A crash was not the only thing that I worried about. Acts of low-level domestic terrorism and random shootings take place routinely in this country, and although security at the parade would be tight, I wondered what the chance was of some sort of attack on the parade-goers, or even another attempt on Trump’s life. The probability seemed low, but considering the number of veterans who would be in attendance, I had occasion to recall a 2023 study that found that military service is the single strongest predictor of whether an American will commit a mass killing. (...)
Then there were the politics of the parade, the first procession of military forces past the White House since the end of the Gulf War. For weeks, opinion columnists and television pundits had been sounding the alarm over the controversial festivities, which they saw as another sign of America’s downward slide into authoritarianism, into fascism. Comparisons abounded to Mussolini’s Italy, Pinochet’s Chile, and Hitler’s Germany. A coalition of opposition groups had organized a day of protests under the slogan “No Kings,” and that morning, in thousands of cities across the United States, millions of demonstrators were assembling, waving signs that said things like stop fascism, resist fascism, and no to trump’s fascist military parade.
I was no more thrilled than they were about the idea of tanks and armored vehicles rolling down Constitution Avenue. Trump’s accelerationist instincts, the zeal of his fan base, and the complicity, cowardice, and inaction of the Democratic Party in the face of the governing Republican trifecta made the possibility of a military dictatorship in the United States seem borderline plausible. But in a reminder that Trump is not wildly popular with the electorate so much as unopposed by any effective political counterweight, groups of foreign tourists predominated among the parade’s early arrivals.
The first people I met in the surprisingly short line to pass through the security checkpoint were an affable pair of fun-loving Europeans. Jelena, a Slovenian, had come in hopes of meeting a husband. “If someone’s going to marry me,” she explained with a laugh, “it will be a Republican man.” Liberals were too elitist for her: “Democrats will ask what school I went to.” Her high-spirited wingman, a Bulgarian named Slavko, was drinking beer out of a plastic cup at eleven o’clock in the morning. He had come “to get fucking drunk and high all day long,” he told me, “and just hang out.”
There were a number of Trump voters in line, but they seemed muted, even reasonable, in their political views, far from the legions of MAGA faithful I had expected to encounter. David and Sandra Clark, a middle-aged couple from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, were divided in their opinions of the president. Sandra was not a fan, she said, and David described himself as a “marginal” Trump supporter. They had come to observe the Army’s semiquincentennial, a “momentous occasion,” he said. The day before, Israel had bombed Iran, opening yet another front in the apartheid state’s war against its Muslim neighbors, and the Clarks were concerned about the situation. “It seems like it could get out of hand,” he said. “I’m here to see the protesters,” Sandra put in. “I may join them.”
A few of the attendees trickling in had on red hats that said trump 2028 or make iran great again, but these slogans somehow lacked their intended provocative effect. I looked out over the Mall, where the second-rate exhibits that the Army had set up made a mockery of the parade’s $30 million price tag. Was this supposed to be a show of American military might? (...)
By midday, the heat was ungodly. Not a drop of the predicted rain fell, and not a breeze blew. Near a much-needed water station was an exhibit of military first-aid kits manned by a delegation from Fort Bragg’s 44th Medical Brigade, which recently saw three of its current or former soldiers convicted of federal drug-trafficking charges related to a racket smuggling ketamine out of Cameroon. After hydrating, I watched the 3rd Infantry Regiment, a ceremonial unit known as the Old Guard, spin and toss their rifles and bayonets to a smattering of languorous applause from a small crowd of South Asian tourists, aging veterans, and subdued MAGA fans.
What kind of fascism was this? Rather than the authoritarian spectacle that liberals had anticipated, the festivities seemed to be more a demonstration of political fatigue and civic apathy. And if Trump intended the parade to be an advertisement of America’s military strength, it would instead prove to be an inadvertent display of the armed forces’ creeping decrepitude, low morale, shrinking size, obsolescence, and dysfunction. (...)
