As Trump celebrates Army's founding, his critics take to the streets

Boston Globe

11 hours ago

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But no celebration of history takes place in a political vacuum. And protesters in large cities and small towns from Seattle to Key West, Florida, showed up to demonstrate against how Trump is making use of the modern force. His decisions over the past week to federalize the National Guard and call Marines into the streets of Los Angeles, in support of his immigration roundups, have rekindled a debate about whether he is abusing the powers of the commander in chief.
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So even before Trump presided over the parade, the country was divided by a split-screen show of force. Roughly 2,000 protests, under the slogan 'No Kings,' pushed back against what the crowds decried as authoritarian overreach. While big-city rallies attracted the attention and the cameras, smaller events were organized in rural areas, including three dozen in Indiana, a state Trump won last November by 19 points.
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In Dallas, another stronghold of Trump's support, crowds of protesters stretched across a wide street for at least five blocks. The Houston protest looked more like a block party, with dances to Mexican music and cool-offs in a fountain.
In Pittsburgh, on a clear day, there was a festival atmosphere, with some chanting 'Shut ICE down,' a reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In Waukesha, Wisconsin, about 1,500 people marched through the streets in an area where Trump had won with 59 percent of the vote. 'This is beyond my wildest dreams,' said Dawn Lawien, an organizer.
And even in downtown Los Angeles, the National Guard members stationed on Broadway near the federal courthouse were not the target of the crowd's anger; Trump was. Protesters fist-bumped the troops and thanked them for their service.
Elected leaders and law enforcement officials in California and across the country encouraged protesters to remain peaceful, and organizers of the No Kings demonstrations called on participants to focus on 'nonviolent action.' In Houston, some demonstrators handed out flowers to police officers who were securing the route of the protest.
But Saturday opened with an ominous turn in Minnesota when a person pretending to be a police officer assassinated a Democratic state lawmaker and attempted to kill a second. Authorities subsequently asked people to refrain from attending 'No Kings' events in the state, reporting that materials referencing the gatherings were found in the vehicle of the suspect, who remained at large Saturday afternoon.
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Back in Washington, organizers of the America250 events, for which this is the first big production, were selling a 'dedicated VIP experience' to large donors, and red MAGA hats to the president's supporters. It is also 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 the Korea and Vietnam conflicts, along with those who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, two wars that Trump — and many Democrats — have declared were wastes of lives and money.
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 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, a former Fox News pundit who is expected to stand alongside Trump in the reviewing stand.
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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 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.
And it comes at a moment the administration has been ridiculing as wasteful such efforts as global aid, battling HIV or backing basic research at universities that Trump has gone to war against. The parade's estimated cost will amount to about one-fifth of the annual budget of the Voice of America, which had millions of listeners around the world until Trump took it off the air this spring.
The protests, 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.
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 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.'
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In the run-up to the parade, those differences broke out on Capitol Hill, when 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.'
Organizers of the protest marches range from the American Civil Liberties Union to abortion rights and gun violence groups, but also include the 'Hands Off!' protesters who argue Trump has threatened Social Security, Medicaid and education budgets.
They they have folded together, though, under the 'No Kings' group, which has called for a 'day of defiance' Saturday. 'We want to create contrast,' said Leah Greenberg, co-founder of a group called Indivisible organize the protest in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress met to create that first army force. 'Not conflict.'