By Kenneth Tiven
American media offered a contrasting vision of a polarized nation Saturday—millions gathering across the USA opposing multiple Trump Administration policies while the US Army provided President Donald Trump with Army soldiers, bands and tanks parading for three hours in Washington.
Fox News ate it up with one commentator insisting spending an estimated $45 million was a brilliant recruiting tool for an all-volunteer army. Ostensibly this celebrated the Army’s 250th birthday since founding to oppose an 18th century British king with concern for what his citizens had discovered in North America. It happened to coincide with Trump’s 79th birthday that he made obvious for the past year that a parade would be an appropriate gift from the American people.
However, million of Americans disagreed, informally arranging a day of protest across the entire country in gatherings that were heavy on signage.
In Washington, crowds lined the long parade route making it difficult to judge crowd size, but the President and his selected audience of cabinet officials and friends stayed in the reviewing stand protected against on and off again rain. The measure of the day is told in images of gatherings.
News outlets reported protesters in the millions in cities large and small. San Diego alone estimated 60,000. Axios reported 100,000 in Philadelphia and 75,000 in Chicago. Dallas police estimated 11,000 there. 50,000 or more in midtown New York City. The Guardian reports that in the 800-person town of Pentwater, Michigan, 400 people joined the protest per the No Kings coalition. Trump’s people had hoped for 200,000 or more, but drew far less, and those numbers were dwarfed by the “No Kings” protests.
Even the New York Times, frequently criticized by Democrats for its deference to Trump, placed the No Kings above the parades. For most of the non-stop television news broadcasts it was a day of too much news, frequently jumping between the parade, the No Kings gatherings in 2000+ cities and towns–and the political murders in Minnesota and warfare between Iran and Israel.
A prominent Minnesota politician was shot and her husband also killed by a man disguised as a police officer who arrived at their home in the middle of the night in a vehicle made to look like an official police car. He then went and wounded two others and when police arrived he fled, leaving a list of some 70 potential ‘targets’in the car. Video from Iran and Israel explaining those attacks also took viewers eyes and minds off the parade coverage.
In Washington, the heat and occasional drizzle inhibited crowd size, plus there was no great victory to celebrate, just an old guy’s 79th. The Guardian newspaper’s American edition described it: “The parade was somehow neither the totalitarian North Korean spectacle that critics had grimly predicted, nor the triumph of Maga nationalism that Trump’s most diehard fans craved. It was just a parade – and a parade that was for all its millions of dollars spent, a little underwhelming.”
And so it seemed to this reporter who covered 250,000 people on the Washington Mall in a 1963 Civil Rights demonstration. A personal footnote: As with many American families this reporter served in the military as did his grandfather, uncles and dad in the past 110 years. Our respect for the military does not negate our concern for a birthday spectacle to satisfy a president whose partisanship and abusive language ignores 50% of the nation.