Donald Trump has been hot to have a military parade ever since the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, held one for him. For a man who obtained five deferments when the bullets were real, the commander-in-chief certainly likes his soldiers, tanks, and fighter jets. Why then, did POTUS cancel his parade scheduled for Veterans Day in November?
Remember, the would-be leader of the free world invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit the White House in November. POTUS’ advisors told him that move was too close to the mid-term elections. Trump did not care.
Then, Moscow’s main man played coy. It seems, he was not actually available in November. Make his visit after the first of the year. Suddenly, Trump’s grand parade was cancelled. Imagine that.
Office of Management and Budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told POLITICO that the president of these United States decided to cancel his parade, but well before the administration found out that the price tag would be $92 million taxpayer dollars, $21.9 from the residents of Washington, D.C.
When Fox News Sunday interviewed Mulvaney, he said he really did not know why the parade was cancelled, except not “purely for fiscal reasons.” There just were “contributing factors:”
‘If the parade had been canceled purely for fiscal reasons, I imagine I would have been in the room when that was made, and I wasn’t. So my guess is there were other contributing factors.’
Mulvaney is supposed to be a money man. He wrested the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau away from its lawful holder. Now he has been in the process of dismantling it. How could he not know why a $92 million dollar project was cancelled? He said:
‘This is a city that voted 70 or 80 percent against the president. So I think maybe the City Council of Washington, D.C., is not trying to help the president accomplish what he wants to accomplish shouldn’t be news to anybody. If the $20 million you just mentioned is a number … that’s a number that I’m not familiar with. The numbers that I saw from the city were much higher than that.’
Trump has always been notoriously cheap, so it was no surprise that he expected the city to pick up nearly 20 percent of the parade’s cost. He blamed Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and local politicians for the cancellation, saying they wanted a “ridiculously high” number.
The man sitting in the Oval Office tweeted this:
‘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…’
Then, the mayor made her sharp point:
‘Yup, I’m Muriel Bowser, mayor of Washington DC, the local politician who finally got thru to the reality star in the White House with the realities ($21.6M) of parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America (sad).’
Mulvaney said he thought Bowser “seems like a nice lady.” Then, he added that he thought the city council did not want to help out the president.
The parade was originally costed out at a far smaller number of $12 million, then $30 million. When the real numbers came in, the Pentagon made the announcement — no parade. Still, there was no reason given. Will the taxpayers find a big parade when Putin arrives? Possibly.
Featured image is a screenshot via YouTube.
