In a sweltering capital threatened by storms, the traditional Fourth of July parade Thursday served as a warm-up act to a distinctly nontraditional evening event at the Lincoln Memorial, where President Donald Trump made plans to command the stage against the backdrop of a show of military muscle.
Protesters unimpressed by his “Salute to America” program inflated a roly-poly balloon depicting Trump as an angry, diaper-clad baby.
Under White House direction, the Pentagon was arranging for an Air Force B-2 stealth bomber and other warplanes to conduct flyovers. There will be Navy F-35 and F-18 fighter jets, the Navy Blue Angels aerobatics team, Army and Coast Guard helicopters and Marine V-22 Ospreys. A small number of Army Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles were stationed in the zone.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, walking Thursday morning in the 4th on 53rd Parade in Hyde Park, joined the chorus of voices opposed to Trump’s planned celebration.
“It should not be politicized under any circumstances. So I’m disappointed that the president has chosen to do that,” Lightfoot said. “It’s a waste of resources to have tanks and other resources that the (National) Park Service had to divert. It’s not the thing that should be happening when reflecting on the great values that we have as Americans.”
In a Chicago protest against President Donald Trump on the eve of Independence Day, a group of activists drove around Chicago’s downtown shining anti-Trump messages on several of the city’s iconic buildings.
The first stop was the Trump International Hotel and Tower, where the “roving band of activists,” as they called themselves, used professional lighting equipment to display their group’s logo and five messages: “Immigrants are welcome here,” “Impeach Trump,” “Trump is not above the law,” “Love & Resist” and “No Trumped-Up War.”
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“When we saw what Trump was doing on the National Mall, we were like we have to do something here,” said Marj Halperin, one of the organizers with the group Indivisible Chicago.
About a dozen members gathered around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday on Wacker Drive across the Chicago River from Trump Tower. The first message — shining out of two high-powered lights loaded onto the back of a pickup truck — hit the side of the building a few minutes before 9 p.m. Though the group wanted to wait until after sunset, the messages weren’t fully visible because it wasn’t yet completely dark outside.
A few minutes later, a pair of Chicago police officers directed the protesters to get on the move, telling them they weren’t allowed to park on Wacker Drive.
From there, the group loaded up into three cars and drove around downtown, making a series of stops that included Daley Plaza, the Chicago Theatre, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field office, the Dirksen Federal Building and the Magnificent Mile. They circled back to Trump Tower by 10:20 p.m.
Halperin said the protest was just planned in the past couple weeks after Indivisible Chicago leaders learned about the president’s plans to include tanks and flyovers in Washington, D.C.’s holiday celebration event.
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With his decision to add his own production to the usual festivities, Trump set himself up to be the first president in nearly seven decades to address a crowd at the National Mall on Independence Day. “I will speak on behalf of our great Country!” he said in a morning tweet. “Perhaps even Air Force One will do a low & loud sprint over the crowd.”
But thunderstorms threatened, with periods of “torrential rain” forecast by the National Weather Service and a flash-flood watch in effect.
Not since 1951, when President Harry Truman spoke before a large gathering on the Washington Monument grounds to mark the 175th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, has a commander in chief made an Independence Day speech to a sizable crowd on the Mall. Protests erupted in 1970 when President Richard Nixon taped a message that was played to crowds on the Mall at an “Honor America Day” celebration organized by supporters.
In the shadow of the Washington Monument, the anti-war organization Codepink erected a 20-foot tall “Trump baby” balloon to protest what it called the president’s co-opting of Independence Day.
“We think that he is making this about himself and it’s really a campaign rally,” said Medea Benjamin, the organization’s co-director. “We think that he’s a big baby. ... He’s erratic, he’s prone to tantrums, he doesn’t understand the consequences of his actions. And so this is a great symbol of how we feel about our president.”
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In a message marking the 243rd anniversary of the Founding Fathers’ adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Trump called the document a milestone that “cast off the shackles of tyranny.”
The White House said Trump would speak at the Lincoln Memorial in front of a ticket-only, VIP crowd of Republican donors, administration and campaign officials, family members and those who had come to see him or protest what they saw as a divisive intrusion on a traditionally unifying national holiday.
Trump had sounded a defensive note Wednesday, tweeting that the cost “will be very little compared to what it is worth.”
“We own the planes, we have the pilots, the airport is right next door (Andrews), all we need is the fuel,” he said, referring to Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews, home for some of the planes expected for the holiday flyover. “We own the tanks and all. Fireworks are donated by two of the greats.”
Trump glossed over the expense of shipping tanks and fighting vehicles to Washington by rail and guarding them for several days, and other costs.
Two groups, the National Parks Conservation Foundation and Democracy Forward, want the Interior Department’s internal watchdog to investigate what they say may be a “potentially unlawful decision to divert” national parks money to Trump’s “spectacle.”
Trump and the event’s organizers could be on the hook to reimburse the government millions of dollars if he goes into campaign mode, in violation of federal appropriations law and the Hatch Act, which bars politicking on government time, said Walter Shaub, who left the Office of Government Ethics in 2017 after clashing with the White House over ethics and disclosure issues.
Trump originally wanted a parade with military tanks and other machinery rolling through downtown Washington ever since he was enthralled by a two-hour procession of French military tanks and fighter jets in Paris on Bastille Day in July 2017 .
Later that year Trump said he’d have a similar parade in Washington on the Fourth of July, 2018, and would “top” the Paris show. The event ended up being pushed to Veterans Day, which conflicted with one of Trump’s trips abroad, before it was scuttled after cost estimates exceeding $90 million were made public.
Washington has held an Independence Day celebration for decades, featuring a parade along Constitution Avenue, a concert on the Capitol lawn with music by the National Symphony Orchestra and fireworks beginning at dusk near the Washington Monument.
Trump altered the lineup by adding his speech, moving the fireworks closer to the Lincoln Memorial and summoning the tanks and warplanes.
