The Associated Press has broken the story that there’s a military parade planned this year in DC, but the whole thing is a facade to basically make a giant military parade for Donald Trump’s birthday. He had gone to Bastille Day in France years ago during his first term and he loved it. He thought this is how it should be.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Caleb Cunningham: So, Farron, the Associated Press has broken the story that there’s a military parade planned this year in DC, the 250th anniversary of the Army, ostensibly, let’s talk about that for a little bit. What are your thoughts?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. On the surface, hey, celebrating 250 years, US military, the army, that’s great, right? But that’s not what this is about at all. This whole thing is a facade to basically make a giant military parade for Donald Trump’s birthday. He had gone to Bastille Day in France years ago during his first term, and he loved it. He thought like, this is how it should be, this big show of all the military equipment parading down the street. So he wanted it so badly during his first term, could never make it happen. So now a little over a hundred days in office, he’s like, by God, we’re doing it and just so happens, it’s gonna be on my birthday. Just absolutely the most transparent thing that this guy has ever done because it’s all about him. This is not about the military. It’s all about him.
Caleb Cunningham: And certainly his defenders are saying that this is the founding, the Continental Congress founded the Army on June 14th in 1775. It’s also Flag Day. So there are some arguments that I’ve seen online about this, but this is a man who’s been obsessed with a military parade, obviously, famously big fan of Kim Jong Un. And Bastille Day, he tried to do this the first term, the estimates were like 90 something million dollars. He couldn’t get it over the finish line. I looked it up, the last big military parade that DC saw was June 8th, 1991. It was National Victory Day during the Gulf War. Stormin’ Norman led the parade. We had won the Gulf War and saluted the President. This is going to be 150 vehicles, 50 aircraft, 6,600 soldiers. This is a big production. Of course, DC is upset saying the tanks are going to destroy the roads. This is gonna be very expensive for a president and a Congress that says we’ve got to cut things. This is not a cut. This is an extravagance.
Farron Cousins: Right. I wonder what DOGE has to say about this because if it was gonna be $90 million eight years ago, I can only assume just like the cost of everything else, it’s gone way up. And you bring up a great point about the tanks. They want actual real tanks rolling down regular roads. Roads are not built for tanks. They cannot carry the weight. So we could be talking about massive infrastructure destruction, not just with the road getting torn up, but depending on where sewer lines run, power lines. This could be an absolute disaster for the people in DC being without electricity, being without sewer, possibly sewage leaks. They’re not really thinking any of this through and they’ve thrown it together so quickly. We’re a little over a month away from when this is going to happen.
You do not have time to reinforce any of this infrastructure. You do not have time to repave roads. It’s the dumbest thing I think I’ve ever seen. And again, it’s all because of his ego. He wants to have these 6,600 troops have to stop along the way and salute him and he’ll be this, oh, I got my birthday cake. He may have a birthday hat. It’s gonna be ridiculous and it’s all about him. Just like the Pope’s death, he made it all about him, you know, saying, well, I could be the next Pope. But it’s so ridiculous that all we could do is laugh because really this is gonna be a disaster in so many ways.
Caleb Cunningham: Well, obviously the army knew that their 250th birthday was coming up, had been planning this for more than a year. There was not, importantly, and this is something to remember, there were not plans for parade until very recently. This was intervention from the White House to put this parade together to make it in DC and it’s gonna be this big ridiculous thing, a lot of aircraft and a lot of people are concerned about the visual. Does this look like communist red square? This is generally associated with dictatorships. Traditionally in our country, from a historical perspective, when you see military parades, most of the time it’s because we’ve won a war. Not because it’s a birthday party, whether it be for the army or whether it be for the president. We generally don’t do this for birthday parties.
Farron Cousins: Right. And in the past when he had originally wanted to do it, he also wanted the missiles to be showcased, having these giant missiles like North Korea does because they held parades anytime they created a new missile, and that missile would be put on a flatbed and brought through the town square, everybody there to cheer on the missile. And that’s what he wants. This really is North Korea style. Maybe even a truck with a giant photo of Trump going through. I’m not gonna put anything past him at this point.
Caleb Cunningham: I think it’s particularly heartless when you’ve laid off hundreds of thousands of workers because we don’t have money. You’re planning a multimillion dollar parade that is not necessary, aircraft, and we all know those things burn fuel. The cost of this, I don’t know how you justify this as you’re predicting austerity and we’re gonna talk about that in another episode. Shipping rates are down. Bankruptcies are up. This is not the time to be having a lavish parade for a 79th birthday party, or a 250th, depending on what side you fall on that.
Farron Cousins: Right. You know, get him a bounce house. He could have just as much fun in there. But no, this, again, disaster waiting to happen.
Caleb Cunningham: Stay tuned and we’ll see how it goes.
