Trump's team claims 250,000 supporters watched his military parade. ‘No Kings' protests drew at least 4 million, experts say
After dueling Army processions in Washington, D.C. and nationwide 'No Kings' protests, the war of spin has begun.
Following the Saturday event in the Capitol, the Trump administration was quick to tout what appeared to be inflated attendance numbers and brand the 'No Kings' protest, which drew millions across events in some 2,000 cities and small towns across the country, as an ' utter failure with minuscule attendance.'
'Despite the threat of rain, over 250,000 patriots showed up to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army,' White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote on X. 'God Bless the USA!'
Outside estimates, meanwhile, suggest there were far fewer in attendance than the 200,000 people expected to view the parade, which coincided with the president's birthday.
Empty bleachers and gaps in the audience could be seen in the crowd that turned out to watch more than 6,000 soldiers and 128 Army tanks roll through Washington.
'When the day came, it was something closer to a medium-sized town's July 4th celebration,' The Independent 's Richard Hall wrote in his dispatch from the event. 'There were families, picnics, bad weather and small crowds.'
Online, meanwhile, critics of the president poked fun at images from the event, including the unexpected appearance of Trump-aligned corporate sponsors like cryptocurrency firm Coinbase and Oracle, as well as a squeaky antique tank filmed driving through a largely silent section of the crowd, viewed by some as a symbol for the event's larger success.
In terms of sheer numbers, the 'No Kings' events that took place the same day as the parade dwarfed the Trump administration's event, drawing between four and six million people, according to an estimate from data journalist G. Elliot Morris and outside analysts. The event's organizers have put the number at more than 5 million.
Organizers purposely avoided throwing a protest in Washington, an effort they said was meant to draw focus away from the famously image-obsessed president.
'Instead of allowing this birthday parade to be the center of gravity, we will make action everywhere else the story of America that day: people coming together in communities across the country to reject strongman politics and corruption,' organizers wrote.
The gambit appeared to be a success, and images of the nationwide protests were plastered across the front page of every major newspaper, sometimes crowding out the president's parade.
Trump has long been fixated on the size of crowds at his events, beginning with his repeated, dubious claims that his first inauguration was the largest in U.S. history, a trend of boasting that continued through his 2024 campaign.
In addition to the intentional political theater of the day — which included Trump-shaped puppets and crossed-out crown insignias on one hand, the White House framed in the background of the stage at the Army parade on the other — there were also striking, unplanned symbols of the present political moment.
Saturday marked the first time that hundreds of U.S. Marines called to respond to ongoing unrest in Los Angeles were spotted joining law enforcement on the ground.
Marines, federalized National Guard troops, and Los Angeles police officers and sheriff's deputies squared off with demonstrators outside a federal building that's been a center of protest for days as Angelenos challenge the Trump administration's immigration raids in the area.
Police say demonstrators attacked law enforcement, while protesters and media members have described a largely peaceful crowd caught by surprise as officers wielding batons and tear gas with little warning after an order to disperse.
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Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump's birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task, recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist's shorthand for the slide towards fascism. 'It's all almost too stereotypical,' Shore reflects. 'A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,' she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. 'As for Los Angeles, my historian's intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.' That response captures the double lens through which Shore sees the Trump phenomenon, informed by both the Third Reich and the 'neo-totalitarianism' exhibited most clearly in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. We speak as Shore is trying to do her day job, having touched down in Warsaw en route to Kyiv, with Poland and Ukraine long a focus of her studies. Via Zoom from a hotel lobby, she peppers our conversation with terms drawn from a Russian political lexicon that suddenly fits a US president. 'The unabashed narcissism, this Nero-like level of narcissism and this lack of apology … in Russian, it's obnazhenie; 'laying bare'.' It's an approach to politics 'in which all of the ugliness is right on the surface,' not concealed in any way. 'And that's its own kind of strategy. You just lay everything out there.' She fears that the sheer shamelessness of Trump has 'really disempowered the opposition, because our impulse is to keep looking for the thing that's hidden and expose it, and we think that's going to be what makes the system unravel.' But the problem is not what's hidden, it's 'what we've normalised – because the whole strategy is to throw it all in your face.' None of this has been an overnight realisation for Shore. It had been building for years, with origins that predate Trump. Now 53, she had spent most of her 20s focused on eastern Europe, barely paying attention to US politics, when the deadlocked presidential election of 2000 and the aborted Florida recount fiasco made her realise that 'we didn't really know how to count votes'. Next she was wondering: 'Why exactly were we going to war in Iraq?' But the moment her academic work began to shed an uncomfortable light on the American present came in the presidential race of 2008. 