During the speech, Trump touted his proposed trillion-dollar defense budget, taunted the reporters in attendance, warned of hordes of immigrants coming from “the Congo in Africa,” denounced the protesters in Los Angeles as “animals,” ridiculed transgender people, and promised the troops a pay raise, even as he repeatedly strayed from his prepared remarks to praise the good looks of handsome service members who caught his eye. “For two and a half centuries, our soldiers have marched into the raging fires of battle and obliterated America’s enemies,” Trump told the crowd. “Our Army has smashed foreign empires, humbled kings, toppled tyrants, and hunted terrorist savages through the very gates of hell,” he said. “They all fear us. And we have the greatest force anywhere on earth.” (...)
In point of fact, the modern American military is a much weaker and more debilitated force than Trump’s braggadocio, and the Defense Department’s gargantuan spending habits, might suggest. The United States has either failed to achieve its stated aims in, or outright lost, every major war it has waged since 1945—with the arguable exception of the Gulf War—and it only seems to be getting less effective as defense expenditures continue to rise. You don’t need to look back to U.S. defeats in Iraq or Afghanistan, much less Vietnam, to illustrate this point. Just one month before Trump’s parade, in May, our armed forces suffered a humiliating loss against a tiny but fearless adversary in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world.
The Houthi rebels, also known as Ansar Allah, have been defying the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel ever since they first emerged as a military force in 2004 protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the quisling Yemeni regime’s collaboration with the Bush Administration. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the Houthis, who had endured nearly a decade of starvation under a U.S.-backed Saudi blockade of their ports, tried to force Israel and its allies to lift the siege of Gaza by using their scrappy speedboat navy and homemade arsenal of cheaply manufactured missiles, drones, and unmanned underwater vehicles to choke off maritime traffic in the Red Sea. In response, the Biden Administration, invoking the threat posed by the Houthis to freedom of navigation, launched a wave of air strikes on Yemen and dispatched a naval fleet to reopen the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The campaign did not go well. A pair of Navy SEALs drowned while attempting to board a Houthi dhow, and the crew of the USS Gettysburg accidentally shot down an F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet after it took off from the USS Harry S. Truman, one of America’s premier aircraft carriers, which a short time later collided with an Egyptian merchant ship.
In January of this year, Trump declared the Houthis a terrorist organization and doubled down on Biden’s war. The administration replaced the commander of the Gettysburg and augmented U.S. assets in the region with another aircraft-carrier strike group, which costs $6.5 million a day to operate; B-2 bombers, which cost $90,000 per flight hour; and antimissile interceptors, which can cost $2.7 million apiece. In the span of a few weeks in March and April, the United States launched hundreds of air strikes on Yemen. The tough, ingenious (and dirt-poor) Houthis, protected by Yemen’s mountainous interior, fought back with the tenacity of drug-resistant microbes. They downed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Reaper drones; nearly managed to shoot several F-16s and an F-35 out of the sky; and evaded air defenses to strike Israel with long-range drones, all the while continuing to harass commercial shipping in the Red Sea, which plummeted by 60 percent.
On April 28, American warplanes struck a migrant detention center in the northern Yemeni city of Sadah, then dropped more bombs on emergency workers who arrived in the aftermath. Sixty-eight people were killed. In retaliation, the Houthis launched a fusillade of ballistic missiles at the Truman, which turned tail and steamed away, causing another Super Hornet to slide off the deck into the ocean.
The loss of a second $67 million fighter jet was evidently a turning point for President Trump. In one month, the United States had used up much of its stockpile of guided missiles and lost a number of aircraft but failed to establish air superiority over a country with a per capita GDP one sixth the size of Haiti’s. To avoid further embarrassment, Trump officials declared Operation Rough Rider a success and ordered U.S. Central Command to “pause” operations, effectively capitulating to the Houthis. “We hit them very hard and they had a great ability to withstand punishment,” Trump conceded. “You could say there was a lot of bravery there.” The very same day, yet another $67 million Super Hornet slipped off the deck of the Truman and sank to the bottom of the sea. (...)
