Phorm Energy Screamin’ Freedom

The line to get into the Army Birthday Festival on Saturday afternoon began a few blocks from the US Capitol, where police had arrested about sixty people the previous day at a veterans’ protest against the planned military parade. Attendees filed past a black flag reading “January 6th was an inside job,” a conspiracy theory that has at times been endorsed by President Donald Trump and his supporters. As we inched toward the security checkpoint a man with a bullhorn and a sign that said “REPENT” warned of the coming Antichrist and prayed for our souls. 

Just as I was about to pass through the metal detector, a woman from the antiwar group Code Pink with a keffiyeh wrapped around her waist handed me a flier that read “For 1% of the Pentagon Budget, we pay $9.21 billion in taxes.” It listed how many teachers that sum could fund (94,889) and how much health care it could provide (according to the group’s calculations, it would cover 3.2 million low-income children or 541,736 veterans). When she tried to hand the same flier to the man standing behind me, a military dog handler stationed at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, he stared at her silently, then turned to his companion and muttered, “Doesn’t she know her audience?” 

The festival, held on the National Mall in honor of the US Army’s 250th anniversary, had the feel of an arms expo combined with a military recruitment fair. A howitzer stood near the entrance, manned by maroon berets from the army’s airborne force. At the camouflaged tent of the 75th Ranger Regiment—the storied Army Rangers—people lined up to hoist a Carl-Gustaf M4 multi-role weapon system over their shoulder and to try on combat vests and helmets. Kids in Make America Great Again hats clambered inside assault helicopters; a circle formed around two automated Boston Dynamics robot dogs that were trotting in place. Spectators climbed on top of Stryker combat vehicles or took turns holding guns equipped with Smartshooter systems that are designed to “significantly enhance lethality and user survivability.” 

Several drones were on display: the Anduril Ghost-X, the Performance Drone Works C100, and the AeroVironment Switchblade “suicide drone,” which the Biden administration shipped by the hundreds to Ukraine for use against Russian tanks. The hulking mass of Bell Textron’s new MV-75 assault aircraft, which will soon replace the army’s Black Hawk fleet in a program that could reportedly cost up to $70 billion, was sheltered under a white tent. The Boeing tent was empty, as was that of the Texas military contractor King & George, LLC; the Northrop Grumman tent showcased chain guns and ammunition. “Got to keep our troops safe,” the woman staffing it explained. 

There were “Trump 2028” hats, “Gulf of America” T-shirts, beauty queens in plastic tiaras. Most local protests took place outside the festival grounds, well beyond the downtown security perimeter set up ahead of the parade, which was scheduled to begin at 6:30 that evening. But a few protesters turned up on the mall all the same. One woman, wearing a sandwich board that said “TRUMP Unfit to Serve in Vietnam, Unfit to Serve Now; Happy 250th Birthday Army,” told me she had taken a train from Vermont to be there. Tim Pohle, a lawyer from Bethesda, told me that he felt he had no choice but to show up and express his dissent. “I’m sixty years old. This is the first time in my life I’ve protested anything,” he told me. “The idea that the military is arresting our own citizens—and being turned against us—I thought it was really important to come out and protest this…. A military parade is un-American.” 

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By late afternoon people had begun slowly moving toward the parade route along Constitution Avenue, passing through a checkpoint and then wandering toward the Washington Monument. The heat was intense and storm clouds hung low overhead; soldiers handed out plastic water bottles and cans of blueberry-flavored “Phorm Energy Screamin’ Freedom” drinks. Surveillance teams stationed on top of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian Castle kept watch over the crowd. Young men in light blue polo shirts embroidered with the words “Team Trump” directed attendees with special guest passes toward bleacher seats with unobstructed views.

It happened to be President Trump’s seventy-ninth birthday, though the overlap between that occasion and the parade, he told reporters last week, was strictly a coincidence. A group of four women in yellow “Happy Birthday” shirts sat in the shade with their children; when I asked them whose birthday they were there to celebrate they pointed to the word “ARMY” printed on their backs. “But also, you know, all of it,” one said. 