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When Trump was elected in 2016, Shore found herself 'lying on the floor of my office, throwing up into a plastic bag. I felt like this was the end of the world. I felt like something had happened that was just catastrophic on a world historical scale, that was never going to be OK.' Did she consider leaving the US then? She did, not least because both she and her husband had received offers to teach in Geneva. 'We tore our hair out debating it.' Snyder's instinct was to stay and fight: he's a 'committed patriot', she says. Besides, their children were younger; there was their schooling to think about. So they stayed at Yale. 'These things are so contingent; you can't do a control study on real life.' But when Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. 'So much had been dismantled … the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court's ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.' Events so far have vindicated those fears. The deportations; students disappeared off the streets, one famously caught on video as she was bundled into an unmarked car by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Trump and JD Vance ordered the Ukrainian president to express his gratitude to them, even as they were 'abusing' him, an episode, says Shore, 'right out of Stalinism' – to say nothing of Trump's regular attacks on 'USA-hating judges' who rule against the executive branch. It adds up to a playbook that is all too familiar. 'Dark fantasies are coming true.' She readily admits that her reaction to these events is not wholly or coldly analytical. It's more personal than that. 'I'm a neurotic catastrophist,' she says. 'I feel like we could just subtitle [this period] 'the vindication of the neurotic catastrophist'. I mean, I've been anxious and neurotic since birth.' She draws the contrast with her husband: 'Tim is not an anxious person by nature, and that is just hardwired.' She's referring in part to their different backgrounds. Snyder is a child of Quakers; Shore is Jewish, raised in Allentown, eastern Pennsylvania. Her father was a doctor and her mother 'a doctor's wife' who was later a preschool teacher. Shore grew up in a community with Holocaust survivors. 'I do think there's something about having heard stories of the Holocaust at a young age that was formative. If you hear these stories – people narrating what they went through in Auschwitz, even if they're narrating it for eight, nine or 10-year-olds – it impresses itself on your consciousness. Once you know it's possible, you just can't unknow that.' How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: 'My fear is we're headed to civil war.' She restates a basic truth about the US. 'There's a lot of guns. There's a lot of gun violence. There's a habituation to violence that's very American, that Europeans don't understand.' Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new 'permissiveness' that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump's indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: 'You can feel that brewing.' She also worries that instead of fighting back, 'people become atomised. The arbitrariness of terror atomises people. You know, people put their heads down, they go quiet, they get in line, if only for the very reasonable, rational reason that any individual acting rationally has a reason to think that the personal cost of refusing to make a compromise is going to be greater than the social benefit of their one act of resistance. So you get a classic collective action problem.' Later she speaks of the beauty of solidarity, those fleeting moments when societies come together, often to expel a tyrant. She recalls the trade union Solidarity in communist-era Poland and the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. By leaving America – and Americans – in their hour of need, is she not betraying the very solidarity she reveres? 'I feel incredibly guilty about that,' she sighs. All the more so when she sees the criticism directed at her husband. They were on sabbatical together in Canada when Trump won the 2024 election, but 'had he been alone, he would have gone back to fight … That's his personality. But he wouldn't have done that to me and the kids.' To those minded to hurl accusations of betrayal and cowardice, she says: 'Direct them all to me. I'm the coward. I take full blame for that.' It was she, not Snyder, who decided that 'no, I'm not bringing my kids back to this'. I linger on that word 'coward'. It goes to one of the fears that led to Shore's decision. She does not doubt her own intellectual courage, her willingness to say or write what she believes, regardless of the consequences. But, she says, 'I've never trusted myself to be physically courageous.' She worries that she is, in fact, 'a physical coward'. She began to wonder: what would I do if someone came to take my students away? 'If you're in a classroom, you know your job is to look out for your students.' But could she do it? Many of her students are from overseas. 'What am I going to do if masked guys in balaclavas come and try to take this person away? Would I be brave? Would I try to pull them away? Would I try to pull the mask off? Would I scream? Would I cry? Would I run away?' She didn't trust herself to do what would need to be done. So now she is in what she calls 'a luxurious position': at a university across the border, safely out of reach of both Trump's threats to cut funding and the ICE officials currently striking terror into the hearts of international students and others. As a result, she feels 'more obligated to speak out … on behalf of my colleagues and on behalf of other Americans who are at risk'. At one point in our conversation, we talk about those US citizens who put Trump back in the White House, even though, as she puts it, they knew who he was. 'Nothing was hidden. People had plenty of time to think about it, and they chose this. And that disgust, I couldn't shake that. I thought: 'People wanted this – and I don't want to have anything to do with this.'' Does that mean she will never return to the US? 'I would never say, 'I would never go back.' I always feel that what history teaches you is not what will happen, but what can happen. The possibilities are generally much more capacious than anyone is expecting at that moment.' Contained in that remark is, if not optimism, then at least the possibility of it. And, right now, that might be as much as we can ask for.
