Donald Trump Plans $45M Military Parade for 79th Birthday

Donald Trump turns 79, and he wants to spend his birthday with a 45-million military parade. The celebration, which will cost about 2 million dollars, is planned to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, 25 tanks will roll down the streets of Washington D.C., and military helicopters and jets will thunder across the skies. It will also include a daytime festival on the National Mall and an evening parade, concert and fireworks.

Journalist and Trump biographer Michael Wolff told The Daily Beast Podcast, “Although he has been going around the White House, there’s a big fear that nobody’s gonna turn out for this parade.”

“I mean, you’re gonna have the military down the street and nobody there watching it. So they’re now trying to make sure people get out. They’re trying to bus in the Trump base.”

• Trump plans $45M military parade with tanks, jets, and fireworks.
• Concerns over low crowd turnout despite Trump’s high expectations.
• White House denies Michael Wolff’s claims, calling them false.

It is a household fact that Trump is obsessed with the size of crowds, and this has defined a significant part of his life in the limelight. Whether it was his combustible demands that his 2017 inauguration attracted more people than that of Barack Obama, or his exaggerated claims of rally attendance (his 2024 claim of 100,000 people attending a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was actually 24,000). Trump has a long history of defining political success in terms of raw bodies.

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“He’s setting expectations for this, which is like, you know, there’s going to be a million people,” Wolff added. “I mean, it’s Trump numbers. So two things will happen. He’ll be furious that the crowds are sparse, and then he’ll announce that the crowds are unprecedented in size.”

Particularly, The Daily Beast noted that GOP lawmakers uses personal needs as an excuse to miss the event, such as moving residences and watching college athletics events to attending the Paris Air Show. One even chimed in as joking that they were avoiding  trouble by staying away.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung dialled down Wolff's claim as a lie, saying, “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s**t and has been proven to be a fraud.”

“He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”