I purposefully held off writing anything until now because none of it happened. None of the apocalyptic predictions came true even a little bit. We had protests, we had a parade, and then on Monday morning we all went back to work or school. The panic was simply because of the left’s unnatural desire to hyperinflate anything Trump does into the republic’s endgame to get those endorphins pumping. Time passing shows it best.
In Hawaii, many of the signs read “One King, No Dictator” at the “No Kings” anti-Trump protest. That’s because here the extreme left are still protesting the late 19th century overthrow of the beloved Hawaiian monarchy by the United States. They do want a king—just not Trump. That was the broad theme; maybe we do need to do something about immigration, but just not Trump’s way. But unless Trump left office between the time I’m writing this and the time you are reading it about 10 days later, you can see how well all those signs worked out. Same for the MSM commentary on the protests and their evil twin, the Washington DC military parade.
It was supposed to be a big weekend, the one for “No Kings” day. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) had just been wrestled out of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristie Noem’s press conference; this was called a “red line for democracy.” ICE and the Marines were on the streets of LA, and everyone knew the next step was a hair’s breadth away: martial law, Insurrection Act, suspension of habeas corpus, all that.
But the kicker was the military parade in Washington, on Trump’s birthday and, it turns out, J.D. Vance’s wedding anniversary (which nobody had on their conspiracy bingo card). That was trumpeted as the end of democracy in America itself. Pundits claimed the tanks would take up positions around the White House after the parade to enforce a coup, leaving Trump sole dictator. The parade was a ruse ahead of, again, martial law, and at the very least a sign of the increasing politicization of our military: the crowning of Trump as its authoritarian leader, like Putin and Kim Jong Un, and, of course, Adolf Hitler.
Back to those “No Kings” protests. The crowd I saw was well behaved, and the nearby cops looked bored. An interesting twist from earlier protests was the replacement of pro-gay signs with pro-transgender signs, with their extra rainbow-flag stripes. Gay has become passé (never mind BLM)—just that newly married couple down the street—and despite the attempts by Pride-month organizers to whip up anti-Trump sentiment, nobody seemed to care. Same with abortion; when Roe went away we were told so many horrible things would happen, but it seems like they got the scale all wrong, and it is yesterday’s protest topic.
So now the meme is something about transgender people, seemingly centered on the one real thing Trump did to them, push them out of the military. You’d think this affected tens of thousands of people based on the protest crowd’s zeal. In reality, the number of trans troops is far lower than estimates by advocates, which ran up to 14,000 people. The Defense Department said actually 4,240 service members, or only about 0.2 percent of those in uniform, have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Some of them may not even like the military and are satisfied to get out early. Nobody in the protest crowd seemed to care, because a great bad thing by Trump had been done, and thus democracy was at risk. More than one person warned me that after Trump was done with the trans people he might come after me. They all knew that poem.
The sun was very hot the day of the protest, and things broke up early.
The military parade was a complete failure, as democracy survived. Not one TV commentator I heard mentioned the inspiration for the thing was Trump attending a Bastille Day military parade in France, a democracy equally proud of its martial past. Instead the comparisons were all to Russia and China and North Korea and of course, the Nazis. The problem was that we did not have a Nazi parade. Our soldiers, instead of paying tribute to the leader, mugged for the cameras, waved at kids from atop tanks, and otherwise stuck to marching, somewhat out of step. They are our sons and brothers, not stormtroopers. If anything the parade was boring; the cameras caught Secretary of State Marco Rubio yawning, Melania appearing to fall asleep at one point, and Trump looking more tired than dictatorial.
Afterwards the tanks went back to wherever they came from with habeas intact. The whole affair looked much like a super-sized version of what you’d see on the Fourth of July in many towns, albeit without the local high school marching band and the mayor waving from an open car. The roads in Washington, DC even looked like they survived in decent shape; the mainstream media, desperate to find things to criticize, warned for weeks that armored vehicles would tear up the asphalt and stick the taxpayers with a big repair bill.
That is the whole point of this belated commentary on the protests and parade. None of what the mainstream media told you was going to happen happened. Not even close. It just took a bit of time to see clearly that their end-of-the-world predictions were, in retrospect, just wrong. Same as happened during Trump 1.0, when we were constantly warned of the Third World War, told that America had reached its Reichstag moment, bombarded with messages about Russiagate, the Pee Tape, and so on.
It seems like only yesterday the New York Times wrote that the point of the military spectacle was to “generate footage of tanks massed on the streets in numbers more often seen in countries where a coup is underway” and to “create optics that support his claim that public dissent constitutes an existential threat to the nation. He also apparently seeks to get the American public used to seeing our armed forces in a new light…. Rather, it should be viewed as an institution that serves at the behest of a leader and his ideological and political agendas.” Branching off to sweep in ICE doing its job in L.A., the Times explained Trump was “flooding our screens with images that habituate us to a new reality of federalized state militia members standing opposite civilian protesters.”
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The ever-skittish Washington Post writer Jonathan Capehart took to “neutral” PBS to fearmonger about the insidious plan behind Trump’s actions in L.A. and Washington:
I think they’re creating the political conflict because — I interviewed Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison in the run-up to the anniversary, the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. And he [Ellison] brought up on his own the rumor that the president was going to pardon Derek Chauvin. And the attorney general said that the president might do that as a distraction to larger goals. And one of the larger goals that the attorney general mentioned that has always been in the back of my mind is to create the conditions that would allow the president to invoke the Insurrection Act. And once the president invokes the Insurrection Act, all sorts of powers are handed to the president, you know, suspending elections, and other things…. That is among the reasons why I am so concerned about what we’re about to see tomorrow [the parade].
Trump did not pardon Floyd’s killer Derek Chauvin, did not invoke the Insurrection Act, and did not cancel any elections as Capehart had been given a national platform to proclaim. There was just a parade. By now the Democrats and the mainstream media have mostly moved on from the stories and end-of-world scenarios listed above and are focused on new stories and end-of-world scenarios that will prove equally as false and empty. Read them now as you would read them in a couple of weeks, after the fact, and see how silly it all sounds.
