In 2017, watching a two-hour Bastille Day procession, Donald Trumptoldthe French president that we’d have one too, only better. That time, the grown-ups said no. The reasons given were costs – estimates ran to$92m–hellish logistics, and the Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser’s worried that tanks and other armored vehicles would tear up Washington’s streets.
Someretired generalsobjected publicly to the totalitarian-adjacent optics, especially given the US president’s praise for such bad actors asSaddam HusseinandVladimir Putin. Several Republican lawmakers also expressed their distaste. “Confidence is silent, and insecurity is loud,” the Louisiana senator John Kennedy toldMSNBC. “America is the most powerful country in all of human history ... and we don’t need to show it off. We’re not North Korea. We’re not Russia, we’re not China,” he continued, “and I don’t wanna be.”
This time, as Washington prepares for a huge military shindig on 14 June, Trump’s 79th – and, oh yes, the US army’s 250th – birthday, the generals are silent. TheRepublicanshave sworn allegiance to the king. And the media are focused on the price tag, the potholes and the impending pomp; on tensions between the blue city of Washington and the red capital; and on the decimation of veterans’ healthcare, housing, and pensions while the administration throws $25m to $45m at a circus of war.
All are important parts of the story. Yet commentary is muted and the debate mischaracterized as normal political discourse. The horrific point is missed: the spectacle of a massive show of military might, before a president who behaves like a dictator and views the armed forces as his personal foot soldiers, evinces memories of the worst totalitarian regimes. History may mark 14 June 2025 as the ceremonial birth of a new American fascism.
Military Parade in Capital on Trump’s Birthday Could Cost $45 Million, Officials Say, reported theNew York Timesin mid-May.CBSalso led with the cost. TheWashingtoniandescribed in detail the street-damage-preventive measures the army is installing: metal plates under the parade route, rubber padding on the tank treads – though transportation experts warn that running, at last count, 28 Abrams tanks, 28 Bradley fighting vehicles, 28 Strykers, and four Paladins, each behemoth weighing as much as70 tonnes, could buckle the asphalt and smash power, water and telecom lines underneath.
Even theNew Republic, the president’s daily disparager, put the cost up top, tallied the ordinance, and noted that the man who “signed an executive order creating a program to ‘beautify Washington DC’” was now “plotting to transform his expensive birthday party into a demolition derby that will cause serious damage to the roads that line the nation’s capital”.
In late May, three weeks after theAssociated Pressfirst revealed the parade plan, the army promised it would pay to fix the streets. It did not commit to picking up the multimillion-dollar tab for policing and cleanup, however, which will come out of a city budget from which the House cut$1.1bnin March and didn’t get around to restoring.
Still, the partial resolution of the infrastructure problems liberated the press to get on with the fun stuff: “what to expect” on the festive day: not just planes, tanks and 6,700 soldiers, but also fireworks, football players and fitness competitions.USA Todaylinked to the free tickets page and published the parade route, plus a map of the military goodies on display, including robots and night-vision goggles. It called the event an “unofficial birthday party”.ABC Newsran a feature on Doc Holliday, the dog who will join the parade in a mule-drawn cart.
Tucked into some stories was a sentence or two indicating controversy, such as this fromReuters: “Critics have called a parade an authoritarian display of power that is wasteful, especially as Trump slashes costs throughout the federal government.”
“The plans have drawn some criticism from Democrats,” saidCBS.
The Hillwrote: “Democrats and critics have questioned both the cost of the parade and whether it politicizes the military, which has traditionally been nonpartisan. The fact that the parade falls on Trump’s birthday has only fueled criticism from Democrats who view it as a way for the president to celebrate himself.”
Over at Fox, they were telling the critics to get over themselves. “The Democratic party, they’ve chosen to be an outrage machine at a time when there is outrage fatigue in this country,”scoffed Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s former press secretary and current Fox News host. “People are fed up with the ‘authoritarianism coup’ language.”
It’s true. Only one party is complaining. But what is striking about their complaints is the relative dearth of authoritarian coup language. “The egotist-in-chief wants taxpayers to foot the bill for a military parade on his birthday,” saidSteve Cohen, a US representative from Tennessee, in a statement. As if the president were moved by mere narcissism.
ReportedForbeson 15 May: “There has been no formal pushback to the proposal.”
Trump likes hulking lethal toys, but he hasn’t always been partial to the people who run them. There was thefighthe picked with a couple of Muslim Gold Star parents during his first campaign; thecommentson a 2018 European trip that fallen soldiers are “losers” and “suckers”; the undisguisedqueasinessabout seeing or being seen with wounded veterans; the Pentagon session where he called his top officers“a bunch of dopes and babies”.
But he is warming to the role of commander in chief. In hiscommencement speechat West Point, between bloviations on Nato, drag shows, golf and trophy wives, he boasted about the unprecedented $1.1tn military budget. “You’ll become officers in the greatest and most powerful army the world has ever known,” he said. “And I know because I rebuilt that army, and I rebuilt the military ... like nobody has ever rebuilt it before.”
Also breaking from script onMemorial Dayat Arlington Cemetery, he suggested that the parade, on top of nabbing the World Cup and the Olympics, was divinely ordained. “Look what I have, I have everything,” he cried. “Amazing the way things work out. God did that.”
If he is to ease from commander of the armed forces to commander of everything, he will need more than God on his side. He’ll need to own the military. Forty-five million bucks is a good starting bid.
Stalin’s 50th birthday celebration, in 1929, is considered the kickoff of his cult of personality. Hitler’s 50th birthday military parade, in April 1939, was organized by the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels for maximum grandeur, including a motorcade of 50 white limousines. Five months later, Germany invaded Poland.
Kim Jong-unchanged Loyalty Oath Day from 1 January to his birthday, 8 January. This February, the Republican US representative Claudia Tenney of New York introduced abillto designate Trump’s birthday as a national holiday. It hasn’t gone anywhere – yet.
The pieces are lining up like a phalanx of soldiers. The website of America250, the non-profit fundraising and marketing arm of the Semiquincentennial Commission, is an advertisement for Trump. Its description of the “grand military parade” refers to him in the second sentence andproclaimsthat under his “leadership, the U.S. Army has been restored to strength and readiness”.
At the parade, the crowd of200,000parade spectators will be dominated by Maga idol worshippers. Trump will watch the extravaganza from a reviewing stand, just likeXi Jinping and Putindid recently at Red Square. The army’s Golden Knights parachute team will land on the Eclipse and hand the president a flag. Officials say there are “no plans” to sing Happy Birthday, but there arerumorsthe army will also give Trump a birthday gift.
Let’s call 14 June what it promises to be: the ceremonial birth of the US’s 21st-century fascist regime.
Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books. Her Substack, Today in Fascism, is atjudithlevine.substack.com