Trump’s Birthday Parade and Stopping the End Run

Yes, this is photoshopped.
But it wouldn’t be funny if it weren’t close to the truth.

Curmie’s father played football in high school.  One of his favorite stories of that time nearly a century ago was about the end of the big rivalry game.  His team was down by four points as time was running out.  They did get the ball back, though, so they weren’t out of the game yet, even if they needed a touchdown and had 80 yards or so to get to the endzone.

That’s when the coach told them to run an end run, with Curmie’s dad and his cousin as the lead blockers, on literally every play until the other team stopped them for less than four yards.  A dozen or so plays later, they scored what turned out to be the winning touchdown with about a minute left on the clock.  If a play works, use it again.

Almost exactly five years ago, on Juneteenth, 2020—we’re talking peak COVID time—President Trump held a rally in Tulsa.  As usual, he crowed about the huge number of ticket requests… but the actual turnout left two thirds of the seats empty.  How did that happen?  Well, it was a combination: utter incompetence by whatever staffers were assigned front-of-house duties, and a bit of fun from Tik-Tok Teens and K-Pop Stans, who apparently ordered hundreds of thousands of free tickets they never had any intention of using. 

Curmie wrote about the story at the time.  Of course, having actually done some house management, Curmie also enumerated several different ways of preventing embarrassing situations like this.  Always the educator, is Curmie.  But Curmie had always been blessed by students who could out-think a kumquat.  Not so, this time.

By now, Gentle Reader, you’ve figured out what this essay is about—the paltry turnout for Trump’s most recent vanity project, that absurd parade—and what those first two paragraphs were about: the TikTok-ers are baaaaaaack, using precisely the same scheme as they’d used in Tulsa.

Curmie doesn’t approve of the subterfuge, but he does chuckle at the apparent inability of Trump to hire anyone whose name isn’t Stormy Daniels who is even remotely competent at their job.  Folks who say they’re from Canada or Australia or wherever claim to have gone online and ordered multiple tickets, some of them under crude or ironic names.  Oops, they couldn’t go.  Some of the confessions may be fake, and one might suspect that inclement weather may have affected turnout to some degree, but there is no question that the parade was not merely costly and boring, but also under-attended. 

Exact numbers for the turnout are impossible, of course, but Barbara Comstock posted that Newsmax, which makes Fox News look like leftist propaganda (that’s Curmie’s description, not hers), estimated about 10,000 attendees; she then added that the parade was “a huge waste of our military $$$ when the world is on fire…”  Curmie tried but failed to confirm Newsmax’s reporting, but Comstock is a former Republican Congresscritter, so she’d be unlikely to misrepresent the right-wing press. 

The place was damned near empty.  Asmodeus Naggoob posted on X that “AOC and Bernie would draw more people with thumb wrestling alone, lol.”  Part of that is, no doubt, attributable to… erm… running the same play until the other guys stop it.

But apparently the organizers’ incompetence stretched well beyond their amply demonstrated inability to learn anything from the Tulsa debacle.  Amanda Moore posted, “The marketing material said the entrance was on 14, but in reality it was on 12 St and you had to go through this pen for two blocks. Everyone who was around to answer questions was an asshole, too. Probably part of the issue!”  There are a host of other comments about poor planning and lack of crowd management.  Starting early to avoid thunderstorms also complicated things: it’s understandable and indeed appropriate in terms of safety, but problematic logistically because apparently some people didn’t make it through the barricades until the parade was over. 

That may have worked out OK for the prospective parade-goers, as the event itself was apparently a world-class snoozefest.  Numerous photos and videos show Trump and most of the people around him nodding off or nearly doing so. 

But let’s get one thing straight about that parade.  No one objects to recognizing the manifold contributions the Army and the other branches of the military have made to this country’s welfare, and having a celebration on the 250^th anniversary of the founding of the Continental Army seems an entirely appropriate time to do so.  We might not approve of everything the military has done, but that is almost never the fault of the troops themselves.  And there are still some vets out there who were on the front lines against actual Nazis: anyone who disrespects them will have Curmie to deal with. 

The ceremonies planned by the Biden administration were pretty much what the occasion called for, but, being pathologically incapable of doing otherwise, Trump turned the event into a vulgar, expensive (estimates just to repair damage to the streets from running tanks over them run to $12,000,000), narcissistic display that was one part cheap theme park and two parts North Korea.  This wasn’t a celebration of the anniversary that happened to fall on Trump’s birthday; it was a birthday celebration of Trump that used a coincidence to pretend it wasn’t really a tacky glorification of Dear Leader.  

It was in recognition of what was about to happen in DC that the day was chosen for the nation-wide “No Kings” protests, which organizers say attracted over 13 million participants.  Curmie is not so naïve that he believes that number without a raised eyebrow, but even the most conservative estimates put the turnout at or near eight figures.  The ratio of protesters to parade-goers is probably somewhere around 1000:1.

Part of that is because the Trump administration couldn’t stop the end run.  In either sense of the term.