The Media Research Center, in its role as Trump Regime Media, had a fit that a military parade was (not inaccurately) tied to President Trump’s birther, and it continued to whine about that connection. Mark Finkelstein grumbled in a June 17 post:
Tuesday’s episode of Morning Joe did its best to rain on yesterday’s parade celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States Army.
First up was MSNBC commentator Anand Giridharadas—a man who seemingly has on his mind a certain issue affecting some men.
Of all the adjectives he might have chosen, Giridharadas called the parade “flaccid.” This from the fellow who has selected as his signature look [see screencap] a rigidly erect hairdo.
This man suggested Trump’s inspiration for the parade was from communist China and North Korea. Fact check: False. He’s long cited Bastille Day in democratic France.
Then there was Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. He began by diminishing the size of Trump’s 2024 victory, noting it was only 1.5%. Robinson ignored the fact that Trump was the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote, and that he swept all seven swing states.
Robinson said that the margin of Trump’s win didn’t constitute an “overwhelming mandate for proto-fascism,” which he apparently thought the parade represented. To which tens of millions of Americans would likely respond, “You’re right. We didn’t vote for proto-fascism. We voted for capitalism and border control.”
But you do have to give Robinson full marks for syntax: not just fascism, but “proto-fascism.” Dials the fright factor to 11.
Alex Christy whined the same day:
Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta traveled over to the Center for American Progress on Tuesday to praise the No Kings protesters, claim Saturday’s Army parade was really President Trump’s “Kim Jong-un birthday parade,” and, more humorously, claim that Trump’s attacks against the media put liberal priorities like high-speed rail at risk. Seriously, he said that.
[…]First, an Army parade modeled on France’s Bastille Day—not North Korea—takes place in one city while protests happen in multiple cities. Second, there was a possibility that the parade could’ve been cancelled due to thunder and lightning. Third, the amount of security involved with the Army parade that was attended by the president could lead people to conclude that attendance was an inconvenience that wasn’t worth it.
Christy grumbled further that the parade was mocked:
Jordan Klepper took the helm of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show on Tuesday and used the opportunity to highlight his latest man-on-the-street segment, where he attempts to show Trump supporters that they aren’t the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. However, it was Klepper that looked rather foolish as he tried to compare Saturday’s Army parade to festivities in Moscow and Pyongyang.
[…]Klepper really wanted to find Trump supporters who would tell him that the parade was actually all about Trump, so he focused his attention on people wearing Trump hats or other clothes. After another man excitedly claimed, “It’s not his parade. It’s the United States Army’s 250th anniversary. Woo!,” Klepper tried to focus on the man’s friend’s hat, “I keep getting confused. I keep looking at these hats, and I’m like, there is a tiny American flag on the side. Now I see it.”
The first man was then brought back to add, “It makes me mad, listening to the people that are saying this is all about Donald Trump and his birthday. No, it’s not. I love Donald Trump, but technically, we are here to support our military.”
Klepper was interested in the idea that the man’s pants had “Trump” written across the top, “Your focus today is just on the military. And that’s why you wore your dress blues.”
The man then conceded, “Well, I’m not in camouflage to support the military, I’m here to support Trump because it is also his birthday.”
Time and again, this is the pattern with Klepper’s man-on-the-street interviews. He picks a small handful of people that he thinks fit his idea of a crazy Trump supporter, but, even here, the man with the Trump pants admitted to doing the extremely normal act of attending a local military parade, and, for some reason, Klepper’s first thought was Russia and North Korea. Maybe he’s the crazy one.
Joseph Vazquez spent a June 19 post complaining about a poll:
Americans should never take poll stories belched out from the liberal media at face value without checking the crosstabs first. Enter the Associated Press.
AP reporters Meg Kinnard and Linley Sanders put out a story twisting its own poll to whack President Trump’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army June 12 headlined, “Most US adults say Trump’s military parade is not a good use of money, a new AP-NORC poll finds.” But this wasn’t the main finding of the story.
In fact, Kinnard and Sanders admitted what the true finding of the poll was in the first paragraph. “As Washington prepares for a military parade this weekend to honor the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, a new survey finds that U.S. adults are more likely to approve than disapprove of President Donald Trump’s decision to hold the festivities,” Kinnard and Sanders wrote.
The plurality of respondents to AP’s poll, 40 percent, supported Trump’s decision to hold the parade. Only 29 percent opposed it. But that’s not what they chose to sensationalize, because why would they choose to highlight a result approving of a Trump action?
Vazquez then played whataboutism over the poll:
But in light of recent revelations about how much waste the government has been engaged in over the years, even AP’s sub-question to respondents about whether celebrating the U.S. Army was a good use of tax dollars looks utterly ridiculous in retrospect.
How about paying for hundreds of thousands of meals to al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria? Or how about the millions paid out by USAID to Guatemala for sex changes? Was that a “good use of money,” AP? How about the hundreds of millions in USAID funding that inadvertently went to cultivating the Taliban terrorist group’s lucrative poppy production for opium in Afghanistan? Or how about the $260 million that was doled out by USAID to a leftist nonprofit backed by George Soros pushing leftist government reforms across the globe? Or how about the fact that USAID was funding India’s first clinic for transgender people?
Comparatively speaking, it seems that celebrating the U.S. Army is in fact a better use of tax dollars when viewed next to the smorgasbord of leftist pet projects the government has been erroneously bankrolling. But who cares so long as AP is able to bend its own survey into a pretzel to get in a cheap shot at Trump, right?
Vazquez was never going to discuss the waste of parade money by an administration that has pledged to cut wasteful spending.