Trump’s Fourth Of July Was ‘Second Rate Red Square Rally’

A British journalist has blasted President Donald Trump’s ‘Salute to America’. The event to mark the Fourth of July suffered heavy rain and featured tanks that didn’t move. The President delivered a non-partisan speech that failed to make many positive headlines.

And this could all have been a blockbuster Hollywood remake of a European classic – if he’d gotten his own way,” journalist David Maclean wrote in The Independent.

“Instead, after reported resistance to a full-scale military showcase from senior aides, this felt at times like a straight-to-DVD version of a Red Square parade.”

“There were no legions of troops, no tanks rolling down the Mall, and some of the war machines that did end up on display – like the M4 Sherman – last appeared on the battlefield for the US in the 1950s.”

Trump was widely mocked for saying Sherman tanks would come to DC but the museum pieces were on display, despite the reportedly high cost of transporting them. Reporters on the scene also said that crowds could barely see the tanks as they were behind fencing.

Maclean’s Soviet comparison isn’t a new one: since Trump suggested a military parade in 2017, critics have contrasted it with military displays in the former Soviet Union or present day North Korea. Trump’s claim that the American revolutionaries seized airports has become another major takeaway.

But Maclean ends his article with an anecdote about a Democrat who attended the event.

“‘The last time there was a military parade in DC was Bush senior in 1991,” he told a friend. “And he lost the election the next year.”‘