Trump’s Big Parade

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The New York Sun

Suddenly the new cause celebre of the Democrats is opposition to the idea of honoring our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen on the Fourth of July. President Trump says he was inspired to have such a salute by the Bastille Day parade that he watched in July at Paris as a guest of President Macron. “It was one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Trump told reporters.

Yet the idea of holding something similar seems to horrify the left. Joe Scarborough spent much of his show this morning trying to palm off on his noble viewers the idea that such a parade would be “deeply un-American.” He went so far as to suggest that Mr. Trump lacked for standing because he had deferments while “brave men and women were getting shot at and killed in Vietnam.”

The Washington Post, which broke the parade story, caviled that “big military parades” — even “with the best of intentions” — posed “risks” and carried “troublesome historical echoes.” It suggested that American presidents have “avoided displays of military hardware that are more associated in the American mind with the Soviet Union’s Red Square celebrations or, more recently, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s efforts to show off his Taepodong missiles.”

Huh? How a march of American GIs down Pennsylvania Avenue, even with tanks and missiles behind them, could provoke association with the communistic tyrants is beyond us. A White House official rejected such an association, saying, according to the Washington Post dispatch, the march would be a “celebration of the men and women who give us freedom.” Said the official: “That’s the opposite of a totalitarian government.”

Democrats on the Hill started grousing about the parade the minute it hit the wires. “I was stunned by it,” CNN quoted Congresswoman Jackie Speier as saying. Senator Bernie Sanders asserted that what Mr. Trump “should have learned from France is about their health care system.” Senator Durbin called such a parade a “colossal waste of funds that should be spent to make sure our troops are ready for battle.”

It’s doubly dismaying to hear such talk because it has lately seemed as if our country was coming together in respect of our veterans. President Obama made a point of trying to rectify the shame of America having overlooked the veterans of Vietnam. At Arlington six years ago, Mr. Obama called the failure to honor our Vietnam veterans a “national shame, a disgrace that should never have happened.” It was a terrific thing he did.

Harvard University’s president, Drew Faust, the Civil War historian who brought ROTC back to Cambridge, went so far as to make a public bow to West Point. Citing a Gallup poll, Mrs. Faust told the Cadets that the military is “the last institution in which Americans have high confidence. Not organized religion, not government, not newspapers, not banks — you. You and all you represent.” She added: “We need you, now more than ever.”

Surely that is the spirit in which President Trump is planning a parade in Washington. He is trying to rebuild our military. He is trying to maintain morale, at all levels of the military, in the middle of a long, twilight struggle that, like the Cold War, could go on for years more than we had hoped. He is, on top of everything else, the constitutional commander-in-chief, installed in that office by an overwhelming vote in the electoral college.

Do the Democrats really want to go into the November by-election having opposed a parade to honor our GIs and veterans? The truth is that such parades are as American as apple pie, celebrated in, among other places, “The Music Man,” in which the lyrics to “76 Trombones” sing of “horse platoons” and “fifty mounted cannon.” Donald Trump is sometimes likened to the con-person in “The Music Man,” Harold Hill. The thing for the Democrats to remember is that River City embraced him in the end.


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