ON SATURDAY, NEARLY 6,600 SOLDIERS, 150 military vehicles, and a range of aircraft are scheduled to form a grand military parade, ostensibly to celebrate the United States Army’s 250th anniversary, which also falls on President Donald Trump’s 79th birthday. The entire event is estimated to cost between $25 million and $45 million—but the real costs are much greater.
While both Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy showcased some military hardware during their inaugurations, there has not been a similar event since the 1991 Persian Gulf War victory parade. Festivities this weekend will include an Army physical fitness competition, a parade along Constitution Avenue, and fireworks. President Trump will be watching from a review stand south of the White House.
Contrary to popular belief, the military does not usually conduct parades for the public. (The Navy’s Fleet Week, the Marine Corps’s small parades at its Washington Barracks, and other public events, such as air shows and static military equipment displays, are often designed to boost recruitment and are scrupulously nonpolitical.) When the troops do parade, it’s usually—as in 1991 or 1946—to celebrate a victory in a major war and to honor those who fought and won it. Whatever this event is really for, there is no victory to celebrate.
Commanders are loath to loan out their soldiers for such events because they’re time-consuming and often rob active-duty service members of their free time, a precious commodity that members hold dear, especially as the military’s operations tempo continues without slowing. Modern military equipment, like the M1 tanks and Stryker vehicles scheduled to roll down Constitution Avenue,1 require immense amounts of logistical support and maintenance, so for hundreds of soldiers, the parade is just an invitation to spend many, many extra hours working on a project that doesn’t contribute at all to readiness. While some may consider Trump’s parade prestigious, for many servicemembers, taking part in yet another dog-and-pony show will rob them of time with their families, which is consistently the top issue facing active duty servicemembers.
For his part, President Trump, who has long boasted of his affection for authoritarians, is using this spectacle to boost his tough-guy image at home and abroad. While he stands in review in D.C., active-duty marines and National Guard will still be in Los Angeles, ostensibly keeping “violent insurrectionists” from causing chaos. So as Trump celebrates the military, and attempts to merge his legitimacy with its, he will simultaneously be using it, possibly in violation of the law, against American citizens.
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Trump’s politicization of the military and militarization of politics poses a significant threat to the armed forces. While every president uses the military to boost their image to some degree, no president has used the military to legitimate harsh partisan rhetoric as Trump has, underscoring concerns that he is attempting to make the military loyal to him, rather than the Constitution. While Americans continue to view the U.S. military favorably, associating the military with President Trump and the Republican party threatens to jeopardize bipartisan support for one of the few remaining trusted institutions in American life.
Trump’s recent speech at Fort Bragg is likely a harbinger for this weekend’s event. During his recent trip, he disparaged California Gov. Newsom and former President Joe Biden, eliciting boos from active-duty service members. Soldiers were also spotted buying partisan merchandise on base.
Trump would like the country to believe that the military is populated entirely by MAGAs and is therefore implicitly loyal to him. This is not true, and the efforts the White House apparently made to ensure that the soldiers behind Trump his Fort Bragg speech were politically loyal (as well as appearing soldierly enough for the draft-dodger-in-chief) reveals that the military, like the society from which it’s drawn, is a mix of Democrats, Republicans, and independents; liberals, conservatives, moderates, none-of-the-aboves, and every other flavor of political opinion.
Trump’s parade could also make frontline commanders’ jobs harder. Even during non-election years, commanders and frontline supervisors have to keep a wary eye on active-duty personnel engaging in political rhetoric. While Trump’s appointees crossed this threshold while on active duty, it remains a critical component not only of good order and discipline but also of the very idea that service members swear an oath to defend the Constitution, not to the president himself.
For many first-time service members, President Trump’s insistence on pushing political norms might obliterate, like so many other sacred norms, the tradition of nonpartisanship. Appearing in nakedly political events while in uniform, especially at the behest of the commander-in-chief, will further erode the military’s nonpartisan posture and could embolden such rhetoric throughout the ranks.
AS WITH ALMOST EVERY ISSUE of civilian-military relations, the danger runs two ways. The risks of a politicized military for civilians are more obvious, but there are three major risks to the military.
The first is the coherence of the force. Just as many members of the Trump administration can’t accept that many Americans are not white, not Christian, and not straight—and the same is true of the armed forces. In combat, the trust in the chain of command and the unity of purpose must be immediate and unquestioning. As soon as a soldier wonders if they’re really part of the team—if their chain of command is really looking out for them as much as for the person in another unit or even the person next to them—the efficacy of the force will suffer.
That’s related to the second problem, which is the future of the force. For years, the military has had trouble meeting its recruitment goals. It’s become a crisis. If people begin to see the military as yet another MAGA institution—which is apparently Trump’s goal—well, MAGA has never been a majority movement in America. Even in 2024, Trump failed to win an outright majority of the popular vote. If we have trouble staffing our military to meet our commitments now, imagine how bad the problem will be when more than half the country thinks the military is politically and culturally hostile to them.
The final risk to the military is that it won’t be taken seriously because service members are not viewed as public servants. At the lowest levels, this can look like the experience of Vietnam veterans, who weren’t given the support they needed to reintegrate back into civilian life. All of society benefits when veterans bring their strengths back home with them—and all of society suffers when they’re left to deal with their problems on their own. At the highest levels, senior military leaders have to be confident that their civilian bosses will consider their best professional advice. If those civilian bosses have reason to believe that advice has a partisan bias, the result could be bloody disaster.
If Trump really supported the troops, he’d help them do their jobs and reintegrate back into civilian life when their service is over. But as his parade so obviously demonstrates, he’s really only interested in the troops supporting him.
Perhaps the White House should have considered the imagery: Trump military parade rolls over Constitution?