The Washington Post, notable for consistently obscuring reality, is now continuing this trend by cutting out all context for Trump’s military parade. The parade, which will cost $25-40 million, will be a presentation of tanks, helicopters, jets, and artillery used by the U.S.’s global killing machine currently and historically.
This will include 25 M1 Abrams tanks that is forcing the streets of D.C. to reinforce the streets with one-inch steel plates to protect from certain damage. The Washington Post, while reporting on this, is not connecting the obvious dots: that if these tanks can crush the D.C. streets, we need to spotlight what they do in the places that they’re sent, where damages are not reimbursed by the U.S. military, and the death and destruction that these groups reak on people around the world, and the planet. This parade is part of the one trillion dollar Pentagon budget for this year.
The Washington Post needs to report on the reality of the situation: this parade isn’t just expensive, it isn’t just a parade about ego or about domestic power– it’s a commercial to make weapons manufacturers that profit off of death richer, and a show of force presenting how the militarism we send abroad can come back to us.
As you know, this Saturday, June 14th, Donald Trump and the Pentagon will be having a military parade in Washington D.C., which will include items like M1 Abrams Tanks, Blackhawk Helicopters, and other pieces of artillery and war-making technologies. It’s a big event with a lot of coverage, and so it makes sense that you’re reporting on it.
But in writing this, we urge you to actually connect the dots a little bit. You talk about the reinforcement of D.C. streets with steel plates– yet ignore what the tanks are actually used for and what streets they actually damage when not presented in pageantry. The M1 Abrams has been used in the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan, in the Gulf War, and in the war in Ukraine. The company that manufactures it, General Dynamics, manufactures the bombs that have been used on Gaza in the last two years, tearing apart families and limbs.
The Blackhawk helicopters that will also be featured in the parade might also look familiar; a widely circulated photo showed one of them landing in Compton to reinforce the Los Angeles Police Department in the midst of the brutal crackdown on anti-I.C.E. demonstrations. These helicopters are manufactured by Sikorsky Aircraft, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, the same company that produces the F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, used by the U.S. war machine for decades and also used in Gaza. F-35 jets, which burn between 3.7-9.4 million gallons of jet fuel per year, also cost around $2 trillion from the annual Pentagon budget to produce.
The military budget, which this year was one trillion dollars directly to the Pentagon, has also not been a focus in your reporting on the parade at all, is only going to planetary death. The Pentagon is the largest institutional polluter in the world, and has over 800 bases devastating local communities and ecosystems.
With 1% of the military budget that is being used to create and show off the war machine, 3.2 million children could receive healthcare, 94,889 school teachers could have jobs, and 22.86 million households could be equipped with solar electricity. The planet would be safer, and people would be able to live better lives if even this tiny cut were made. Why isn’t that your story?
You have every chance to capture the reality of this parade on Saturday: the cost of the war machine, what the impact on D.C. streets translates to where military boots actually touch the ground, its death-making to the people and planet, and what could be built instead.