If Donald Trump, as Susan Glasser shrewdly notes in her New Yorker column today, is running an ‘unreality show,’ then the latest installment arrived with his cancellation of a military parade in November on Pennsylvania Avenue. He blamed, as he always does, someone else. In this case it was Washington mayor Muriel E. Bowser who says that she ‘finally got thru’ to Trump about the exorbitant expense of his little parade. Trump stated on Twitter that the $21 million bill that the city wanted to submit for the cost of hosting the event would have amounted to a ‘windfall’ that he was unprepared to disburse. For its part, the Pentagon said it might stage a parade next year to afford the denizens of the capital of the free world the pleasure of watching massive M-1 Abrams tanks tear up asphalt streets.
So is it ‘no more parades,’ as Christopher Tietjens repeatedly mourns in Ford Madox Ford’s novel? Not at all. Trump plans to jet off to France for Armistice Day, where he can once again hang out with his pal Emmanuel Macron. By then, he may have many reasons to take a jaunt abroad. For one thing, his predictions of a ‘red wave’ this November are looking increasingly iffy as Democrats continue to see poll numbers improve. Most GOP strategists seem to regard Trump as in the grip of a hallucination as he repeatedly brags about how much he is helping Republican candidates.
At the same time, Omarosa is claiming that she has another 200 or so tapes that she can release at her leisure. The Washington Post is calling it ‘revelation water torture,’ a tactic that was pioneered with the DNC Wikileaks that helped to cripple Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Meanwhile, America’s former top intelligence officials, including Robert Gates, signed a letter decrying his jejune decision to strip former CIA director John Brennan of his security clearance. Nowadays it seems that everyone is raining on Trump’s parade.
