Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Parade FLOPS as MILLIONS Protest Nationwide

Episode Date: June 15, 2025

JVL, Sarah Longwell, Will Sommer, and Andrew Egger talk Trump’s sad, sparsely attended military/birthday parade in Washington DC while ‘No Kings’ protests across the country draw unprecedentedly massive crowds.

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I'm JVL here with my bulwark colleagues, Will Summer and Andrew Ager and my best friend, Sarah Longwell. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We're taping on Saturday night around 8 PM. I feel like we can exhale. I feel like we made it basically. If you are the type of person who is in full blown worst case scenario mode for this weekend and what it could mean for America, uh, I think we, we

dodged one, I mean, we've all set up political assassination today, so like not, not fully dodge it, but, uh, the parade, the military parade, the Kim Jong-un style Soviet style thing in Washington with tanks in the street, I think is a flop. Newsmax is reporting 10,000 people showed up for this thing. And I just want to go around the horn and ask, was this an embarrassment for Trump? Sarah, let's start with you. Yeah, well, you know, Trump's the one who turns everything into a size matters conversation. He's the one who does we don't make the rules, the minds bigger than yours, yard sticking.

And so I think that he's got to take his medicine here on no one showed up to your sad birthday parade. And a lot of people showed up in a lot of places to register how unhappy they are with you. And I actually, I was thinking about it and like obviously I'm tickled when I see the shots of you know, there's only a few people kind of up front, there's not people in the back in the big park, it's just not filled and you see the risers as they go by and they're just sparsely attended. I feel good about that, sure. But then there's the other part of me that's like, this is such a stupid, ugh, like the level

of conversation we have to have, which is just going to be us comparing the crowd sizes. Like, Trump has led us here where like, what matters to us is simply who had the bigger show of force today. But the good guys had the bigger show of force today. So we do have that going for us. Well, can I push back against this a little bit? Sure. Because it isn't just the size of it. It's the fact that it didn't become a flash point.

Like that's good, right? The whole thing, it was raining and the whole thing just felt kind of soggy and limp in ways which suggest a shrug and not like hot fire emotions, which I think is again best case scenario. That's good. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think it rained. Oh, it didn't rain. It didn't rain down in the D.C. area. Much like a little like like drizzling over over the general Capitol Hill area. I can't speak to the exact parade, but I mean, it's not like a downpour yet. Sure. They rearrange certain parts of the programming to an anticipation of maybe heavy rain later.

They moved it up 30 minutes. Yeah. OK. Is that why no one was there because they started early? I don't think that's why. I don't Because they started early. I don't think that's why I don't think there's a big group of people as like we're getting there right on time. Well, well tell me what are what are your thoughts on it? I guess what do people in Maga land think? Are they are they like, uh Honestly, I mean, I think the unfortunate thing is number one, I think the murders in Minnesota have stolen a lot. They're really focused on that in terms of spinning out,

you know, vile conspiracy theories. But I mean, I was just looking at the Gateway Pundit before we started and I had to scroll. Like, I don't think the parade is on their first, like, 30 items. I mean, and so to follow up on the point you made, JVL, I think Trump was really denied any kind of like imagery here. I mean, it's just this kind of soggy parade.

I mean, you know, you look at these things and people are filming, you know, right up front and there's like no one around them. I mean, it is really not a lot of people showed up and Trump Trump looks like. Why did I do this? You know, I thought this was going to be cool. You know, Fox had a camera that was just watching him the whole time. He just, you know, this is this is 45 million dollars. You know, I've seen enough tanks.

So, yeah, I mean, I think if he was looking for kind of like a Kim Jong Moon moment, it didn't happen. Very sad birthday party. It's like hiring your dad hires a clown, but he gets like the janky clown and the other kids in the neighborhood are like, oh, Andrew, what do you what do you think of their nice shirt, buddy? Talk to me. Yeah, thanks. We're going to dwell on that. All right.

No, I think one big part of this is that it was a deliberate strategic decision by like the no kings folks not to do anything in DC today. And so I think part a big part of what we were worst case scenario in like, like as we were gaming out possibilities, sort of the the worst possible thing involved a lot of like conflict in DC. And I think a lot I think that would have obviously completely reset the tone and we would not be talking about like, oh, like we wouldn't be counting like MAGA hats along Constitution Avenue. We would be talking about potential clashes

between protesters and counter protesters. This was kind of a nationwide thing for one thing that the no Kings protests were extremely kind of disciplined from the top down about the messaging of like, we're not out here to tangle with people. We're out here to kind of show up and have our numbers tell the story and be really boring beyond that, like not getting clashes and things like that. Of course we're recording at 8 PM classic classically,

the way this tends to go is you have the protest and if there is any violence and unrest, it happens later. So I mean, maybe tomorrow we'll wake up and this will all look different. Um, but, but I think it was a good strategic move to steer clear of DC and show up literally everywhere else. I mean, like I was kind of bowled over by we talked about the difference in size, but I mean, one of my or my brother, he was in Chattanooga, Tennessee today. He swung by their no Kings protest, you know, multiple thousands of people. He said he's bad with numbers, but closer to 5,000 than a thousand people in

