I Went to Trump’s Military Parade. Everything About It Was Wrong.

In May 1865, the national government threw itself a parade. It had been more than a month since the rebellion in defense of slavery was finally put down. It had been more than a month since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln shook the feeling of triumph. The national government wanted that feeling back.

Each day of the so-called Grand Review was designated to honor the different Union armies who had won the war. May 23 was given over to the Army of the Potomac which, after suffering from bungling generals, had coalesced under the leadership of Ulysses S. Grant into the fighting force that had trapped and defeated Robert E. Lee. The next day honored the Armies of the West—the Army of Tennessee and the Army of Georgia. These men had broken the Confederate forces at Franklin and Nashville, and at Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. They were the men who, with General William T. Sherman, had captured Atlanta and then marched to the sea, as Sherman put it, while making Georgia howl.

At 9:00 a.m., a gun fired and the Army of the Potomac stepped off. At the head of the Fifth Corps was General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, one of the heroes of Gettysburg, and he recalled how his men had shined themselves up for the occasion.

“In my command we were well aware of quite an anxiety among officers and men of the army to generally to look their very best, and more, too, on this occasion; for new uniforms, sashes, epaulettes, saddle housings, and other gay trappings, almost disguised some of our hardiest veterans, who were not insensible to the new orders of spectators before whom they were now to pass their ordeal.”

Enlivening the proceedings, and doubtlessly pleasing himself, General George Armstrong Custer rode wildly up and down the parade route. One observer recalled:

“Conspicuous among the division commanders was Custer. His long golden locks floating in the wind, his low-cut collar, his crimson necktie, and his buckskin breeches, presented a combination which made him look half general and half scout, and gave him a daredevil appearance which singled him out for general remark and applause.”

And a correspondent from The New York Times seemed quite take by Custer’s well-crafted elan.

Custer rode a powerful horse [named Don Juan], restive, and at times ungovernable. When near the Treasury Department, the animal madly dashed forward to the head of the line. The General vainly attempted to check his course, and at the same time endeavoring to retain the weight of flowers which had previously been placed upon him. In the flight, the General lost his hat. He finally conquered his horse and rejoined his column. Passing the President’s stand, he made a low bow, and was applauded by the multitude. Which, I suspect, was the whole point.

Chamberlain received a wreath of flowers, flummoxing his horse, which had been shot out from under him a few times over the previous four years. But professor of rhetoric that he was, he came closest to the heart of things when he thought about marching with these troops for the last time.

“The flag of the First Division, the red cross on its battle-stained white, sways aloft; the hand of its young bearer trembling with his trust, more than on storm-swept fields. Now they move—all—ten thousand hearts knitted together. Up the avenue, into that vast arena, bright with color—flowers, garlands, ribbons, flags, and flecked with deeper tones ... Around us and above, murmurs, lightnings, and thunders of greetings ... These were my men, and those who followed were familiar and dear. They belonged to me, and I to them, by bonds birth cannot create nor death sever. More were passing here than the personages on the stand could see. But to me so seeing, what a review, how great, how far, how near! It was as the morning of the resurrection.”

The next day belonged to Sherman and his men and, to most observers, the contrast with the shined-up troopers of the day before couldn’t have been more startling. Sherman’s men refused, quite reasonably, to buy new uniforms for one day when they were all going home anyway. Also, they hadn't been paid in months. General Henry Slocum described the result:

“The crowd quickly began comparing these soldiers to those who marched the day before. Sherman had less artillery and very little of his cavalry while Meade’s army had only part of its infantry. The Western men were taller, with fewer boys and scarcely any foreigners. Their stride was about six inches longer – more of a left-and-right-and-left-and-right-and-left—yet they stepped in unison. Their yellow and red beards and light hair were worn long. One could not distinguish officers from men, except by their uniforms. Eastern men wore the close-fitting skull cap [kepis]; the Western men the soft slouch hat. The Easterners were exact, prim and stiff; the Westerners easy, carefree, independent and pioneerish.”

The Grand Review celebrated the Union’s victory over the Confederacy.

As a matter of fact, there was considerable tension between the Western men and their Eastern counterparts. In the huge camps in which the armies were bivouacked along the Potomac, Chamberlain recalled that, “There seemed to be a settled dislike to us, blatant at least, among Sherman’s men. In a certain class their manner was contemptuous and bullying.”

