Trump military parade was always a really bad idea

On Thursday night, the Pentagon said that it was shelving the much-ballyhooed military parade in Washington -- until at least next year. On Friday morning, President Donald Trump tried to explain why.

"The local politicians who run Washington, D.C. (poorly) know a windfall when they see it. When asked to give us a price for holding a great celebratory military parade, they wanted a number so ridiculously high that I cancelled it," he tweeted. "Never let someone hold you up! I will instead attend the big parade already scheduled at Andrews Air Force Base on a different dates & go to the Paris parade, celebrating the end of the War, on November 11th.

Maybe we will do something next year in D.C. when the cost comes WAY DOWN. Now we can buy some more jet fighters!"

Which, um, probably not.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser tweeted a response to that effect. "Yup, I'm Muriel Bowser, mayor of Washington DC, the local politician who finally got thru to the reality star in the White House with the realities ($21.6M) of parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America (sad)," she said. (The total cost of the parade was estimated at $92 million, roughly $80 million more than original estimates, according to several news outlets.)

Here's the thing: This military parade has been a very bad idea since Trump first conceived of it. What he's doing now is using a scapegoat that he knows will work with his base -- bad local government in an overwhelmingly Democratic city -- to get out from under something that was fundamentally unworkable -- and unpopular!

The idea of the military parade was almost immediately panned by, well, almost everyone not named Donald Trump.

"I think confidence is silent and insecurity is loud," Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy said. "America is the most powerful country in all of human history; you don't need to show it off."

Mark Hertling, a retired Army general and a CNN contributor, added: "We're the only nation in the world that defends a piece of paper. An ideology. And to say we're going to strut our stuff with tanks and rocket launchers and things like that, is just not a good representation of what the military does in a democratic nation."

A Quinnipiac University poll released in February showed that just 26% of the public approved of the military parade while 61% disapproved. Told that the cost of the parade was estimated to be between $10 and $30 million, the public was even less interested in the parade. Just 18% said that expenditure was a good use of government dollars; 75% said it was a bad way to spend federal dollars.

To put a fine point on it: The military parade idea was an albatross from the start. The "rah rah" patriotism Trump thought he could gin up with it wasn't building, and the costs -- as they always do when you are talking about massive movements of our military -- were going through the roof.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/17/politics/parade-trump/index.html