Chattanooga, Tennessee. My sister was in Asheville, North Carolina, another big protest in Asheville. I mean, like you add up three or four of those, like small. Metropolitan no Kings protests. And you are definitely bigger than the DC, you know, Trump, 250th anniversary birthday bash with all the tanks. I mean, like that's really striking. That's something like, like we say bigger and smaller, and that doesn't even like get

at the scope of all of this. But I, but I do think that that, yeah, if, if, if, if there had been more clashes and you never know, you know, knock on wood for later tonight. But, but that kind of deflating balloon of no conflict there in the show of all of this force was part of why I think this, this went over a little bit lame for the president today. Well, how about the protests? I mean, I you know, it's hard to get a sense of this from anywhere because as you said, there's so many I went to the no Kings map the other day just for to look at it and there were I mean, scores of these things all over the country, maybe hundreds, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred. Just the video, you know, the anecdotal video,

I saw it looked like 100,000 people in Philly. And I mean, that's, you know, it's not quite Super Bowl parade, but it's like not far off from Super Bowl territory. And I think it's deeply impressive. Am I wrong? Somebody be cynical and tell me that I'm wrong and that actually it's not that big a deal. I mean it's certainly better than the alternative. I think it's great. Look, I think there's a lot of

pent up desire to do something. I was up, cause I had half a notion to go downtown. Um, but I was, uh, steered away from that by people in my family. Uh, that was smart. Uh, as instead I was up here in Maryland and like the, there were people everywhere, like, and not organized pig protests or, or they were clearly like micro organized by churches or civic associations or something because you would hit a circle and there'd be 50 people in one and then you get up a little further and there's an intersection and there's a thousand people and it was

like really crazy that people were just sort of self-organized gathering and then you just saw people walking and it was a lot of asking people to honk, which I was doing religiously. And so I think that there were the big crowds in the big cities and then everybody got out today. I mean, it was, and so I think it matters. Look, things like that matter a lot for the people who do them to be with each other and feeling like they're winning in some way, feel like they're sending a message in some way, to see that they're being heard, their opposition is being heard. And so I think for Trump, and I guess this is where I started, what I mean is it's a stupid frame for us to get so enthusiastic about, except that we know how much it matters to him. And so the idea that he was humiliated today, because I guarantee you, because

it matters so much to him, this is deeply humiliating for him. And so that's one of those things that we just get to feel good about. Can I, can I tack on real briefly to that please as, as well, which is just that. You know, if you're asking first kind of a downside to the, to the no King stuff, the only one I can really think of is protests tend to be particularly effective when they're organized around like a specific cause with like a, you know, a specific ask, like a specific action item kind of. And obviously this wasn't that right.

I mean, this was the broadest, biggest tent. You know, you'd see people with with little signs for all for a million different things, you know things as you're scrolling through crowd pictures on Twitter or whatever. Everybody kind of showed up in this sort of very big tent way. But I think in addition to just being sort of psychologically annoying for the president, it strikes at a core of the argument that he has made, which is the thing that he continues to put before the American people as his justification

for all of the norm breaking and all of the kind of trampling over court orders and usurping congressional powers and all that sort of thing. It's always the same argument that this is the guy who's channeling the popular will, right? I mean, he is the sort of avatar and the embodiment of America as a political unit. And I think that

that because he does that, because that's the explicit argument that he's made, the optics of something like this become much more important than they would otherwise, where you can just anywhere in America, if you were in any of these cities, you could kind of go out your front door, go to the square, and see a whole lot of America that isn't on board with that argument, isn't on board with that process. So even though there isn't a specific ask, I think the split screen there is very healthy and helpful. And I think I was glad to see

it. I have something the no Kings protest was lacking compared to the parade. The cool sponsors, the parade had, you know, I don't know if folks have seen the video where they say, thank you to Coinbase. Special thanks to our sponsor, Coinbase. For responding to YouTube Palantir. And then the one that I find shocking, and this comes from reporter Amanda Moore, I didn't see a video of this, but I mean, I trust her reporting. They had, it, you know, soldiers in uniform handing out copies or cans of Dana White's energy drink. I mean, that is crazy that like, you know, okay, we're going to have the soldiers run the booth here.

