President Trump prepared on Saturday to make a show of American military might with a parade of tanks, missiles and aircraft through the heart of the nation’s capital, a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States Army that has already transformed into a test of wills and competing imagery, with demonstrators around the country decrying his expansion of executive power.
On Saturday, central Washington was locked down, divided by a wall of tall, black crowd-control fences designed to assure that the parade, the first of its kind since American troops returned from the Gulf War in 1991, is an uninterrupted demonstration of history and American power. The event was scheduled to go on despite a forecast of thunderstorms.
By design, military parades are part national celebration and part international intimidation, and Mr. Trump has wanted one in Washington since he attended a Bastille Day parade in Paris in 2017. Formally, the parade celebrates the decision by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1775, to raise a unified, lightly armed force of colonialists after the shock of the battles with British forces at Lexington and Concord. That army, which George Washington took command of a month later, ultimately expelled the far larger, better armed colonial force.
But no celebration of history takes place in a political vacuum. And protesters in large cities and small towns from Seattle to Key West were planning to demonstrate against how Mr. Trump is making use of the modern force. His decisions over the past week to federalize the National Guard and call the Marines into the streets of Los Angeles, in support of his immigration roundups, has rekindled a debate about whether he is abusing the powers of the commander in chief.
So the country was preparing for a split-screen show of force, before Mr. Trump presides over the parade and roughly 2,000 protests, under the slogan “No Kings,” take place from Philadelphia to San Francisco to push back against what they see at authoritarian overreach. While the big-city rallies will attract attention, smaller events are being organized in rural areas, including three dozen in Indiana, a state Mr. Trump won last November by 19 points.
The organizers of the America250 events, for which this is the first big production, were already selling a “dedicated V.I.P. experience” to large donors, and red MAGA hats to the president’s supporters. It is also Mr. Trump’s 79th birthday, though he has insisted the celebration is about the army, not him. The streets will be filled, organizers say, with veterans of Korea and Vietnam, along with those who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, two wars that Mr. Trump — and many Democrats — have declared were wastes of lives and money.
Mr. Trump has defended the spending of as much as $45 million — including the cost of repairing Washington’s streets from the damage expected from rolling 60-ton tanks down Constitution Avenue — as a small price to pay to stoke national pride and to remind the world of America’s hard power. He told an interviewer on NBC last month that the price tag was “peanuts compared to the value of doing it.”
“We have the greatest missiles in the world,” he continued. “We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest Army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we’re going to celebrate it.”
But to some of Mr. Trump’s critics, it is conduct unbecoming a superpower. In the first Trump term, that view was shared by military leaders who dissuaded him from replicating the French show of force. They have since been ousted, replaced by true believers like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News pundit who is expected to stand alongside Mr. Trump in the reviewing stand.
Mr. Trump’s political advisers are betting that half the country or more will enjoy watching the display of Army history — there will be World War I tanks and World War II equipment — and his “America First” declarations. Parades are pure showmanship, and Mr. Trump is the master showman.
Yet a military parade is also an unvarnished celebration of America’s hard power, even if this one is dominated by huge equipment, like the M-1 Abrams tank, that seems antiquated in an age of drones and cyberweapons. (Of the 31 Abrams tanks given to Ukraine over the past two years, only a handful remain operational; most were taken out by the Russians or sidelined by breakdowns.)
And it comes at a moment the administration has been ridiculing as wasteful such efforts as global aid, battling H.I.V. or backing basic research at universities that Mr. Trump has gone to war against. The parade’s estimated cost will amount to about a fifth of the annual budget of the Voice of America, which had millions of listeners around the world until Mr. Trump took it off the air this spring.
The counterprotests, which organizers deliberately kept outside Washington to avoid focusing more attention on the military celebration, have been planned for many weeks, as opposition to the administration’s efforts to dismiss expert opinion, oust the “deep state” and silence critics have mounted.
Mr. Trump’s decision to move 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines into Los Angeles asserted a role for the military at home, which was exactly what had given the Continental Congress pause about creating a colonial army at all. Now that same concern, 250 years later, is expected to give the weekend protests mass and weight. They have been further fueled by Mr. Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina last week, when he lumped peaceful protesters with “troublemakers, agitators, insurrectionists,” and later said anyone protesting in Washington would be met with “very big force.”
In the run-up to the parade, those differences broke out on Capitol Hill, when Mr. Hegseth defended the use of troops at home and suggested preparations were underway “if there are other riots, in places where law enforcement officers are threatened,” so that “we would have the capability to surge National Guard there.”
Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington State, lashed out at him. “You are deploying the American military to police the American people; you are sending the National Guard into California without the governor’s request, sending the Marines not after foreign threats, but after American protesters; and now President Trump is promising heavy force against peaceful protesters at his D.C. military parade.”
“Threatening to use our own troops on our own citizens at such scale is unprecedented, it is unconstitutional, and it is downright un-American,” she concluded.
The organizers of the protest marches range from the American Civil Liberties Union to abortion rights and gun violence groups, but also includes the “Hands Off!” protesters who argue Mr. Trump has threatened Social Security, Medicaid and education budgets.
But they have folded together under the “No Kings” group, which has called for a “day of defiance” on Saturday. “We want to create contrast,” said Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of a group called Indivisible that is organizing the protest in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress met to create that first army force. “Not conflict.”
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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