The 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army is being celebrated today with a massive parade. There are events planned throughout the day in Washington, DC, but the parade is scheduled to kick off at 6:30 p.m. EST.
President Donald Trump said of the event, “For two and a half centuries, our brave soldiers have fought, bled, and died to keep us FREE, and now we will honor them with a wonderful Parade, one that is worthy of their service and sacrifice."
Trump, whose 79th birthday coincides with the Army celebration, has received criticism over the parade, including from Democrats who say the event is to celebrate himself.
"It’s a vulgar display. It is the kind of thing you see Kim Jong-un, you see it Putin, you see with dictators around the world that are weak and just want to demonstrate strength," said California Governor Gavin Newsom. "Weakness masquerading as strength. To fete the dear leader on his birthday? What an embarrassment."
Newsom is in the middle of a political and legal battle with Trump. A federal judge said the president's deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles to quell immigration protests was illegal. An appeals court has temporarily blocked the judge's order.
"Trump is throwing himself a $30 million birthday parade just to stroke his own ego," Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) said on X. "If it was really about celebrating military families, we could put $30 million toward helping them offset the cost of their child care, food assistance and tuition."
When factoring in security and other expenses, the projected price tag is $45 million+.
Christopher Purdy, an Army veteran who served in Iraq, called the parade a facade that paints over some of the Republican president’s policies that have targeted military veterans and current service members, including cuts at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Purdy, who spoke to the Associated Press, said the parade will needlessly display U.S. military might.
Some weather forecasters are predicting the possibility of rain in the DC area today.
Mother Nature isn't the only one threatening to rain on Trump's parade. Millions are expected to protest in what organizers predict will be the strongest display of opposition to Trump’s administration since he returned to the White House.
Thousands of protests across all 50 states are planned through the No Kings movement, which organizers say seeks to reject “authoritarianism, billionaire-first politics, and the militarization of our democracy.”
Trump has warned that protesters who show up to the parade will be met with “very big force.”
However, not everyone disagrees with Trump's military parade. Among those attending will be some of the president's most devoted House supporters, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. “Yes, of course,” she said earlier this week. “I’m going to be there for the 250th anniversary of the Army.”
The last time Washington, DC hosted a military parade was in 1991, to celebrate victory in the first Gulf War.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.