I mean, just wild. What a world. Um, I, so here I have a question for you guys. So one of the things that I think this may have helped with is just making people feel like they're not crazy and that they're not alone. And this is sort of a proof of concept for a large nationwide protest, right?

You do this once and there's always a little bit of like, ah, has anybody gonna come out? Now that you've done it, you've shown, you can get people out. You can get people to show up. Again, this is anecdotal. I don't have any data on this, but I have the largest number of people in my life

who have never gone to any sort of protest before. They are not protest people. And they were dialed into this and they went out and like made signs and stuff for the first again, this is just, you know, this doesn't mean anything. This is like, Hey, JVL knows five people who went out to protest great, get a cookie. But I do get the sense that there's a little something breaking out beyond the type of people who

normally are protest types. I gotta say when I was driving, the number of sort of 65 year old, you know, middle like, I don't know, they did not look like your. I don't know. Maybe they used to be protesters and now they're just MSNBC parents and they're I don't know, they didn't strike me as the kind of people who were used to jumping into the streets on the regular. I do think something that I wanted to add this onto Andrew's add-on that's interesting is Trump ended up having to do this military parade got announced a while ago, but he had to do it at a real ebb in popularity. Like at a time where, you know, he's just,

he's just had this fallout with Elon and what she was called a pedophile and told to, you know, he's just, he's just had this fallout with Elon in which he was called a pedophile and told to, uh, you know, get, he should be impeached. Right. So he has this dust up with Elon. It's real big. That's kind of demoralizes the right. It's kind of splits them up. And then he's got the, he's got Marines in Los Angeles. They got the Padaa thing. Like he was already between Israel and Iran war between, right. Where it all no no wars would start if either. And we've had multiple polls in the last week that has his disapproval real high. Like there are a couple of them were like tickling 60, which feels too crazy, but like- Mid 30s approval in a few polls. Right. And so to have that kind of week and then on top of it have your parade be a flop and that will be the story.

There's no there's a spinning the empty seats. I mean, I try and so it just this is a this is a cap on a lousy week for this guy. But but that did feature many instances of his misusing the American military as a visual aid in ways that I've never seen as an American Can we just to put another extra fine point on that as well like like roll back the clock just like three or four days To like the middle of last week where we were coming out of The LA protests and Trump sending the National Guard and sending the Marines down there and coming off of that that speech at Fort Bragg where he did the, you know, just the nakedly partisan,

just the Trump speech with all the nasty nonsense that goes on there, the lying about the stolen 2020 election and, you know, all kinds of just the absolute dunking on the political foes in front of an audience of active duty military who had been selected for ideological sympathy to the president hooting along with him. And it was easy to envision this thing going off this weekend as kind of an explosive capstone to Trump's week of Trump's army, right? Like kind of the debut at the debutante ball of Trump with Trump's week of Trump's army, right? Like kind of the debut at the debutante ball of Trump with Trump's army.

And then you could imagine that, you know, Trump's army parading through the streets of DC in front of a cheering throng of Trump's, you know, populist base who are like do or die for all this stuff. And it's just the, we just got the opposite of that. I mean, it did not materialize in the way that I think a lot of us potentially feared that it would have materialized.

He got this this, you know, sad air out of the balloon flop instead on the back of all of that, which is also turning out to be unpopular in the way that all of you guys are talking about. So it's you know, it's it's it feels like something that he really swung for this past week in particular. And and with Dawn, which I think is a relief to everybody, which, you know, I'll just The this you JVL you're asking like what's the downside?

You know the downside is is I feel like this was a week that the American military was diminished In the eyes of the broader public in the world, like I was watching the tank, you know, I was just watching the clips It's I don't know. I don't it's it's weird to say that a tank looked small, but there was something about it. I like the American military. I like a parade. Like a good Memorial Day parade, you know, I like people waving American flags. But Trump is diminishing the whole thing by making it hyper-partisan and by making it

about him. And it made me, it's sad for the country, I think, to start feeling that sense of, Hey, you're using these guys as political props to the extent that they're allowing it to happen. It feels really icky. And so that's just, I think that's a loss for us. And I do think I will say, um, kudos to the organizers, kudos to the people now who are really kind of pushing out the numbers around how many veterans

we could have fed with that 45 million that Trump used to put on his parade. And so, you know, that was all well done. We're gonna need a lot more of these days though, is the problem, because we've got more than three and a half years left of this. Good luck, America.