Trump Plans $92 Million Military Parade—Honoring Himself

Donald Trump may finally get his long-desired military parade through the streets of Washington. 

The Washington City Paper, citing an unnamed D.C. source, reports that the president has chosen June 14, 2025—the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army,  Flag Day, and coincidentally also his own 79th birthday—as the big day. If it goes ahead, the four-mile procession would go from the Pentagon in Arlington to the White House.

Seven years ago, Trump made his desire for a grand military parade well known after he saw a French parade in 2017, telling people at the time, “We’re going to have to try and top it.” But the idea got a lot of pushback from military leaders as well the D.C. government, who estimated that it would cost the military $92 million and the district over $21 million in public safety costs. 

Trump angrily abandoned the idea, accusing D.C. politicians of wanting “a number so ridiculously high that I canceled it. Never let someone hold you up!” At the time, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser shot down the idea on Twitter, saying she “finally got thru to the reality star in the White House with the realities ($21.6M) of parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America (sad).”

This time, though, Trump has overhauled military leadership, firing four-star Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as leaders in the Navy and Air Force,  including the top lawyers of those two branches and the Army. The legal firings presumably give Trump loyalists who would defend his parade if it is challenged in the courts. 

As far as D.C. leadership, Bowser and the rest of the D.C. government appear to be cowed by the administration out of fear that Trump will follow through on threats to take over the local government. Bowser chose to remove a Black Lives Matter memorial to appease administration officials and has stepped up the removal of graffiti and homeless encampments following Trump’s complaints. 

Trump has also set up a federal task force on D.C. crime fighting that does not include a single local official, indicating that he plans to keep interfering with how the city runs. That will now include a massively wasteful parade for his own ego, spending millions of dollars from both local and federal coffers despite claims that his administration is eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Will anyone push back against it this time?

60 Minutes’ Cecelia Vega on Sunday confirmed what anyone who’s been paying attention already suspected: An overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan men that Trump deported to a Salvadoran megaprison have no criminal record whatsoever. Yet the president continues to call them Tren de Aragua gang members and terrorists to legitimize his invoking of the Alien Enemies Act.

60 Minutes was able to get access to government records of the Venezuelans and compare them to domestic and international arrest records and court filings. The news program reported that they “could not find criminal records for 75 percent of the Venezuelans—179 men—now sitting in prison.” Less than a quarter have an arrest record in the U.S., and they are mostly for nonviolent offenses. This proves that the Trump administration is carrying out its cruelty campaign indiscriminately—if you’re a South American immigrant with tattoos, you could find yourself in Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s infamous megaprison with a shaved head and without a day in court. 

The Trump administration told 60 Minutes that it were wrong and that the 179 men truly are “actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more. They just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”

“Could it be possible that there is something that perhaps the government knows that you don’t?’ Vega asked Lindsay Toczylowski, the lawyer representing Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist and theatre troupe member who was deported to the megaprison.  

“I don’t think that that is possible,” Toczylowski replied. “But if it was possible that they had some information, they should follow the Constitution, present that information, give us the ability to reply to it.” 

But the Trump administration is fighting tooth and nail to avoid doing that, even invoking the State Secrets Act to keep proof of its illegal disappearings in the shadows. There is no timeline for freedom for the many innocent Venezuelan men sitting in one of the world’s most brutal prisons.

Donald Trump loves the idea of deporting American citizens to El Salvador—no, seriously he said that.

A reporter asked Trump Sunday whether he was considering an offer from El Savador President Nayib Bukele to “take American citizens in the federal prison population.”

“Well, I love that,” Trump replied.

“If we could take some of our twenty-time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head, and purposefully run people over in cars, uh if he would take them, I would be honored to give them,” Trump continued.

“I don’t know what the law says on that, but I can’t imagine the law would say anything different,” Trump said, claiming that it could likely save the U.S. money to house their prisoners in El Salvador. In fact, the law does say something different: It is illegal to deport U.S. citizens.

“I would only do according to the law,” Trump said. “But I have suggested that, you know, ‘Why should it stop just at people who cross the border illegally?’”

There are significant legal barriers to the deportation of U.S. citizens, even if they are incarcerated in the federal prison system. One legal expert told ABC News that removal to El Salvador could violate the Eighth Amendment protection from “cruel and unusual punishment,” which prevents the U.S. government from inflicting humiliating or torturous punishments for federal crimes.

