It’s Trump’s party, and he’ll cry if he wants to.
To say that President Donald Trump is going all out for his special day would be an understatement. The birthday boy is planning Saturday’s $45 million military parade using taxpayer money—a jubilee complete with at least 25 tanks rolling through the streets of Washington, D.C. as Army helicopters and military jets fly overhead.
But as his 79th birthday looms, his obsession with crowd size is only growing.
Despite the party’s bells and whistles, he’s nervous that nobody will actually show up, Michael Wolff, his best-selling biographer tells The Daily Beast Podcast.
“Although he has been going around the White House, there’s a big fear that nobody’s gonna turn out for this parade,” Wolff told host Joanna Coles. “I mean, you’re gonna have the military down the street and nobody there watching it. So they’re now trying to make sure people get out. They’re trying to bus in the Trump base.”
Trump might be traumatized from the empty seats that haunt his dreams: several of his rallies on the 2024 campaign trail were totally devoid of people.
Trump has long boasted about the size of his fanbase, claiming last fall that “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
During his 2017 inauguration, he had a meltdown about the “fake news” releasing photos of the event that made it seem like there were less people than at former President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
“I looked out, the field was—it looked like a million, million and a half people,” Trump said, complaining that the media’s photos showed empty patches on the National Mall.
In 2024 he claimed that 100,000 people attended his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania when in reality only 24,000 were in attendance.
So it’s no surprise that Trump’s getting worried that his birthday party will prove to be the same.
“He’s setting expectations for this, which is like, you know, there’s going to be a million people,” said Wolff. “I mean, it’s Trump numbers. So two things will happen. He’ll be furious that the crowds are sparse, and then he’ll announce that the crowds are unprecedented in size.”
A White House spokesperson questioned what evidence Wolff had to support the assertion but did not comment on Trump’s pre-birthday nerves.
Not even Republicans want to show up for the extravaganza with lawmakers and their offices offering an array of explanations for their absence to the Daily Beast.
Among the reasons were Speaker Mike Johnson who is preparing to downsize his house, a senator headed to watch college sports, another flying to Paris for the air show there and one who joked about needing to stay married.
Although the event is dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the Army, it just so happens to be on Trump’s birthday. It kicks off Saturday with a daytime festival on the National Mall, followed by an evening military parade, a concert, and fireworks.
Republican Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky expressed disgust at the lavish observance.
“I’ve never been a big fan of goose-stepping soldiers in big tanks and missiles rolling down the street,” he said. “So if you asked me, I wouldn’t have done it. We were always different than the images you saw of the Soviet Union and North Korea. We were proud not to be that.”
In response White House Communications Director Steven Cheung recycled a previous attack on Wolff and said, “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s–t and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
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