28 Abrams tanks, 6,700 soldiers, 50 helicopters, 34 horses, two mules and a dog
Trump will get his birthday parade. Next up - Mt. Rushmore?
By Sam Bellamy
Our stable genius is finally getting his very own military parade – on his birthday! – but alas, it appears MAGA attendees will have to use the plain old subway to get there rather than ride in style on “the Trump Train.”
A Florida Republican recently introduced a bill in Congress to change the name of Washington D.C.’s Metrorail public transit system to “Trump Train” and to rename its parent organization to MAGA (Washington Metropolitan Authority for Greater Access).
But unless his colleagues hustle, Rep. Greg Steube’s big, beautiful idea – under a threat to pull $150 million in federal funding if the cash-strapped Metro system doesn’t comply – won’t be in place by June 14, the president’s 79th birthday.
It’s a shame really. The parade, which coincides with a celebration of the Army’s 250th anniversary and Flag Day, is likely to draw to D.C. the largest crowd of MAGA cult members since they beat police officers, smashed windows and defecated and urinated inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Whether the parade will be as much fun remains to be seen, but the Trump administration certainly seems to be trying.
The New York Times reported this week that the parade “involves a tremendous scene in the center of Washington: 28 M1A1 Abrams tanks (at 70 tons each for the heaviest in service); 28 Stryker armored personnel carriers; more than 100 other vehicles; a World War II-era B-25 bomber; 6,700 soldiers; 50 helicopters; 34 horses; two mules; and a dog. (The latter is an odd detail, given Trump’s dislike of dogs, which – in a fair world – would be an impeachable offense.)
The parade will cost an estimated $25 million to $45 million, according to Army estimates. This does not include the cost of law enforcement, cleanup or repairing damage to city streets, which is expected to be substantial because, well, they were built with a fervent expectation that tanks – ours or anyone else’s – would ever roll down them.
Trump, as he’s reminded us a zillion times, saw what appears to have been a life-changing military parade during a Bastille Day celebration in 2017 with French President Emmaneul Macron.
If France can do, so can the United States, according to Trump. And one must keep up with the Putins, too; Russia has maintained the Soviet tradition of showing off its military might. Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, Ali Khamenei – they all get parades, too.
Trump denies the parade has anything to do with his birthday, but we can be sure his special day won’t go unnoticed by the participants or the MAGA crowd as he watches it all from a reviewing stand.
In a column for The Guardian, U.S. journalist Judith Levine – who also writes “Today in Fascism” here at Substack – says June 14th could be remembered by historians as “the ceremonial birth of a new American fascism.”
The parallels are certainly there.
“Stalin’s 50th birthday celebration, in 1929, is considered the kickoff of his cult of personality,” Levine writes in The Guardian. “Hitler’s 50th birthday military parade, in April 1939, was organized by the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels for maximum grandeur, including a motorcade of 50 white limousines. Five months later, Germany invaded Poland.
Kim Jong-un changed Loyalty Oath Day from 1 January to his birthday, 8 January. This February, the Republican U.S. representative Claudia Tenney of New York introduced a bill to designate Trump’s birthday as a national holiday. It hasn’t gone anywhere – yet.”
Tenney’s birthday bill, as well as Steube’s Trump Train bill, are part of an extremely disturbing pattern of Republicans systematically turning the man with the badly made-up orange face into a god among mortals.
There are bills in Congress to rename Washington Dulles International Airport after Trump, put his face on either the $100 bill or a new $250 bill and carve an undoubtedly slimmed-down Ramboesque image of him on Mount Rushmore.
The latter may be his next obsession, once he’s had his parade. Kristi Noem, who is currently dressing up as secretary of homeland security, recalls meeting Trump when she was in Congress and he was early in his first term as president. She invited him to her home state of South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore.
Trump replied, “Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?”
“He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious,” Noem recalls. She later presented him with a sculpture depicting him on the mountain. Next to Lincoln.