At last it was time for the parade. The thin crowd, which hadn’t thickened much over the course of the day, filtered through a secondary security checkpoint and took up positions along Constitution Avenue, angling for spots in the shade. I saw a woman changing a baby’s diaper at the base of a tree, and a shirtless old man in a cavalry hat standing atop an overflowing garbage can. With the sun still high in the sky at six o’clock, the heat had barely relented. Smoke from a wildfire in New Jersey had turned the overcast sky a dirty brown.
On the north side of the street, in front of the White House, a covered stage had been set up for the reviewing party, protected by bulletproof glass and flanked by tanks below. First to take his seat was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, a “serial entrepreneur and investor,” according to his Air Force biography. The secretary of defense, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, came out shortly after, wearing a blue suit and camouflage tie, followed by Vice President J. D. Vance, who garnered scattered claps and whistles from the crowd. More-enthusiastic applause greeted President Trump’s appearance onstage, accompanied by a jarring blast of trumpets, but the cheering was still rather sedate. First Lady Melania Trump stood beside him, looking down at the crowd with cold contempt. The whole perverse regime was onstage, including Kristi Noem and Marco Rubio. Seeing them seated there in such close proximity, I found myself wondering how long-range those Houthi drones really are.
Trump voters know just as well as the rest of us that the terror wars were a mistake. We all know that they were based on lies. We are all well aware that our side lost, and that the defeats were costly, and indeed ruinous. We are going to keep starting new wars anyway, and losing them too. As President Biden said last year of his administration’s air strikes on Yemen: “Are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”
This isn’t a sign of ascendant fascism so much as the nadir of late-stage capitalism, which depends on forever wars to juice corporate profits at a time of falling rates of return on investment. In its doddering senescence, the capitalist war machine is no less murderous than fascism was—witness the millions of Muslims killed by the United States and Israel since 2001—but it has considerably lower production values. In this soft dystopia, our military forces will not be destroyed in a cataclysmic confrontation with the armies of Communism, as befell Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. Instead, the defense oligarchs who own Congress will go on pocketing the money allocated to the military, just as they have been for the past forty years, until nothing is left but a hollow shell, a shrinking and sclerotic military so debilitated by graft, suicides, overdoses, and violent crime that it’s incapable of fulfilling its mission, and suitable only for use in theatrical deployments at home beating up protesters and rounding up migrants and the homeless.
Mustering the last of my morale, I trudged back to Constitution Avenue and took my place among the remaining parade-goers. One of the last formations to march past was an Army weapons-testing platoon accompanied by a number of small quadcopter drones. Quadcopters like these have proved pivotal in Ukraine, but the United States hardly makes any. China can churn out an estimated hundred cheap, disposable drones for every one produced in America. In an effort to close the gap, Pete Hegseth has announced new initiatives to boost domestic manufacturing of the devices, but early results have not been promising. A recent report in the New York Times described an exercise in Alaska in which defense contractors and soldiers tested prototypes of U.S.-built “one-way” kamikaze drones with results so dismal they were almost comical. None of the tests described were successful. The drones failed to launch or missed their targets. One crashed into a mountain.
The quadcopters hovering over the testing platoon at the rear of the parade were the X10D model made by Skydio, the largest U.S. drone manufacturer. Not long ago, Skydio transitioned its business from consumer to military and police drones, targeting markets in Ukraine, Israel, and elsewhere. After Skydio sold drones to Taiwan, Beijing retaliated last year by cutting off the company’s access to Chinese batteries, prompting the company to ration them to only one per drone. I noticed that one of the Skydio quadcopters hovering over the parade had dropped out of view. I couldn’t see where it had gone. Then one of the soldiers in the testing platoon marched past, holding it up over his head, make-believing that it was still aloft.
