Donald Trump, whose tastes always lean towards the more garish end of the authoritarian leader scale, has longed for a Soviet-style military parade to bolster his ego since before he even took office. He reportedly tried to get a military march, with tanks included, for his inauguration, and bragged in January 2017 that he wanted the military "marching down Pennsylvania Avenue" and "flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades." The Pentagon put him off this desire for a year, but The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that military brass may now cave into the boy-chief's demands for a propaganda parade.
Administration officials seem to be trying to spin this terrible idea by invoking France's Bastille Day parade as a comparison, instead of the parades of military dictatorships that captured Trump's imagination long before he went to Paris last summer. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, always ready to be shamelessly dishonest, claimed the parade was "a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation" for the military.
Many active duty and former military personnel, however, do not agree with Sanders that this is about appreciating the military. Legal and social pressures tend to keep most active duty service members silent on political matters, but there's good reason to believe that many people who have actually served — which the president famously used his "bone spurs" to avoid doing — don't appreciate being used as props in Trump's narcissistic pageantry.
"This parade is a perfect example of Trump’s relationship to the military," said Alexander McCoy, a former Marine embassy guard and the current communications director for Common Defense, in an email. "Trump doesn’t want to honor the people who served, he wants them to honor him."
“We’re talking about a guy who has admired the tactics of Saddam, Putin and more, and is telling crowds it's treasonous to not applaud him," Will Fischer, an Iraq war veteran and the director of government relations for VoteVets, wrote to Salon. "Parades are expensive and time-consuming for our military, and frankly, no one in the military likes doing them. If Donald Trump really gave a hoot about troops, he’d have never demanded it."
"It is unconscionable that someone who avoided the draft five times, denigrated Gold Star families of color, ridiculed POWs, and [has] been an overt sexist toward women service members would waste our troops' time and our country's resources to feed his ego and dangerous agenda," said Common Defense Executive Director Pam Campos-Palma, a former Air Force intelligence analyst. She also suggested that Trump is "using the military as props to shield his own failings, corruption and fake patriotism."
The Military Times published a reader poll asking: "Do you support Trump’s military parade in Washington?" As of this writing, nearly three-quarters of respondents had selected the answer, "No, it's a waste of money and troops are too busy."
“The troops are being treated like wind-up toys. It’s offensive to me personally, because I know that peace is the only cause worthy of a real military parade," said writer Alison Buckholtz, the wife of an active-duty Navy officer, in a phone interview. "I have this nightmare vision of this military parade with tanks rolling down past the Trump Hotel, and the picture on the front page of the newspaper the next day is military officers standing at attention in front of the Trump Hotel.”
"We’re America. We don’t do that," argued another woman who has been a Navy wife for more than two decades. She chose to remain anonymous, due to concerns about political pressures on active duty members and their family members. "This is a display of military strength, a display of shiny things. It has nothing to do with trying to show our military personnel or families or veterans that they’re appreciated."
Both Navy spouses emphasized that if Trump really wants to show support for the military, he could push for more training and flight time for service members, better mental health and other medical services for both active-duty personnel and veterans, more programs to help find employment for military spouses, higher pay, and better programs to help integrate former military members and their families into civilian life.
Task & Purpose, another online publication geared towards current and former military, posted a news item about the proposed parade on its Facebook page and asked, "Good idea or bad?" While there was a smattering of support for the hypothetical parade, most of the comments were clearly opposed. Here are some responses from people whose profiles indicated that they are current or former military:
[O]ur military is not a tool to stroke your overblown ego or a prop to flaunt for your insecurity.
Every dictator loves a good military parade down main street at citizens expense.
Waste of resources!!! Americans don't have to do that we know we have an awesome Military!! First time I have felt negative about You sir!
What? Are we fricken North Korea or China or something now? How pointlessly retarded. And a giant waste of [money] just to appease some orange goons out of control ego.
Contributors to the Army subreddit were even more blunt in their disapproval.
"But you know who gets fucked? Joe. Joe gets to practice for three months for this shit then gets to sweat his nuts off while this clusterfuck lollygags down the street," says one contributor.
"FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK PARADESSSSSS," argues another. "Look I've marched in some parades. And beyond the fact that in 2017 only asshole countries have big ass show of force parades they fucking suckkkkkkkkkk."
"We've done grand parades before . . . after victory in the Civil War, Spanish American War, WWI, WWII, and Desert Storm. We are not missing the parade, we are missing something else," another astutely notes.
Task & Purpose writer and Navy veteran Adam Weinstein agreed in a piece titled, "Take Your Military Parade And Drop It In Your Gold-Plated Toilet," in which he points out that the "entire military establishment, shot through with waste, fraud, and abuse, can’t even audit itself, and Congress is too broken to even fund it," arguing that this whole spectacle would be a massive headache for the troops the White House claims it is supposed to honor.
Even retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton weighed in, calling Trump "a wannabe banana republic strongman" and saying the military is "not to be reduced to stagecraft to prop up Donald Trump's image."
As Buckholtz noted to Salon, there are many occasions already where the military is honored — including the Fourth of July, which is the American analogue to Bastille Day. A quick Google image search shows that troops and veterans regularly march in parades across the country for the Fourth, Veterans Day, Memorial Day and Armed Forces Day, although usually without the expensive and labor-intensive display of tanks and other high-tech hardware.
There's some evidence that the Pentagon may try to peg this parade to one of these holidays, in an effort to minimize the association with Trump's authoritarian impulses. But as Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post only half-jokingly suggested, the president will probably undermine any such attempt at dignity by bedecking himself in a bunch of fake medals, Muammar Gaddafi-style.
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