06/15/2025
Around the capital before Saturday, people mused about whether Donald Trump’s long-desired Army-anniversary parade—which cost $45 million and coincided with the President’s 79th birthday—would be something like Tiananmen Square. In other cities, a series of “No Kings” protests were scheduled for the same day. 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 by a gunman impersonating a police officer, according to officials.
But as Antonia Hitchens stood in the crowd with teen-agers in period garb, in D.C., the city had the “eerie, abandoned feel it gets before big staged events,” she writes. The occasional pedicab driver rode down the empty downtown streets, cordoned off from traffic by D.C. trash trucks. Tanks that had arrived from around the country had been sitting idly on the Mall for a few days; a summer thunderstorm was now threatening to rain out the President’s parade. An ad on Craigslist circulated, offering a “flat fee of $1,000 paid in cryptocurrency” to seat fillers in red hats and gold accessories “for space maximization and attendance.”
A friend of Hitchens, who grew up in East Germany, said that the scariest thing she saw was a robot dog, at an Army fair that had taken place earlier in the day. “This was nothing like the military parade that I experienced every year until the fall of the wall, in 1989,” she said. The sparse crowds for Trump’s parade were charming to her—you can offer to pay people on Craigslist, but, in the U.S., you can’t force them to attend. Even most Republican lawmakers sat the event out. Read more: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/PedqEh
