As Trump Prepares to Celebrates Army's Founding, His Critics Take to the Streets
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.
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