Memorial Day Eclipsed by the Impending Trump Parade

[justaprogressive]

Memorial Day has been somewhat upstaged this year, both by the Army (understandably) and Donald Trump (narcissistically). That’s because three weeks later, on June 14, the Army will celebrate the 250th anniversary of its establishment by the Continental Congress in 1775, in order to fend off the British. And it’s also because June 14 will be Trump’s birthday, so he’s ordered the festivities expanded to include a tank-and-armored-vehicle parade down Constitution Avenue to celebrate his power.

Initially, before Trump’s re-election, the festivities were to be chiefly confined to the National Mall. There were to be—are still to be, in fact—soldiers dressed in the garb and carrying the weapons used in all of the nation’s wars, beginning with the Revolution and concluding with I’m not sure what. (Afghanistan? Syria? Yemen? Will there be someone carrying a drone?) Some of those wars were clearly what we call “good wars”—the Civil War and World War II most particularly. (Of course, Pete Hegseth or somebody like him might decide that we need to celebrate the traitors of the Confederacy, too.)

As to our other wars, there’s the War of 1812, where Trumpians avant la lettre tried unsuccessfully to take over Canada; the Mexican War, of which one young officer who fought in it (Ulysses S. Grant) later wrote, “I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation”; the various 18th- and 19th-century wars to dispossess the native tribes of their land and sovereignty; the Spanish-American war of conquest over Cuba and the Philippines, the latter being followed by the Army’s bloody suppression of the Philippine independence movement—wars opposed by such anti-imperialists as Mark Twain and Samuel Gompers; World War I, which was accompanied by the domestic suppression of critical publications and arrests of the critics; the Korean War, under the nominal aegis of the United Nations, through which the spread of the totalitarian Kim regime was halted; the Vietnam War against communist and nationalist forces, which killed not just more than 55,000 American soldiers but also between two and three million Vietnamese; its Nixon-Kissinger expansion into Cambodia, which led to the Khmer Rouge’s extermination campaigns; the Gulf War; the intended-to-be-brief-but-ended-up-nearly-eternal Afghanistan war; and the pointless Iraq War, a neocon miscalculation of catastrophic consequences, which made Iran into a major Middle Eastern power and gave rise to ISIS.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-05-26-memorial-day-eclipsed-by-impending-trump-parade/