A lone protester, dressed in a red cape and white bonnet in the style of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, knelt on the ground, her mouth gagged and hands bound and a QR code taped to her back. “She’s one of those Stepford wives,” a woman in a camo MAGA hat told me. We struck up a conversation, and she told me she was a D.C. native who had come out that day because “I love a good parade, and I think it’s incredible. I’m a full supporter of the military…and I think it’s kind of neat that it just happens to be also when President Trump has his birthday.” (She declined to give her name for fear of being doxxed online.) She said she was annoyed that people had complained about the cost of the military parade, but not about the cost of rebuilding cities after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. 

Christopher Bice, a retired contractor who had traveled from New York for the parade, expressed a similar sentiment. “I’m a patriot, mostly because my relatives had been in the service. My father came back from Korea with no fingers,” he said. “I am just disgusted with the, I hate to say it, left side of the country. It’s almost like they want to give the country away…. I just want to witness something nice, something celebratory about the US.” He said that “the amount of money they spent on this is minuscule compared to the amount of money that is being spent on illegals in the country. I’m not making this up, and I have a funny feeling you might feel differently.” 

Joe Rodriguez, from San Antonio, told me he was there because he has about eighteen family members in the armed forces; every day, he told me, he regrets that he himself never served. “I’m here for that and for President Trump’s birthday as well. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. We aren’t going to be here in 250 years, for the 500th.” Michael and Mary Jo, a married couple who met while serving in the army over three decades ago (he was a military policeman, she worked on a missile launch system), told me they were there to support the military. “I know it’s his birthday. But I think it needed to be done. I served for twenty-two years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Michael said. He wore a veteran’s cap that had belonged to Mary Jo’s father, who died last year. They were sad that their son, who lives in D.C., had refused to join them at the parade because he did not want to express support for the president. 

As we spoke, the 4th Infantry Division from Fort Carson, Colorado, marched by in blue Civil War–era uniforms. The parade had begun early in an attempt to beat a forecast thunderstorm. When Trump first appeared, welcomed by a twenty-one-gun salute, the crowd cheered. The last time there was a military parade in Washington was in 1991, a “victory celebration” to mark the end of the Gulf War. Trump had said that this parade, too, was intended to celebrate American victories, by which he seemed to mean all of them, across time. Spectators pressed against the barriers to get a better glimpse of each formation; uniformed soldiers in the crowd watched as their colleagues passed by. Online, critics remarked that some of the units were not marching in lockstep and speculated about whether that was a form of protest. On the ground, no one appeared to notice or care. 

The parade was choreographed to present an abbreviated history of the military, starting with the Revolutionary War and running all the way to the “global war on terror” and beyond. “It’s a very historic moment in US history. We haven’t had a military parade in a very long time,” Zach, a twenty-three-year-old from New York who declined to give his last name, told me. His twenty-nine-year-old friend Amanda, wearing a red hat emblazoned with the words “Trump was right about everything,” told me that the president had correctly described “how horrible the Democrat party is, and all the lying and scheming that was going on behind the scenes that we really don’t know about.” 

Whatever else it might be, a military parade is always a reminder of how readily the armed forces can be deployed both at home and abroad. In the days before the parade, national guardsmen and marines outfitted in uniforms similar to the ones on display in D.C. had been deployed by the president against civilian protesters in Los Angeles. The marines briefly detained one person—a veteran who had become a US citizen as a result of his military service. In the days following the January 6 riot in Washington in 2021, military vehicles guarded the perimeter around the vandalized Capitol building. According to NPR, about one in five defendants in January 6 legal cases was a military veteran. But unlike that day there was no audible vitriol in the crowd, no anger or violence. They had won: the parade may have been the army’s celebration, but it was also a victory lap for Trump and his supporters. At 6:20 PM the US Army Parachute Team, the Golden Knights, tumbled out of the sky ahead of schedule, red smoke grenades tracing their paths down to earth.