President Trump’s big military parade that was going to cost an estimate of $80 million will not happen—at least not in November as planned.
Trump tweeted Friday morning that he was postponing the parade, which he’d announced in February, after learning that it would cost $92 million. Instead, he said he will attend a “big parade” at a military base located just outside of Washington, DC, called Joint Base Andrews and spend November 11 in Paris at France’s Veterans Day Parade.
Trump’s parade had been scheduled for November 10, with the stated intention of not only celebrating the U.S. Armed Forces but also marking the 100th anniversary of the cease-fire that ended World War I. The president tweeted that perhaps D.C. could still hold a parade in 2019 if the city found a way to bring down the costs. “Now we can buy some more jet fighters!” he tweeted, though one F-35 currently costs in the neighborhood of $94 million, or roughly what the parade would have amounted to.
The local politicians who run Washington, D.C. (poorly) know a windfall when they see it. When asked to give us a price for holding a great celebratory military parade, they wanted a number so ridiculously high that I cancelled it. Never let someone hold you up! I will instead…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2018
….attend the big parade already scheduled at Andrews Air Force Base on a different date, & go to the Paris parade, celebrating the end of the War, on November 11th. Maybe we will do something next year in D.C. when the cost comes WAY DOWN. Now we can buy some more jet fighters!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2018
Why did Trump decide to hold a military parade?
Trump decided in February 2018 that the US was going to hold a military parade akin to France’s Bastille Day, a celebration held at the Champs-Élysées in Paris to celebrate the storming of the Bastille fortress and a symbolic end to the French monarchy.
“It was one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen,” Trump told reporters a few months after returning from France. “It was military might.”
In an attempt “to top it,” Trump was planning “a great representative parade … up and down Pennsylvania Avenue” with “a lot of plane flyovers.”
Why was Trump military parade so Expensive?
Nearly 3,000 personnel, a mix of civilian and military employees, are planned to be supporting the execution of the parade the week before it takes place. Some of those individuals will be security personnel. In addition to the 5,000 to 7,000 individuals who could be marching, the parade, which was slated to begin at the U.S. Capitol and end at the White House, is expected to feature a mix of vehicles, aircraft, and horses.
A breakdown of those local costs lists more than $13 million for police, some $3.5 million for fire and emergency medical services, $2.2 million for the local transportation department for traffic control and more than half a million for the public works department for measures that include “sanitization of the parade route.”
About $50 million is expected to be paid for by the Pentagon with the other $42 million coming from the Department of Homeland Security, the official said.
