The media has focused on the price tag and potholes. But history may mark 14 June as the ceremonial birth of US fascism
In 2017, watching a two-hour Bastille Day procession, Donald Trump told the French president that we’d have one too, only better. That time, the grown-ups said no. The reasons given were costs – estimates ran to $92m – hellish logistics, and the Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser’s worried that tanks and other armored vehicles would tear up Washington’s streets.
Some retired generals objected publicly to the totalitarian-adjacent optics, especially given the US president’s praise for such bad actors as Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin. Several Republican lawmakers also expressed their distaste. “Confidence is silent, and insecurity is loud,” the Louisiana senator John Kennedy told MSNBC. “America is the most powerful country in all of human history … and we don’t need to show it off. We’re not North Korea. We’re not Russia, we’re not China,” he continued, “and I don’t wanna be.”
