Tanks, Flyovers and Protests: Army Celebrates Its 250th Year, Trump Celebrates His 79th

The U.S. Army celebrated its 250th anniversary on Saturday with a massive military parade that overtook the streets and skies of Washington, D.C., and included thousands of service members participating in the big-budget spectacle.

Also celebrating on Saturday is President Trump, whose 79th birthday corresponds with the Army anniversary, and who has long dreamed of holding such a display of America’s military might. A parade of this magnitude is unusual during times of peace and has stirred up controversy for what opponents view as a politicization of the nation’s armed forces and a break from U.S. democratic norms.

As Trump and first lady Melania Trump took to the viewing stands at the start of the main event, a group of individuals wearing “250 special guest” badges began singing “Happy Birthday” to the president. Others chanted “USA.”

Kicking off the parade, parachutists from the Army’s Golden Knights team drifted onto the National Mall from the gloomy Washington sky as Trump and hundreds of thousands of spectators watched from below. The Army said it expected around 200,000 attendees.

Thousands across the country spent the day participating in demonstrations against the parade and Trump’s broader political agenda, including fallout from mass immigration raids in Los Angeles that led Trump to send in both California’s National Guard, against state officials’ request, and the Marines.

The group No Kings — a coalition of more than 200 organizations — arranged some 2,000 protests nationwide against what they described as a “costly, wasteful, and un-American birthday parade in Washington.”

Plans for commemorating the milestone Army anniversary have been in place for at least a year — long before Trump had secured a second term. But the parade feature was added in recent months, ballooning the budget by tens of millions and leaving planners for both the city and military scrambling to prepare.

The parade is part of a larger slate of events, all taking place around the National Mall. Beginning at 11 a.m. ET, the Army hosted a public festival with military demonstrations and live music. The parade march, which started just after 6 p.m. is expected to end around 8 p.m., and the evening will be capped off with a fireworks display in front of the White House.

Presidential wishlist

Trump has been asking for such a parade since 2017, after he saw a military demonstration in France for Bastille Day. At the time, officials were able to keep the notion at bay, citing the questionable optics of a peacetime demonstration.

But in his second term, the Army’s birthday presented an opportunity for Trump to have the parade he’d long wanted.

Speaking last week at Fort Bragg, Trump said the parade was going to mark a “big day in Washington, D.C.”

“You know a lot of people said we don’t want to do that. I said, ‘yeah we do, we want to show off a little bit,'” he said.

Since the parade was announced, there has been sharp criticism, particularly from Democratic lawmakers who call the showcase self-indulgent and a misuse of public funds.

“To use the military in this manner when Donald Trump is slashing veterans’ benefits to aggrandize himself, to communicate to the country his control over the military, is just another shameful act of this administration,” said Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California.

Other critics have said it’s a display of military force typically associated with autocratic governments in places like Russia or North Korea.

“It’s a vulgar display,” Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said during a news conference on Friday. “It’s the kind of thing you see Kim Jong Un, you see Putin — you see with dictators around the world that are weak.”

“How weak do you have to be to commandeer the military to fete you on your birthday in a vulgar display of weakness? That’s Donald Trump,” he continued.

Already, the weekend festivities have racked up an expected price tag of between $25 million and $45 million, according to Army spokesperson Heather J. Hagan. That includes planned road repairs due to possible damage from tanks rolling on city streets.

Trump is expected to participate in the parade as a spectator, but he is scheduled to receive a folded American flag, according to Army spokesman Steve Warren. Such presentations are usually reserved for the families of fallen soldiers.

Military equipment has been arriving in D.C. for days

Heavy military equipment began rolling into the city days ahead of the Saturday event, coming in by freight or carried through city streets on large, flat-bed trucks.

Peirce Economakis was bartending on Tuesday evening in Shaw — a residential neighborhood in the city — when he said the main road nearby was suddenly closed off by police around 8 p.m. as truck after truck loaded with military machinery such as tanks and armored cars drove through. He says the whole scene probably lasted about 30 minutes.

