Campaign Action
There's now a (very) rough estimate of how much Donald Trump's desired Look At Me Everybody Military Parade will cost, with White House budget kingpin Mick Mulvaney telling the House Budget Committee we're talking about numbers somewhere in the tens of millions.
“I’ve seen various different cost estimates of between $10 million and $30 million depending on the size of the parade, the scope of it, the length of it, those kind of things,” Mulvaney said.
It's not clear if $30 million includes the cost of road repairs, if Donald orders the military to drive tanks down Washington, DC streets, or if the nation's capitol city will be expected to foot the bill for that bit themselves. And the parade is not included in the White House "budget" plan, so that money will have to be re-allocated from somewhere.
To give some idea of how much money that is, it's roughly one hundred times as much money as the Secret Service has paid in golf cart rentals as they follow Trump around his various golf courses. It's several times more than the $6.6 million taxpayers have had to come up with to pay for Donald Trump's Air Force One trips to his private club, Mar-a-Lago. And even the on-the-cheap version costs about as much as Donald Trump has required us to spend on his total travel expenses for the year.
Thirty million dollars for the man to sit in a chair and watch tanks go by is a lot of money, and it's especially a lot of money for something with the sole apparent purpose of Donald trying to impress France. But these numbers do suggest a simple way Trump could pay for his Viagra On Parade; he could simply stop going to Mar-a-Lago. Boom! Done! If he thinks it's that important for America to "honor the troops" by dragging them, on some holiday weekend when they'd rather be doing anything else, to march through the streets of Washington for his personal amusement, he could pay for that bit of martial showboating by simply not demanding he be shuttled to one of his own private, for-profit companies on the taxpayer dime every weekend.
Donald already has had to suffer the indignity of being left out of a brutal shooting war because of a flare-up of Sudden Onset Bone Spurs, back when he was an otherwise perfectly healthy and patriotic young man. Now he's got a chance to make it up to America's military men and women; since he's insistent that marching them down Pennsylvania Avenue, all possible equipment in tow, is the only proper way to honor them for their service, he could pay for it. He's fabulously rich, you know. He mentions it all the time. But if he can't squeeze his wallet for this apparently very, very important show of military something, there's an even easier way he could pay for it.
He could just not golf, as president. That would free up enough taxpayer money to hold an extravagant military parade, right there. That would get him the money he needs for this little show of personal force. Will he do it? Let's watch!