On both days, the armies stopped and saluted the president of the United States, who was not Abraham Lincoln. He was Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee Democrat who’d replaced Hannibal Hamlin as part of a national “unity” ticket. Nobody knew at the time that Johnson would do so much to undermine the “new birth of freedom” that his late predecessor had proclaimed at the Gettysburg burying ground. In the crowd, however, Walt Whitman watched both days and, being a poet, he saw beyond the trappings of the Grand Review to its hidden and undeniable costs. There is something about military parades. Their noise and bustle can conceal a great deal, good and bad. Whitman sat down to write about that.

It wasn’t his best work but, then again, Whitman was still feeling the effects of the two years he spent working in wartime hospitals during the Civil War, treating the dead and dying, trying to comfort men with horrific injuries. So, when he watched the big parades in May 1865, he saw behind the grand processions, a shadow army.

(Pass, pass, ye proud brigades, with your tramping sinewy legs,

With your shoulders young and strong, with your knapsacks and your muskets;

How elate I stood and watch’d you, where starting off you march’d,

Pass-then rattle drums again,

For an army heaves in sights, O another gathering army,

Swarming, trailing on the rear, O you dread accruing army,

O you regiments so piteous, with your mortal diarrhoea, with your fever,

O my land’s maim’d darlings, with the plenteous bloody bandage and the crutch,

Lo, your pallid army follows.)

But on these days of brightness,

On the far-stretching beauteous landscape, the roads and lanes, the high-piled farm-wagons, and the fruits and barns,

Should the dead intrude?

One thing this wasn’t, was a day of brightness.

I remember when parades used to be fun—bands, bunting, some big Army boom-booms for the kids to cheer over, every high school bandmaster doing their best Robert Preston cosplay. I remember when they were ceremonies of communal joy. You could mark your calendar by them. Homecoming parades. Veterans Day, which was Armistice Day when I was very young. Macy’s and Gimbel’s and Hudson’s on TV every Thanksgiving and the Rose Parade on TV for New Year’s. Memorial Day. The Fourth of July. All of them were supposed to honor something or someone, provided you could see past the cotton candy.

And then there was this leaden spectacle on Saturday, June 14.

I have never experienced such a joyless, lifeless, and sterile mass event in my entire life. Grim-faced soldiers, marching past half-empty grandstands, many of them obviously wanting to be somewhere else. No bands. Little bunting. Just piped-in rock music and MAGA hats. If this truly was meant to honor the 250 years of the United States Army, all we got was an endless procession of uniformed troops looking like they’d prefer to have been at Valley Forge. The president, sitting on the reviewing stand in that weird, forward-leaning attitude that he has, rarely smiling, a skunk at his own garden party. Scores of people being funneled through cattle-runs of metal grates just for a chance to sit on the lawn of the Washington Monument and listen to bad music and speeches so dull and listless that they’d have made Demosthenes get out of the business and open an olive oil stand. I think there probably was more good feeling and genuine emotion when they took Jack Kennedy out to Arlington for the last time.

Of course, history being on its game these days, the context elsewhere spun the event completely out of control. War seems to be breaking out in the Middle East. Some maniac dressed as a cop tried to decapitate the Democratic leadership of the Minnesota state legislature and came damn close to doing it. In Virginia, another maniac drove an SUV into a ‘No Kings’ protest. This occasioned another spate of both-sides thumb-sucking on “political violence” while the chief instigator leaned forward in his chair in Washington and looked blankly at another couple of tanks.

‘No Kings’ protests occurred across the U.S. on Saturday.

But it was the ‘No Kings’ project that must have stung him the most deeply. A lot of the people waiting in line were watching on their phones, watching the coverage of the No Kings marches all around the country. Now, those were parades—laughter and singing and chanting and people in goofy costumes and exotic hair-colors, thousands of them, big cities and small towns. The streets were jammed with people celebrating the hope that this Grand Guignol period of our national life will pass one day. There was no hope in the streets of Washington. Just tanks and cannons and soldiers marching in dead-eyed cadence.

