You might remember, back in those last few weeks when the nation had a president who wasn't an incompetent, narcissistic mess, the news that Donald Trump was interested in turning his upcoming inaugural parade into a Soviet-styled military procession with tanks and missile launchers and whatever else might look good rolling through the streets of the nation's capital on the day we gave up all pretense of being anything better. Upon this becoming public, it was denied by the Trump team. Hey, guess what? It turns out Team Pumpkinfuhrer was lying.
The Presidential Inaugural Committee “is seriously considering adding military vehicles to the Inaugural Parade,” a Pentagon official wrote in an internal email dated Dec. 13, 2016. “The conversation started as ‘Can you send us some pictures of military vehicles we could add to the parade,’” the official wrote.
The emails, which were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, corroborate HuffPost’s January report that Trump, who has spoken favorably of public displays of military prowess, looked into deploying heavy military equipment in his inaugural parade.
The military was not thrilled with the request, apparently, because they would have to have organized it and had to repaint vehicles and figure out which equipment could be separated from their units for a session of fluffing Donald Trump—not to mention the bit where sending tanks down public streets is a great way to owe Washington, D.C. about six month's worth of road repairs. And the idea was eventually dropped; we'll presume it was because somebody, somewhere in Washington, finally got through to Donald that making Washington, D.C. look like Red Square was a little too damn on-the-nose for his first freaking day of office.
There are several super duper awesome things about this revelation. The first is, of course, the sheer consistency with which Donald Trump and those he surrounds himself with lie about everything, all the time. Of course they made the request. Of course they lied about it afterward.
The second is the news that Donald Trump and team wanted pictures of suitable military vehicles sent over so that Donald could decide which, among them, were turgid enough to represent his new reign. That would have been a hell of a meeting, don't you think?