The people of Washington DC have seen unusual traffic on Rhode Island Avenue this week: flatbed trucks, escorted by police and laden with military tanks traversing the thoroughfare that connects the city’s suburbs with downtown.
The convoys have left traffic jams in their wake, and even more disruptions are to come for the capital city. Thousands of soldiers accompanied by armored vehicles, aircraft, horses and even a couple of mules are set to parade down the National Mall to mark the army’s 250th anniversary on Saturday – which also happens to be the day Donald Trump turns 79.
“I think it’s time for us to celebrate a little bit. You know, we’ve had a lot of victories,” the president said earlier this week. “It is my birthday, but I’m not celebrating my birthday,” he acknowledged, instead pointing to the Flag Day holiday that also takes place on Saturday.
The more than 700,000 residents of the nation’s capital are used to seeing their monuments and streets commandeered by politicians, including Trump, who convened thousands of people on the White House ellipse on January 6 in 2021, some of whom went on to attack the Capitol.
The military parade is scheduled to last only a handful of hours, but busy roads nearby will be closed for up to four days, and Ronald Reagan Washington National airport will suspend flights for an unspecified amount of time during the event. Parading dozens of M1A2 Abrams tanks and other armored vehicles down city streets built to carry vehicles a little more than half their weight may also leave the city with hefty repair bills to deal with.
The parade has also made Washington DC the second US city to which Trump has deployed soldiers, albeit for very different reasons. In recent days, he has ordered federalized California national guard troops and US marines on to the streets of Los Angeles over the objections of state and city leaders, saying their presence is necessary to allow immigration authorities to arrest undocumented people. The deployment has sparked fears he plans to regularly use the military against his domestic enemies.
The spectacle in Washington DC will be the first military parade since 1991, when George HW Bush greeted troops after the Gulf war. According to the army, the parade will proceed for eight blocks down Constitution Avenue Northwest, beginning at the Lincoln Memorial and ending just past the White House.
Any protesters, Trump has warned: “will be met with very heavy force”.
Washington DC is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the federal district’s non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives, Eleanor Holmes Norton, has blasted the event as “a performative military parade in the style of authoritarian leaders” that “will not serve any legitimate purpose”.
Muriel Bowser, the Democratic mayor who appears to have a cordial relationship with Trump, has avoided similar criticism, instead emphasizing her administration’s preparations to handle crowds that the Secret Service estimates could climb into the hundreds of thousands.
“There’s going to be a parade aspect, but don’t lose sight of the fact that a lot of people served in the army. A lot of families, a lot of people are into aircraft and other equipment,” she told reporters last month.
As for the potential of tanks tearing up city streets, Bowser said: “I remain concerned about it, I have to tell you. These are, for the most part, local streets, and if they’re rendered unusable, we have to make them usable and then go seek our money from the feds.” A city spokesman declined further comment.
An army spokesperson, Heather J Hagan, said the entire parade would cost between $25m and $45m. While the army anticipates “minimal damage to roads”, she said tanks would be fitted with rubber pads and one-inch thick steel plates will be placed “strategically” on the route “as a precautionary measure”. She declined to comment on who would pay for damages to city infrastructure.
Advisory neighborhood commissioners, who are elected to represent chunks of Washington DC’s eight wards, have been comparatively outspoken against the event. This week, commissioners representing part of Capitol Hill approved a resolution calling military parades “more typical of authoritarian governments than of democracies” and urging its cancellation.
Jim Malec, an advisory neighborhood commissioner who represents part of the Foggy Bottom neighborhood near the parade route, said its preparations have already created “significant disruptions”, and noted the procession will take place not far from where the city cleared homeless encampments at Trump’s urging earlier this year.
“I think it’s appalling that we’re spending $45m on a parade after kicking out, from that same area, the people who are the most vulnerable residents of our neighborhood,” he said.
Washington DC has repeatedly been knocked by Trump and his Republican allies since he returned to the White House. His campaign to thin the ranks of federal workers by coaxing them to resign or outright firing them has prompted concerns about an economic downturn in the city and surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs.
Meanwhile, Republican majorities in Congress have set about meddling in the federal district’s affairs, which is allowed by the law. This week, the House passed bills to stop noncitizens from voting in local elections, undo a prohibition on the police union bargaining over disciplinary matters, and prevent its administration from not cooperating with immigration authorities. The chamber’s leaders also have yet to schedule a vote on legislation to undo a $1bn cut to the city’s budget they made earlier this year.
Samuel Port, a former army logistics officer living in a Maryland suburb adjacent to the capital who recently lost his contracting job when the Trump administration moved to close the US Agency for International Development (USAID) , said his experience with tanks leaves him in no doubt that they will tear up roads on their drive through the city. And their engines, he predicted, will make anyone who comes near them unpleasantly hot on a day where the National Weather Service predicts a high of 88F (31C) , in addition to spewing plenty of pollution into the air.
“I do think it’s important and necessary to celebrate important things involving the history of the military and veterans in general,” Port said.
“Trump is using this as an excuse to benefit and to prop up himself up for his birthday. And by doing that he not only politicizes the military in that way to support him and his ego, but also it really demeans the soldiers as well, because it’s using them as a political prop.”
