'Sh** show': 'No Kings Protest' crowd outshadows Trump's $45 million lavish military parade
On Saturday, US President Donald Trump held a hideously expensive military parade in Washington, D.C., on his birthday. Social media mocked Trump's military parade, marking the 250th anniversary of the US Army. The footage showed the American troops marching sloppily, without any coordination, in front of a tiny crowd as the president saluted every walking contingent.
Even as social media users mocked Trump's military parade, the US President deemed his dollar military birthday parade a 'tremendous success' Sunday, despite it being dwarfed by the thousands protesting against his presidency on the same day. While speaking to reporters on his way to Canada for the G7 summit, Trump heaped praises on the parade.
'Last night was a tremendous success with a fantastic audience,' Trump told reporters. 'It was supposed to rain, they gave it a 100% chance of rain and it didn't rain at all. It was beautiful.'
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'And so I asked, if they gave it a 100% chance, right? 100% it was going to rain like crazy—and it didn't rain at all—how do they predict 100 years out? And 50 years out or 200 years out?' he continued. 'They didn't do too well the weather people last night, but it was beautiful.'
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Was Trump's military parade a flop?
Even though an exact number of attendees has yet to be released, crowd figures were considerably lower than the 250,000-plus total White House Communications Director Steven Cheung touted on X Saturday, according to MSNBC and the Associated Press. 'Just the eye of any individual who is here on the ground or looking at images or video knows that there were not 250,000 people,' reporter Vaughn Hillyard, who was at the scene, told the hosts of MSNBC's The Weekend on Sunday.
Footage from the event also showed sparse crowds. The crowd at the Trump's military parade was comparatively smaller to the thousands who marched in the 'No Kings' demonstrations across the country on the same day, reports Daily Beast.
Data journalist G. Elliot Morris estimated that 'roughly 4-6m people' joined the 2,000-plus 'No Kings' demonstrations, which protested against Trump's policies, potentially making it one of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history.
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Social media users were not impressed by the celebrations and questioned if the soldiers had willingly decided not to turn up for the event.
"This was a sh*t show. Recruits in bootcamp can march in formation better than this," wrote one user, while another added: "Even NCC Cadets in India perform better parade marches than the superpower America."
A third commented: "Can't believe how underwhelming all the footage of America's military parade is. 250 year anniversary for the world's biggest military and they get troops trotting along out of sync, isolated tanks rolling through to complete silence, small crowd, no cool displays of precision marching or cool tech, and lame country music to cap it off. Embarrassing."
A different user wrote, 'HAHAHA! The crowd for Trump's birthday parade is TINY! They claimed 200,000 people would show up and it doesn't even look like 1,000 showed up. How embarrassing for MAGA! No Kings blew this out of the water!!!'
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No Kings Protest in US
Protests against President Donald Trump have taken place in towns and cities across the US in a coordinated event titled "No Kings". Lawmakers, union leaders and activists gave speeches in cities including New York, Philadelphia and Houston to crowds waving American flags and placards critical of Trump.
Tens of thousands marched peacefully in Philadelphia, where organizers were holding their main event, police said. Philadelphia was chosen as the hub, because "there's an indelible link between Philadelphia and between the freedoms and the ideals that the country was founded upon," said Joel Payne, spokesperson for MoveOn, one of the dozens of groups behind the No Kings protests.
Organisers of the 'No Kings' demonstrations said millions had marched in hundreds of events. Governors across the US had urged calm and vowed no tolerance for violence, while some mobilised the National Guard ahead of marchers gathering. The demonstrations come on the heels of the protests over the federal immigration enforcement raids that began last week and Trump ordering the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, where protesters blocked a freeway and set cars on fire.
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