Trump wanted a military spectacle. Instead, he got a history lesson.
The Army’s 250th birthday parade was not the grand military spectacle that many anticipated, and for that Americans can breathe a momentary, measured sigh of relief.
It was a family-friendly conclusion to a celebratory day, with events on the Mall and fireworks at the end. What had been billed as an overwhelming display of military might turned out to be a linear history lesson, from the early days of revolution to the age of robotic dogs and flying drones. A narrator made sense of it all over loudspeakers and for those watching the live stream on television, with a script that rarely strayed from the Army’s disciplined sense of itself as a lethal fighting machine in the service of democracy and the Constitution.
The tone was reminiscent of the wall texts and exhibits at the National Museum of the United States Army, which opened on the grounds of Fort Belvoir in November 2020, during one of the most dangerous moments in recent American history. Like Saturday’s parade, the museum celebrates the Army’s history, but it does so with the temperance and nuance of serious professional historians, and a well-crafted historical and cultural narrative that largely steers clear of propaganda. It opened in the waning days of President Donald Trump’s first term, after he lost reelection, and only days after he fired his defense secretary, Mark T. Esper. There was, at the time, considerable anxiety that Trump might attempt to use the Army to sustain his false claims of election fraud.
That Army, which has a keen sense of its own aesthetics, had been embroiled in Trump’s efforts to politicize it earlier in his first administration. In June 2020, a photograph of members of the D.C. National Guard on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial went viral, during the unsettled days of national protests after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. That picture, of troops seemingly deployed and ready for combat, standing in an orderly phalanx on the steps of the memorial, recalled the horror of the 1970 Kent State shootings, when Ohio National Guard troops fired on unarmed student protesters, killing four of them. It also seemed to presage a new age of domestic militarism, with the U.S. Army loyal not to the Constitution, but to Trump personally.
https://wapo.st/3HXJcZ1
Trump's behavior likely turned off most people from watching the parade.
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