll. He also posted this on his vanity social media site, TruthSocial:
Dear God, how much is wrong here? For starters, World War II only ended in Europe on May 8, 1945. It took until August to get Japan to surrender in the Pacific, with nuclear bombs. In other words, that fucking idiot can’t even get the date the entire war ended correct.
May 8 is already V-E Day, though it is not an official national holiday or anything, and remembrances of it have generally been pretty restrained, at least in our lifetime. But the point is that there is no need to proclaim May 8 as Victory Day, because it already is! But only for one half of the war.
Second, Trump should call his good friend Vladimir Putin and run that whole “nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance” by him. The Russians still don’t refer to the war as World War II, but rather as the Great Patriotic War because of the immense suffering and death the country suffered under German invasion before its military rallied enough to push the Nazis back into Germany. They barely acknowledge any other nation’s contributions, though certainly the Allies tying Germany down in Western Europe helped drain the nation’s resources until the Soviets could rally.
The then-Soviet Union lost anywhere between 8.5 and 11 million military personnel (estimates vary) along with somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 million civilians. The United States, by contrast, lost a little over 400,000 military personnel and a few dozen civilians in Hawaii and Alaska. That’s dozens as in double digits, not eight digits.
Donald Trump Does Not Hate Wounded Veterans, He Just Has No Respect For Such Uggos
Donald Trump Sorry Everyone Too Stupid To Understand John McCain Is Big War Hero Loser
As for changing the name of November 11 from Veterans Day to Victory Day, well, Veterans Day was created by federal statute. The president can’t officially rename it without an act of Congress. And how are veterans going to feel about changing November 11 from a day honoring all veterans to one honoring just the victory in one war that ended over a hundred years ago? A war in which the US suffered way fewer casualties than its allies in Europe, who fought for two and a half years before the US came in?
We’re guessing veterans won’t be thrilled!
There is as ever a grim hypocrisy here in the fact that while President Bone Spurs dodged fighting in the Vietnam War when he had his chance, he has a huge fetish for the military, minus the struggles and sacrifices of American soldiers that he would never, ever, ever in a thousand years dream of participating in himself.
Not that his fans will care. They will still churn out art of him riding dinosaurs while firing machine guns at hippies. The rest of us can just sit there in our embarrassment and disgust.
[AP / TruthSocial]
Please help keep Wonkette alive so we may continue to love the Troops.
www.wonkette.com (Article Sourced Website)
#Trump #Giant #Military #Parade #Roll #Chuck #Cheese #Game #Tokens #Birthday