Dispatches from the present
On Donald Trump’s 79th birthday on Saturday, June 14th, a parade honoring the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army’s founding marched through Washington. At the same time, crowds across the country staged “No Kings” protests to demonstrate against Trump’s politicization of the military, from the campaign-rally rhetoric of his recent speech at Fort Bragg, to his deployment of the National Guard and the Marines to quell protests in Los Angeles, to his birthday parade. But as concerned citizens filled the streets of cities from Philadelphia to Portland, the National Mall, that storied theater of civil disobedience, remained largely devoid of dissent. The “No Kings” organizers had explicitly steered clear of D.C., whether to avoid a crackdown or simply divert attention from the parade.
In the early afternoon—the sun was long and hot, and the few spectators were staking out prime spots for watching the parade under the shade of trees—I met my first protesters. Competition for their attention was fierce. Two women from a Japanese newspaper politely questioned a man and woman in their mid-twenties, in white t-shirts with “NO KINGS” scrawled in Sharpie. When I tried to make my approach, an Australian television reporter stepped in. “We were next,” he said, “and we’re on a deadline.” By the time I got to the couple, they were weary. They researched climate change and equity, respectively, they told me. Funding was running dry. They lived four blocks away, so they had decided to come down to make sure things weren’t “an echo chamber.” They hadn’t had any antagonistic encounters, but it was early yet.
A man in orange basketball shorts held a sign that read “PETE HEGSETH STILL LISTENS TO NICKLEBACK [sic].” The sign, he told me, was meant to be lighthearted: “Not everything has to be so serious.” He did support the administration, he shrugged and smiled—in fact, he had been at the infamous rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump had been grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet. Eagerly, he showed me the rest of his stack of irreverent signs. Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t share snacks in a Humvee, one claimed. JD Vance can’t do army pushups. RFK JR COULD MAX THE PT TEST.
A woman carrying a “MAKE LOVE NOT WAR” sign adorned with musical notes and peace symbols told me she had been there in Butler too. She was certain it wasn’t a lone shooter. She didn’t have answers, she said. Just pictures and experiences that raised questions. I nodded. She wanted to talk about the rampant corruption in government. She wanted to see a spreadsheet. She wanted “a little more love in this world” and less funding for foreign aid, fewer foreign wars and more spending on veterans. A man in cargo shorts interrupted our conversation to shake her hand and express solidarity, though neither of us could tell if he was being sincere. “You meet all sorts of weirdos at these things,” she said, and I nodded again.
A man in his twenties in a bucket hat and all-white athletic apparel carried a blank sign. For a moment, I thought his markers had been ineffective. But as I moved closer I saw that the poster board was indeed entirely white—fresh from the drugstore, barcode affixed, unmarked on both sides. I asked him what it meant. He said that it reflected whatever you held inside. As within, so without.
Sitting in the grass, I encountered a young man in the respectable khaki shorts, collared shirt, coiffed hair and sunglasses of an off-duty (or laid-off) D.C. wonk. He sat cross-legged with a small poster that simply stated, in boyish handwriting, that “this parade cost enough to provide 14,697 children with a year of healthcare.” Nearby four high schoolers from Washington Boys Latin sported white tanks with “I <3 USA” written on the front and “FUCK TRUMP” scrawled on the back. They sounded off: “Have these people even read 1984?” “We should do an exit poll asking people.” “No, we should ask them whether they’ve read a book.” “I bet they’ve read a book—but just To Kill a Mockingbird in sixth grade.” Listening in, a boomer reporter in tactical gear asked them, “Is this a frat pledge thing?”
Hegseth, Vance and Trump walked on stage to cheers as the parade got underway. Screens next to the podium filled with videos narrating U.S. military history, our country’s martial virtues and victories. Decommissioned tanks trundled by amid troops in period uniforms, as Revolutionary War reenactments gave way to recruitment ads. A Howitzer most recently deployed in Ukraine passed by before the 101st Airborne Division, celebrated for their deployment by Eisenhower to protect the Little Rock Nine. One spectator said the acrobatic paratroopers reminded him of Fortnite. The birthday boy made only a few appearances, swearing in new recruits with the benediction, “Have a great life.”
Yes, it was jingoistic and expensive, held in the wake of illegal cuts to federal spending that had cost me and so many others their jobs. Just how worried should I be? I had come to watch tanks roll past the president with the hope of finding out. But as I watched the parade, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was mostly just a little corny. One could almost imagine it as a small-town affair—fireworks and ice cream, lawn chairs and vintage cars—if not for the setting and scale.
Wandering the crowds, I encountered several proud January 6th arrestees. One, wearing an ICE windbreaker, dismissed concerns about Trump’s executive overreach and argued that Biden had done worse by pardoning his son. After Trump saved so much money shrinking the government, the parade was a well-earned splurge. Another woman sported a crop top that read “pardoned by Trump,” and the man by her side boasted that he had been arrested on assault charges and had entered the Capitol armed. He wouldn’t hesitate to do it again, if America came under threat once more.
One of the most conspicuous protesters, a former D.C. journalist, carried a large sign pointing out, in bright red lettering, that Congress had created the Army 250 years ago to throw off a king, not crown one. He later told me that the antagonism he faced from the crowd was about “fifty percent of being a fan of the out-of-town team at a Nats game.” The ratio of journalists to protesters was higher than anything he’d seen before.
If the paradegoers and protesters failed to find common ground on politics (or just the facts), there was something basic, it seemed to me, that they shared: an instinctive opposition to despotism and absolute power, the skeptic’s unconventional streak. No one wanted kings. But, as Tocqueville warned, a mass of individuals insistent on free thinking might, in the end, prove just as tyrannical.