Donald Trump’s Fourth of July extravaganza is shaping up to be an event so staggeringly awful that it could have been cooked up in a meeting between The Onion, National Lampoon, and Joseph Stalin. If all goes to plan—and using the word “plan” is being exceedingly generous—Trump’s vision of the national birthday will include:
- A National Mall ringed in tanks. “Brand new Sherman tanks,” according to Trump, suggesting that he really does plan on opening a time portal to the 1950s, since that’s the last time Sherman tanks were made.
- All the prime seating devoted only to followers of Trump, with the Republican Party now handing out tickets and non-Trumpists consigned to the outer circles.
- Trump standing on the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial, flanked by the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines (suck it, Coast Guard) as planes from all four services fly over and loudspeakers blare the hymns of each service. Possibly at the same time.
Trump has also declared that visitors will be able to get their selfies on with unspecified other military hardware. Though whether that means bringing missiles through the streets or settling helicopters around the Mall isn’t clear. Neither has anyone been made aware of just how Trump plans to get 60-ton tanks to the location without destroying streets, sidewalks, and park. Though Trumpist convert Newt Gingrich has declared that it doesn’t matter. “Just fix the streets,” says Newt.
But the most ridiculous aspect of Trump’s “Salute to America” isn’t the hardware he wants to display—even if he doesn’t know what it is, what it does, or when it was made. The most astounding part of this Trump-centric celebration is how Trump has utterly hijacked a national holiday and turned it into an absolutely partisan affair. Not only will Trump himself be at the center of this rally-writ-large, but all of the space near the Memorial, extending far back along the reflecting pools, will be reserved for Trump’s “friends.”
When you hold a national rally, where the great leader is flanked by the military and everyone not a member of the party in power is confined to the sidelines, that’s not a salute to America. That’s a reenactment of Nuremberg.
As The New York Times reports, military leaders didn’t really want to go along with turning service members into Trump’s props, or filling the streets of an American city with hardware whose sole purpose is to bring destruction. Trump simply didn’t give them any choice. After Pentagon leaders balked at turning Veterans Day into an opportunity for Trump to conduct a Red Square-style review, this time around Trump simply made the public announcement that it would happen, then left military officials to figure out the pesky how.
The result is that just days away from the event, no one seems at all clear on how many troops, tanks, or equipment are going to be present, or where these items will be placed around the National Mall. Trump has also ordered up flyovers from every service, turning the event into the kind of airshow that generally requires months of preparation and planning … except, in this case, without the planning.
And of course, as HuffPost reports, there’s that little matter of how this “national” event has actually become a Republican event. What has been, in the past, a nonpartisan, nonpolitical day on the National Mall has been revised into not just a nationally televised, taxpayer-financed Republican rally, but a rally from which nonsupporters of Trump have been explicitly barred.
Meanwhile, the RNC has been handing out tickets, not just to members, but also to donors who have been offered spots up in the “friends and family” ranks, a few short flights of stairs below Trump’s feet.
There will also be entertainment at Trump’s giant red-hats-only rally. Though it’s not exactly clear who that will be. Carole King, who had been scheduled to appear in the Fourth of July events before Trump decided to make the day his own, has stated that she’s still coming, but she’s not staying. “To be clear—I am appearing in ‘A Capitol Fourth,’” King stated—i.e., the name of the event for years, before Trump jumped in. “I am not participating in T’s political rally.”
Maybe the best news about Trump’s rally at this point is the forecast: thunderstorms.