U.S. Code 3621 requires an incarcerated person in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons to be able to be transported back to court—which obviously would be impossible if the prisoner is removed from U.S. custody to El Salvador, where the U.S. government is already claiming that it cannot remove a man wrongfully deported there. It also requires certain standards for prisons, which cannot be met in a foreign prison such as El Salvador’s CECOT, which is notorious for human rights abuses.

U.S. Code 4100, which established the Prisoner Transfer Program, says that an incarcerated person can only be transferred out of the U.S. to the country where they are a citizen or national, and can only be removed from the U.S. with their consent. A U.S. citizen can only be transferred to the United States.

The U.S. also has a law prohibiting the government “from expelling, extraditing, or otherwise effecting the involuntary return of a person to a country in which there are reasonable grounds for believing the person would be in danger of subjection to torture,” which one federal judge has already argued could apply to all removals to the notorious prison in El Salvador where Trump has sent deportees.

In February, when Bukele first offered to take U.S. citizens as part of a deal to take the alleged gang members the U.S. government has designated terrorists, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it was a “very generous” offer but that there were “obviously legalities involved,” like that pesky U.S. Constitution.

Meanwhile, Trump was initially enthusiastic about the idea.

“These are sick people. If we could get them out of our country, we have other countries that would take him. They could,” Trump said at the time.

At the time, Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, rebuked Bukele’s offer in a post on X: “Bukele is undoubtedly trolling, but to emphasize again: this is so incredibly illegal that there’s not even a hint of possible way to do it under any circumstances whatsoever. It violates international law and the U.S. constitution. Period. End of story.”

But the Trump administration hasn’t seemed particularly interested in following the letter of the law, as it invoked a wartime law to suspend due process and carry out the mass deportation of over 100 Venezuelan nationals in likely violation of a court order. The government claimed that the deportees were members of violent gangs, but it seems that several of them just had innocuous tattoos.

This story has been updated.

Elon Musk spent the weekend pushing for a “zero-tariff situation,” while his favorite president causes widespread economic uncertainty and dread doing the exact opposite.

“I’m hopeful, for example, with the tariffs, that at the end of the day I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free-trade zone between Europe and North America,” Musk said on a video call on Saturday. “That’s what I hope occurs. And also, more freedom of people to move between Europe and North America if they wish to work in Europe, if they wish to work in America, they should be allowed to do so in my view. So that has certainly been my advice to the president.”

Musk also posted a clip of conservative economist Milton Friedman explaining the many steps that go into making a simple pencil—wood, graphite, steel—describing the global import and export market as a “magic of the price system.”

“That is why the operation of the free market is so essential,” Friedman continued in the clip. “Not only to promote productive efficiency but, even more, to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.”

“Free-trade zones” and economic peace and harmony are perhaps the lowest current priority for the Trump administration. His unprecedented trade war has caused the stock market to plummet, will surely cause prices on goods everywhere to skyrocket, and has made the United States a common economic enemy of the world, uniting countries with centuries of beef against us. This is not what the world’s richest man signed up for, and Musk’s subtweets suggest that there is disharmony between himself and the president. Combine this with the fact that Musk has lost $52 billion just this year and the rumors of him stepping away—which the administration vehemently denies—and it becomes plain to see that all is not right between Musk and Trump. The honeymoon is officially over.

On Monday morning, Donald Trump seemed to be celebrating even as the global stock market continued to plunge. 

The president boasted on his Truth Social page of low oil prices, lower food prices, and of “Billions of Dollars a week from the abusing countries on Tariffs,” despite the tide of bad news from Dow futures, the S&P 500, and indexes across Europe and Asia resulting in a $9.5 trillion wipeout in global equity value.

After Trump’s baseline 10 percent tariff went into effect on Saturday, a market sell-off quickly ensued. When asked about it on Sunday, the president said, “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” claiming that such measures were needed to address the trade deficit with China. 

“We have to solve our trade deficit with China,” Trump said to reporters on Air Force One. “We have a trillion-dollar trade deficit with China; hundreds of billions of dollars a year we lose with China. And unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal.”

Meanwhile, the dollar is sliding while the euro is gaining value and stocks from construction equipment giant Caterpillar to Elon Musk’s Tesla are struggling. Trump’s tariffs have even soured his relationship with close ally Musk, who spent the weekend attacking administration officials including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and adviser Peter Navarro. 

It seems that the president is ignoring all of the indications of an insanely bad policy, even lashing out at a reporter who asked if there’s “pain in the market at some point you’re unwilling to tolerate,” calling her question “stupid.” The real question is how much pain the American people, as well as Trump’s Republican allies and supporters, are willing to tolerate.