I can think of two birthday homages to US presidents that will be remembered as iconic moments in American history.
The first is Marilyn Monroe’s unforgettably sultry, yearning, rendition of Happy Birthday to John F. Kennedy, in Madison Square Gardens in May of 1962. All of the sexual tension of the JFK-Monroe relationship, all of the impossible, ultimately doomed, optimism of Camelot is contained in those couple minutes of song, culminated by Monroe ushering in a birthday cake so large it had to be carried onto stage in what looked to be a sedan chair. Those two minutes are quite possibly the most extraordinary Public Display of Affection in American political history.
The second is the obscene military parade and accompanying countrywide protests yesterday that ushered in Donald J. Trump’s 80th year on the planet.
Trump’s decision to have the army fete him on his 79th birthday with a $45 million parade in DC, at a time when Congress, at his behest, is debating removing medical coverage and food stamp access from millions of American families, marked a moment when the imperial presidency started to take on the full visual trappings of dictatorship. After all, numerous commentators noted, parades of hardware like this, when combined with messages entangling the strength of the country with the dominance of its national leader, are more common in North Korea or Russia than in modern democracies. Historians recall that Hitler ordered up a big military parade to celebrate his own birthday, back in 1939.
Trump disingenuously claimed the celebration was about the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army. But to millions of Americans, looking on aghast as the preparations to roll tanks through the center of DC intensified—and as Trump announced, with characteristic elementary school bravado, that any protests against the 7,000 soldiers and their war-making hardware would be met with “very big force” —this was nothing more than a vanity project to stroke the ego of a would-be king and to instill fear in those who would dissent.
The would-be-king, of course, denied he had regal ambitions; but even his denial was, intentionally or otherwise, soaked in royal pretensions. “No, we’re not a king. We’re not a king at all,” he said, using what is commonly known as the “royal we” in talking about himself in the plural.
There is, of course, a difference between a military parade conjured up by Kim Jong-Un in North Korea, or Hitler in Third Reich Germany, and Trump’s grotesquery. And that difference is reach. Trump has dictatorial ambitions, and he most certainly has the thin-skinned, sadistic, unempathetic temperament of most dictators; but, to date, he doesn’t yet have the power to compel attendance at his vanity projects. Thus, while Hitler’s birthday bash was filled to capacity, with everybody who was anybody in the Third Reich making sure to be seen in attendance, Trump’s fell embarrassingly flat. The overwhelming majority of Republican Senators made a point of letting it be known they weren’t planning to attend; two-thirds of the American public told pollsters they opposed the parade; and of the few tens of thousand souls who did attend, sparsely populating the grass and sidewalks lining the parade route along Constitution Avenue, large numbers headed for the exits before the president began his speech.
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Dave Cathey
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Dave Cathey
Even the Trump team’s own, vastly inflated, estimates of the crowd size topped out at 250,000. By contrast, millions of people took to the streets nationwide to participate in No Kings protests, not only in reliably blue metropolises, including thousands in Santa Fe and in Albuquerque, but in dyed-red states such as Idaho, Texas, and Montana. Preliminary calculations of the numbers involved nationally in the two thousand protests range from four million on up to the six million range. And, given the vast size of some of the rallies—Boston’s rally overlapped with the Pride parade, for example, and Los Angeles was primed for protest given Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and marines into the city last week—it’s entirely likely that the true figure was actually considerably higher than six million.
In other words, for every one American who chose to participate in Trump’s parade, about 30 Americans chose to protest against Trump.
This was American political resistance at its finest. By their millions, Americans let their disgust at Trump’s open corruption, at the cruelty he has unleashed against immigrants, at his treating of the military as his personal plaything, at the cuts to basic government services, at the normalization of violence that he encourages, be known. By their millions, they announced that, Trump’s use of the royal-we notwithstanding, they wouldn’t put up with the monarchical pretensions of the MAGA cult.
It’s taken a while for the forces of opposition to find their footing. But find their footing they now have. While Trump was giving mooneyes to the men with big guns, millions of ordinary Americans were setting to work to reclaim their American Dream. By day’s end, the Emperor didn’t appear to be wearing any clothes. There he was, a naked, nasty old man, sitting watching airplane fly-bys as storm clouds threatened to douse his parade with rain.
