For many soldiers, the Army‘s 250th birthday parade in Washington, D.C., on Saturday was a celebration they managed to divorce from its politically charged backdrop, including its overlap with President Donald Trump’s 79th birthday and the president’s deployment of troops against protesters in Los Angeles.
“This was about us, not him,” one senior noncommissioned officer told Military.com.
Still, for other troops, it was hard to ignore the unusual imagery of parading military hardware in the nation’s capital — a long-standing Trump aspiration but also a hallmark of authoritarian regimes like Russia and North Korea — and, to them, it was an enormous escalation in politicizing the force. One midlevel officer called the event “repulsive.”
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Despite the mixed feelings, the Army birthday parade was also an overdue opportunity to engage with the public and highlight the service’s rank and file. It provided a contrast to recent episodes that have marred the Army’s image, from the chaotic exit from Afghanistan to the more recent domestic National Guard deployments to cities where public protests have grown over Trump’s immigration policies and second-term agenda.
“I have become very disillusioned over the past couple years, but watching the presentation made me proud,” one sergeant major told Military.com. “From what I saw, it was not overly political; it was just our people being great.”
Unlike the Marine Corps, which treats its birthday like a sacred ritual, the Army has historically kept its own anniversary low-key. A modest version of this year’s parade had been quietly in the works for more than a year, and it was originally slated to be much more humble, with just a few hundred troops.
But in the final weeks, the plan abruptly ballooned into a sprawling, high-gloss spectacle complete with armored vehicles, aircraft flyovers, and last-minute demands on units to cancel training and scramble to shine up their gear. The Army rarely does parades and hasn’t done one of note in three decades.
The parade came just days after Trump delivered a fiery, rally-style speech at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where uniformed soldiers were seen cheering his political attacks and, in some cases, wearing pro-Trump merchandise purchased from a pop-up shop, which Army officials objected to but were overruled.
In Washington, D.C., on Saturday, several high-profile sponsors added to the political undertones of the parade as well.
Among them: Coinbase, the cryptocurrency giant that donated $1 million to Trump’s second inauguration; Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos has made overt efforts to curry favor with Trump during his second term; and Palantir, which last year was awarded a $178 million contract to build new artificial intelligence systems for the Army.
One of Palantir’s top executives, Shyam Sankar, was directly commissioned into the Army as a lieutenant colonel last week. The move has sparked quiet unease on Capitol Hill, where some see it as a symbol of big tech’s growing foothold inside the Pentagon, particularly within the Army.
At the event, attendees were being handed Phorm Energy drinks, a beverage that launched a week ago and is a collaboration between Anheuser-Busch and UFC CEO Dana White. Trump frequently attends UFC fights.
The event was organized by America250, the congressionally chartered commission responsible for coordinating celebrations marking the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026.
At the helm is Executive Director Ari Abergel, a former spokesperson for Melania Trump and former producer for “Fox & Friends,” the flagship morning show on Fox News. For the parade, the commission enlisted Event Strategies Inc., a firm with long-standing ties to Trump’s orbit, to handle most of the parade’s logistics. The company oversees many of Trump’s political rallies and orchestrated some of the pro-Trump protests in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
The parade didn’t see any notable protests as anti-Trump demonstrations were taking place in most major cities in the country under the banner “No Kings.” However, there were some brief tensions.
One incident included a woman shouting at a teenager holding a homemade sign that read, “Hegseth still listens to Nickelback,” a jab that escalated into a brief shouting match between her and the kid’s mother. In a separate scuffle, two men traded punches before being separated by the crowd. There was virtually no security within the one-mile-wide event area itself, with most police and federal agents concentrated at the entrance.
But the real mood of the event was shaped less by flare-ups than by a strange quiet.
Tanks lined the streets and a central stage piped in music, but for most of the parade, the crowd stood in near silence. There were no speakers, and outside of the immediate space in front of the stage, there was no music or emcee.
Only the occasional cheer broke the stillness. Soldiers marched largely without musical accompaniment as military bands were notably absent for most of the procession, and long, awkward gaps stretched between units and vehicles.
Unlike the colorful, crowd-pleasing spectacle of something like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, there was little attempt to engage the audience or build any visual momentum.
The only real jolt of energy came at the very end, when a group of cadets marched past singing in cadence. Washington, D.C.’s signature oppressive humidity didn’t help, leaving much of the audience subdued.
Many attendees arrived nearly five hours before the parade began, funneled through TSA-style security checkpoints as part of the heightened lockdown typical for presidential events.
To make matters worse, most of the designated cooling tents failed, and Military.com observed multiple attendees showing signs of heat exhaustion, several of whom had to be medically evacuated.