“It’s surreal. It’s a little depressing,” he said. “I think a lot of people forget that people actually live here and it’s not, you know, some sort of playground.”

Not everyone, however, was against having a military display.

Mike Davis, a 30-year Army serviceman and employee of the Pentagon, said that he felt the 250-year anniversary of the military branch called for something big.

“I welcome it, and the reason I say that is the last time we’ve had a military parade of any sorts, I recall, is the Gulf War,” Davis said. “So, it’s been a long time and what better way to celebrate it than the 250th?”

Davis said that protests against the event cast a pall on what he thought should be a celebratory occasion, but he said he understood people’s First Amendment rights to speak out.

“I think they have their own agenda,” Davis said. “But you know, hey, we go to war and defend the nation’s rights for the citizens to do things like that, so more power to it.”

Significant street closures have been in effect around the city since Thursday, and Reagan National Airport has said it will close for several hours, potentially disrupting flights on Saturday to accommodate the military flyover safely.

The city has also been bracing for potential damage to its streets by installing steel plates along the parade route. D.C. Mayor Mariel Bowser has expressed concern that heavy machinery and tanks could rip up roads and require millions of dollars to repair.

The country has not had a major military parade like the one planned for this weekend during times of peace in a very long time, although presidents such as John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower did have some troops marching with military equipment for their inaugurations.

The last major military parade was in 1991, also in D.C., to celebrate the end of the Gulf War and commemorate fallen soldiers from that conflict. But even that move was seen as controversial, says Joshua Zeitz, a historian and contributing editor for Politico magazine.

“Our country was born of a very particular opposition to state power, state authority, to standing armies which could enforce that type of authority and power,” he told NPR’s All Things Considered, saying that it’s important to view this parade in context with other moves Trump has made to expand the authority and the power of the presidency.

“He’s really reinventing the presidency as something that doesn’t resemble what it has traditionally in American history, and the military parade is part of that,” Zeitz says.

But Matthew Frakes, a historian of American military history and assistant professor at the Ohio State University, points out America does have a history of smaller military parades — like local Independence Day or Veterans Day celebrations, for example. He said the key with this parade will be to see how much of it focuses on history versus a show of America’s military prowess.

“In democracies, military parades are meant to commemorate, whereas in authoritarian regimes they’re meant to intimidate. And so you can think of, you know, the Soviet Union or more recently in China or North Korea,” Frakes says.

Anti-Trump protests held nationwide

Ahead of the weekend events, organizations across the country protested against the parade, which has been criticized as a vanity project for the White House.

The group No Kings, which has organized past protests against Trump, planned to host events in more than 1,800 cities across the country.

“On June 14 — Flag Day — President Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday,” No Kings said in a statement on their website. “A spectacle meant to look like strength. But real power isn’t staged in Washington. It rises up everywhere else.”

The group said that in order to pull attention away from the display of military grandeur, No Kings would specifically not demonstrate in Washington on Saturday, and instead hosted their largest demonstration in Philadelphia — the city known as the birthplace of America.

The Philadelphia event was attended by tens of thousands of demonstrators, and police said the protest was peaceful.

Demonstrations in other cities carried on throughout the afternoon. But No Kings called for the cancellation of all remaining events in the state of Minnesota “out of an abundance of caution” following the targeted shootings of two Democratic lawmakers at their homes in Minnesota. State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed at their home; state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were shot and wounded at their home.

In Washington, as of Friday afternoon, the National Parks Service had approved a protest permit for just one demonstration related to the parade.

On Friday evening, U.S. Capitol Police arrested 60 protesters, some of whom pushed down barriers and ran toward the steps of the Capitol Rotunda. All 60, police said, will be charged with unlawful demonstration and crossing a police line and some will also be charged with assault on a police officer and resisting arrest.

Trump had vowed to take action against demonstrators at Saturday’s events. The president is already facing sharp blowback for his decision to deploy the military to Los Angeles amid protests against ICE immigration raids.