The real reason Donald Trump just called off his military parade
This evening the Department of Defense announced that Donald Trump’s military parade, which had been scheduled for November of this year, has now been officially “postponed” until 2019. That’s a nice way of saying that it’s been called off and will never happen. This is remarkable development, considering that Trump could have made the parade happen without needing Congressional funding approval; the decision to pull the plug is entirely his. So what’s really happening here?
There appear to be multiple things at play. For starters, the ABC News is reporting that the American Legion came out publicly against the parade, stating that it would rather see the roughly hundred million dollars go to help military veterans instead. But Donald Trump rarely listens to veterans groups whenever he decides to try to use the military to make himself look patriotic, so there has to be more to it.
That brings us to the timing of the parade. Donald Trump had long wanted this parade to take place four days after the congressional elections. At the time, he must have thought that the election results were going to work out in his favor, and that the military parade would have served as a coronation of his expanded authoritarian power. Trump would have looked asinine if he held this parade just a few days after the Democratic Party took control of Congress with the intention of impeaching him.
So it’s fair to conclude that this parade is being called off because there is every indication that Donald Trump and his party are going to fare very poorly in the November elections. Trump may not be able to grasp that reality, but certainly his handlers know it. They may have used the American Legion statement as a way of convincing Trump to pull the plug, but the upshot here is that this is a sign that Team Trump expects the GOP to get wiped out in the midterms. Now voters just have to get out there and make it happen.
