The New Yorker:
After all the talk of dictators and wannabe kings, the Army’s anniversary celebration in the capital was a low-key affair, amid national turmoil.
By Antonia Hitchens
A soldier in a Revolutionary War uniform was sitting under a tree, vaping and scrolling on his phone. It was the Army’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary celebration in D.C., and I was looking for the entrance to their fitness competition and cake-cutting ceremony, before the big parade at night. Walking down Independence Avenue, a little before noon, I heard a din. Behind the Department of Agriculture building, thousands of soldiers were getting in formation. They had spent the night sleeping in the federal agency’s headquarters—workers had been asked to telework to accommodate them—and now they were streaming out into the muggy day for their procession. Each conflict in the Army’s history was to be restaged in a carefully choreographed performance, and so the soldiers were dressed in period costumes: some from the Revolutionary War, others in outfits from the Civil War, the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. The uniforms had been rented and shipped to them from Hollywood.
A year ago, when the Army filed a permit requesting to celebrate its anniversary in D.C., the idea was for about three hundred personnel and four cannons, with a little more than a hundred folding chairs. But the institution happens to share its birthday with President Donald Trump. By now, the whole thing had taken on a different context entirely. The parade would cost forty-five million dollars. Uniformed military had entered the streets a week earlier, in Los Angeles, after Trump deployed National Guard troops and the Marines to the city in response to protests against ice raids. Trump had said that any protesters against the military parade in D.C., meanwhile, would be met with “very big force.” Around the capital, I had heard people muse about whether Saturday would be something like Tiananmen Square. In other cities, a series of “No Kings” protests were scheduled for the day of the event. Laura Loomer, a maga influencer, had cautioned her followers to “stay strapped when you’re in public this weekend.” On the day of the parade, in what appeared to be an act of political violence, in Minnesota, two Democratic lawmakers were shot—one killed, the other injured—by a gunman impersonating a police officer, according to officials.
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