On Saturday, Donald Trump finally got his military parade in Washington, D.C. Ostensibly to honor the U.S. Army on its 250th birthday, the event was, in reality, an authoritarian spectacle where Trump, like a Third World dictator, could play “El Generalissimo” and watch "his" troops celebrate his own 79th birthday and return to power.
But the parade was not the grand pageant he and his MAGA movement desired. Attendance was modest, estimated to be in the thousands. The weather was poor, and the event was described by journalists and other observers who were there as being low-energy — a descriptor Trump himself loves to leverage against his opponents — and boring.
