Jesus was waiting in a long line for ice cream ahead of Donald Trump’s big military parade. The Washington monument towered above, gleaming white against an increasingly ominous sky as a slow-moving thunderstorm closed in. To his right, seemingly endless rows of Portaloos stretched towards the black mesh fence that marked the edge of the security perimeter, ready for a vast crowd of spectators that failed to materialise. When I asked the man dressed in the flowing white robes why he had decided to attend the parade, he replied, “Things have to be broken down before they can be rebuilt.” Dangling from his waist, a laminated white sign declared: “We’re all fucked.”
Nominally, the 14 June parade through Washington was in honour of the US army’s 250th anniversary. But it was also Trump’s 79th birthday and, well, he has wanted a military parade for almost as long as he has been a president. Trump’s parade-lust seems to have started with the Bastille Day celebrations in Paris, which he attended alongside Emmanuel Macron in 2017. He returned to Washington marvelling at the display of “military might”, determined to hold his own. But his then defence secretary, retired four-star general Jim Mattis, said he would “rather swallow acid”. Paul Selva, who had grown up under the military dictatorship in Portugal and was then vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the president bluntly, “that’s what dictators do”.
But Trump 2.0 no longer tolerates dissenting views. The principled generals who managed to constrain his wildest impulses during his first term – the “backbone guys” as a 68-year-old army veteran protesting the parade in Washington put it to me – are long gone. Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has purged the top military leadership and staffed his cabinet with sycophants and yes-men (and women).
Striding on to the stage at the start of the ceremony to the rousing strains of “Hail to the Chief”, Trump pumped his fist. As a 21-gun salute boomed across the capital, the crowd began chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” Trump stood for the national anthem and saluted, even though as a civilian who has never served in the military, protocol requires him to put his hand on his heart instead. Then he took his seat behind the bulletproof glass in the VIP viewing stand as he waited for the promised display of fearsome American military might.
For Trump’s supporters in the crowd, the whole event was yet more evidence of his patriotism, and part of the reason why they had voted for him in the first place. “I don’t see how respecting our military and giving them a parade for one day is wrong,” said Crystal Fay, 58, who was wearing a red “Make America great again” hat and had travelled six hours by train from North Carolina to attend. The criticism that military parades are the domain of dictators and strongmen did not bother her at all. “If you don’t have a strong leader, just like a teacher in the classroom, if you can’t control your students, then you’re gonna have chaos.”
There have been military parades in the US before, most recently in 1991 for the “National Victory Celebration” that followed the end of the first Gulf War during the George HW Bush administration. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John F Kennedy all had military processions as part of their inaugural parades. France, where Trump first got the idea, is not a dictatorship. But Trump’s fixation on military parades fits a wider pattern of fetishising strength and admiring strongmen around the world. He has praised Vladimir Putin as a “genius”, Kim Jong Un as a “very strong guy”, and Xi Jinping, a “king”. This is a long-running theme for Trump. A year after the widely condemned crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Trump told Playboy magazine: “The Chinese government almost blew it. They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”
Trump’s desire to stage a show of military force was particularly jarring given that, at the same time, he had ordered National Guard troops and active-duty marines into Los Angeles to suppress protests over his immigration policies. He insists, falsely, that the city has been “invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals” and that he is defending American citizens from “violent, insurrectionist mobs”. (Never mind that one of his first acts on resuming office was to pardon all those involved in the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.)
“I do not want to see society militarised, and I do not want to see the military politicised,” I was told by Scott Norton, a retired army colonel who had served for 34 years, as he protested the parade in DC. He stood quietly holding up a sign that said: “Only kings and dictators have birthday parades.”
There were concerns too about growing political violence. Earlier that morning, a gunman who had disguised himself as a police officer shot and killed a Democratic state representative at her home in Minnesota along with her husband, and seriously wounded another Democratic lawmaker and his wife in what the state’s governor called an act of “targeted political violence”. Trump himself survived two assassination attempts last year. “I wasn’t sure if this would be a safe thing to go to,” a woman at the parade told me. “But my friend told me this would actually be the safest place.” As she spoke a distant drumbeat signalled the start of the parade. The first lines of soldiers, dressed in the red, white and blue uniforms of the Revolutionary War – apparently flown in from Hollywood – slowly began to march into view.