Eventually, the president had to make a speech to the sparse crowd that littered the lawn around Washington’s great obelisk. He was obviously exhausted. Spending the day as the national Bad Fairy at your own party is hard work for a man of his advanced age. He began:

“Thank you very much everybody. And thank you to Vice President Vance. Thank you to our wonderful first lady. And above all thank you to the greatest, fiercest, and bravest fighting force ever to stride the face of this earth, the United States Army. Thank you very much. Because the army keeps us free. You make us strong. And tonight, you have made all Americans very proud, they’re watching from all over the world, actually, made them all very proud. Every other country celebrates their victories. It’s about time America did, too. That’s what we’re doing tonight.”

Wait, I thought America didn’t “celebrate its victories” until he thought up this dreary spectacle? What about the Grand Review? What about the victory parades in Washington, New York, Boston, and dozens of other places after the Armistice was signed in 1918? What about the spontaneous bursts of street theater that greeted V.E. Day and then V.J. Day. What about half the monuments around him on that very National Mall? How did he think we got “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” when the men will cheer and the boys will shout and the ladies, they will all turn out? Weird lyric, that. Hell, even our walkover win against Spain in 1898 got a grand parade of warships up the North River in New York.

Nevertheless, the speech ground on, flotsam against the current. He stuck largely to the text, which seemed to owe a lot to Wikipedia and sounded like it had been written eleven minutes before the president took to the microphone. He gave a shout-out to Revolutionary War General “Mad Anthony” Wayne, and he chose a Creighton Abrams quote from the Battle of the Bulge rather than General Anthony McAuliffe’s classic, ”Nuts,” which is a choice, I guess. Much of the rest of the address was an exercise in the president’s lascivious use of violent verbs.

“The U.S. Army has driven bayonets into the heart of sinister empires, crushed the ambitions of evil tyrants beneath the treads of American tanks. ... Time and again, America’s enemies have learned that, if you threaten the American people, our soldiers are coming for you, your defeat will be certain, your demise will be final, and your demise will be total and complete.”

Somebody has to step up and take the G.I. Joe action figures away from the gang in the speechwriting shop.

And, in any case, what enemies is this guy talking about? Schoolteachers and nannies? Gardeners and construction workers? Inconvenient members of Congress? He’s got the Marines out there in Los Angeles, rousting anyone with brown skin and a name ending in ‘z.’ All that brutal B-movie dialogue had to be aimed at something beyond boring the living daylights out of a crowd suffering from heat stroke. I think it was a taste of what’s coming, or what he hopes is coming.

At any rate, the fireworks were pretty cool.

Before the parade, I was sitting in Lafayette Park across from the White House, not far from the spot where the president once gassed peaceful protestors so that he could hold a Bible upside down outside a church. I fell into conversation with a man from Maine named John Collins. He was wearing a vintage Solidarnosc T-shirt, the symbol of the great movement in Poland, led by Lech Walesa, that began with a labor dispute on the docks of Gdansk and, with the help of the West and a certain cleric from Krakow named Karol Wojtyla, struck the first mighty blow that cracked the implacable Iron Curtain.

“I was working on a boat on the inland lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin,” Collins said. “This was in 1982, and the skipper went out and bought us all these shirts. I guess he was woke. Everybody was woke back then.”

Walesa. Havel in Czechoslovakia. The singing revolutionaries in Estonia who supercharged the movement to free the Baltic countries. The Pan-European Picnic Monument jail break in Hungary, when several hundred East Germans broke through the gates and dashed into Austria while the guards did nothing. The fall of the Berlin Wall. And, finally, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. It seemed to happen overnight.

Trump stood on stage to address the sparse crowd at Saturday’s parade.

Yet, on Saturday, a president threw himself a parade despite the fact that he has marked the United States lousy the world over, but especially in Europe, where Ukraine is hanging on by its fingernails, and a kleptocratic Russian imperialist, with whom the president has proven far too chummy, has his hungry eyes set on eastern Europe. The effect of parceling out the ironies and the hypocrisies was deadening to the soul, so my thoughts once again wandered back to the Grand Review, whose participants had won actual victories on American soil and were cheered on through the streets of Washington by hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Back then, Walt Whitman’s shadow army marched behind the troops, whispering like the slave in a Roman triumph that no victory is permanent, and that sacrifice can be rendered vain decades down the line. On Saturday, this shadow army of the national conscience did not follow to the rear of the parade. It marched right in step.