[Moderating]
Most folks are doing a good job of keeping this thread factual, for which I thank you. However,
Anyone’s motivations for any particular action can’t be answered factually (stated motivations can be, but that’s not what this is).
This also goes for the motivations of the attendee seen in Mennonite garb, by the way.
The Marines also peg their birthday to 1775. It’s the Navy that (used to, almost inexplicably) peg its birthday to the postwar re-creation (1794, the original “six frigates” authorization).
Supposedly there were going to be Apache fly-bys, and paratroopers doing their thing, fighter jets, etc. from some of the hype I saw. I assume this was cancelled due to low clouds?
They did have the one guy marching by holding a little drone over his head…
I also saw a post - I assume, not official - putting the crowd at a little over 8600. One watcher apparently fell asleep.
For the record, I did not watch nor attend the Washington parade, I was protesting in my town. In a way, I am glad it all looks so dreary.. Americans are not fond of show off military events, not in the way of N Korea or Russia, at least. We like to be low key about all that, maybe so that we don’t look so tough and maybe we will be underestimated by our enemies. The parades are always about the people and the communities in our country. Bands, floats, etc. While I enjoy a good marching band and flyover, I don’t care about weapons too much (my grandson would love a complete military parade, but even he has his limits, being only 9). I wouldn’t know much beyond tanks and guns, and the drone would befuddle me (what is that thing and what does that symbolize? would have been my thoughts) No one who sat with Trump looked interested. Hegseth seemed to be biting his nails at one point. I think I saw a smirk or two, but I am probably cherry picking. Anyone giving up their Saturday to sit with their boss in the rain while watching those marching in the rain probably would smirk with boredom. I did not see smiles, though, just bland I don’t care looks.
Trump: it was massive. 250,000 people!
Eyewitnesses (with lots of video): Less than 10,000, estimated. Most of the bleachers were empty, the lawns didn’t have more people than an ordinary weekend. It was boring, and many people left before or during trump’s speech.
Maybe all those worshipers I mean parade-goers were at the protests and couldn’t make it.
The lone soldier marching down the road carrying a small silver drone about the size of a dinner plate over his head had to be serious sarcasm or passive aggressive behaviour on the part of whoever thought that up, someone who was not enchanted by the idea of this parade…
Plenty of jokes on TikTok and Instagram, “The parade you ordered from Temu” showing a massive N. Korean parade thousands of soldiers in step, and “The parade you got from Temu” and a group of maybe 50 US soldiers and a pair of WW2 tanks going by the camera slowly.
That seems stunningly low. How long was the path of the parade? It’s a lot of people to count.
@knavette57 , this has nothing to do with the question posed in this thread.
Oopsy!
Anecdotal evidence, but one would think that someone would have figured out how to count people at such things in DC.
I looked again – except for the White House count, which naturally they just pulled out of the wish fulfilling genie’s ass, no one tried to count the crowd, but every media outlet covering it made some remark on the sparseness of it. Some commenters on the ground remarked that it was unusually poorly organized, that some thousands never saw the parade because the map given out was wrong, and that there was a noticeable exodus after about an hour (before the speeches), to the point that exits were jammed. My hypothesis is that, since military parades are rare in the US, many parade goers were surprised at how boring it is watching tanks and soldiers file by.
Another repeated remark was that it was so quiet you could hear the tires of the armored vehicles rolling. Which is awfully quiet for a parade.
I have a friend whose son is a Secret Service agent (not the Presidential detail) who worked the parade. According to the son, attendance was less than expected.
There isn’t going to be an official count, insofar as the National Park Service (the agency that normally would be responsible) stopped calculating attendance at public DC events/protests/inaugurations/etc. many years ago.
Parade you ordered from TEMU - good one!
I did watch a few seconds of it - forget which channel - and as for the tanks damaging the road, a commentator said that for these tanks, it would mainly be an issue in places where they had to turn in place, and those areas had sheet metal laid down in the road to protect it, FWIW.
They could have had Woodstock-sized crowds, and Donnie Two Dolls wouldn’t have been satisfied.
I think it used to be the National Park service that did that, but after years of getting blamed for over estimating or under estimating or both they have an explicit policy of no longer providing such numbers.
News organization have generally stpeed in to fill in the gap based used arial photography, but most of those involve a single large concentration of people. I would think that doing this along a mile long parade route is much more difficult which is why other than to say that it was far short of the 200k expected I haven’t seen any news org. claim a particular number.
I saw that. He used visual images and computer model representations for what crowd densities look like and crowd estimation software to come up with that ballpark number. And he did state caveats like some of the crowds were under trees and therefore harder to evaluate. But his methodology seemed sound.
I can’t resist comparing it with the King’s Birthday Parade on the same day In London:
At one point, they resumed doing it, though. It was the Million Man March with Farakhan that made them stop as their number was well under 1 million.
I haven’t heard if they did this one, though. I would guess Trump’s people would suppress it.
Mennonites may be pacifists, but from personal observation, they like looking at military hardware about as much as anyone else. I’m a regular attendee at the Cleveland National Air Show and I see plenty of them there every year.
FWIW, I just Googled this today. I looked at many links but none had even a guesstimate of the crowd. The best I could find was that the crowd was less than the 200,000 expected. Or the 250,000 I think Trump claimed. Pretty much a flop no matter how you look at it.