Bottom line: The military parade is a costly and self-aggrandizing authoritarian display that exposes the ways Trump is harming the very communities he’s sworn to protect.

A Would-Be Dictator’s Dream

• In the United States, military parades have primarily marked the ends of large wars and the subsequent safe return of servicemembers. Trump’s parade breaks that tradition.
• Billed as a tribute to the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, June 14th was going to be a low-key affair until Trump took office and decided that his birthday needed a parade.
• From Mussolini to today’s despots, a leader rolling tanks and troops in front of cameras and the public is a feature of authoritarian governments, meant to showcase dominance and instill fear, not pride.
• Autocrats also put soldiers in the streets – as Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth are unlawfully doing this week in California to intimidate protesters and support deportation operations.

A “Big, Brutal” Budget Bill

• Creating a trillion-dollar police state is not patriotic. It’s directly at odds with maintaining a functioning democracy and protecting citizens’ rights to life, free speech, assembly, protest, and ability to engage safely with the state.
• If enacted, that bill would enact sweeping tax breaks for billionaires and cut Medicaid and SNAP for millions of Americans, the largest attack to the social safety net in decades. That’s 2 million children and 56 thousand families with veterans going hungry.
• The bill also contains $150 billion in additional Pentagon spending, including $25 billion for the President’s misguided “Golden Dome” missile shield, $34 billion for new warships, and $14 billion for the development of autonomous weapons.
• The House-passed bill also contains well over $100 billion for Trump’s cruel mass deportation campaign, including $45 billion for new immigration detention centers and $27 billion for arrest operations – the same kinds of raids on homes and workplaces that are currently terrorizing communities across the United States. 

Trump’s Trillion Dollar Target

Waste doesn’t stop with the Big, Brutal Bill. The army parade will be a stark reminder of our misplaced national priorities – how we can spend more on our military than the next nine countries combined, even as we gut public health, education, and basic services.

• The United States already spends $895 billion a year on war, waste, and defense contractor profits at the Pentagon – significantly higher than any other agency in the discretionary budget.
• President Trump and Secretary Hegseth are jointly pushing to increase that to more than $1 trillion annually. And corporate defense contractors will get roughly 50% of that money.
• Despite its infamy for cost overruns and administrative waste, the Pentagon has never passed an audit.
• Yet Elon Musk’s DOGE has prioritized targeting programs at the Pentagon that made the military more inclusive, including initiatives to support women and minority groups in the armed forces, instead of the real and rampant waste, fraud and abuse swirling from the Pentagon’s spigot.
• $45 million for a birthday parade may seem like couch change compared to a trillion-dollar budget, but even the trade-offs for that amount are staggering. In lieu of a military parade, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that $45 million could provide:
  • School lunches for more than 14 million high school students.
  • A year of Medicaid coverage for almost 6,000 eligible people
  • A year of subsidized housing assistance for 4,500 Georgia households
  • A year of disability compensation for more than 7,200 military veterans
  • A year of SNAP food assistance for nearly 17,700 people

Oppose the Propaganda Parade