This was not my first military parade. As a reporter previously based in Russia and China, I’ve seen formidable processions of tanks and intercontinental ballistic missile launchers rolling through Moscow and Beijing as Vladimir Putin and Xi flaunted their military strength. If Trump was expecting the same sort of spectacle, then he was about to be underwhelmed. The American soldiers, thankfully, did not goose-step. But where the massed ranks of Russian and Chinese militaries had marched past in perfect unison, the slap of their boots on the tarmac stamping out a relentless drumbeat, the impression in Washington was more shambling. The formations were more or less in step, but it was a long way from the robotic precision Trump might have seen elsewhere. There were no loudspeakers along the parade route beyond the immediate area surrounding the VIPs, so the troops mostly walked past in silence, greeted by a line of camera phones and periodic shouts of “Go army!” It was so quiet at times that you could hear the creaking tracks of the approaching tanks. “I thought it was going to be rowdier,” a man behind me said.
The parade was more impressive on television. Viewers at home had the advantage of watching a slickly produced video ahead of each new formation that explained the significance of the various units and their equipment, interspersed with messages thanking the official sponsors, which included Lockheed Martin, Phorm Energy (a new energy drink promoted by the UFC founder Dana White) and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. They were arranged in historical order from the Revolutionary War, Civil War and the two World Wars, through the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the global war on terror. This had the unfortunate effect of illustrating that, with the exception of the first Gulf War in 1991, it is a long time since the US has fought a war that ended in victory.
If Putin and Xi were watching, they are unlikely to have been impressed. In the end, Trump’s military parade turned out to be more pageant than awe-inspiring display of firepower. In fact, the lesson the world’s established strongmen seem to be learning during Trump’s second term so far is that they can call his bluff. Despite promising to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to power, the conflict is only escalating, with Trump reduced to demanding ineffectually on social media, “Vladimir, STOP!” as the Russian president presses ahead with a renewed offensive. Xi similarly stood his ground when Trump launched his trade war in April, matching the US tariffs blow-for-blow and blocking the export of rare earth elements until Washington backed down and negotiated a truce.
Then there is Israel’s strongman, Benjamin Netanyahu, who pressed ahead with his plans to attack Iran despite the fact that negotiations between Washington and Tehran on a nuclear deal were well under way. Netanyahu calculated, correctly, that Trump would not stand in his way once he launched his assault. Less than six months into his second term, the mirage of Trump’s “peace through strength” diplomacy has dissipated, while the most dangerous war in the Middle East in decades appears to be spiralling. Playing a strongman on television, it turns out, is easier than actually imposing your will.
This does not mean we should lightly dismiss Trump’s authoritarian aspirations. The worse things get for him on other fronts, and the weaker he perceives his position, the more likely he is to step up his immigration crackdown at home, relishing the protests that are certain to follow. The order he signed authorising the deployment of troops to Los Angeles is applicable anywhere in the country there is deemed to be a “form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States”. Trump’s handling of immigration remains, by far, his strongest issue and he clearly believes the scenes of security forces facing down mask-wearing, Mexican flag-waving protesters play well for him. “We couldn’t script this any better,” a source close to the White House told Politico last week.
It is easy to mock Trump’s desultory parade, as many memes are now doing, but what he understands, in common with Putin, Xi and Netanyahu, is the power of weaponising patriotism and dividing the country further into “us” and “them”. As Trump declared in the days before the parade – threatening those who might dare to protest with “very heavy force” – these are “people who hate their country”. Beyond Trump’s dictatorial cosplay, the real danger now is how he decides to use the military, both at home and in the Middle East, in the fraught days and weeks ahead.
[See also: Is Trump the last neoconservative?]
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This article appears in the 18 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Warlord