President Donald Trump was unhappy with his sparsely attended military parade over the weekend and blamed it on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, biographer Michael Wolff revealed.
Wolff told The Daily Beast Podcast that Trump wanted a “menacing” show of force to celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary and his 79th birthday on Saturday—but got a “festive” parade instead.
“He’s p---ed off at the soldiers,” Wolff said. “He’s accusing them of hamming it up, and by that, he seems to mean that they were having a good time, that they were waving, that they were enjoying themselves and showing a convivial face rather than a military face.”
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As thousands of soldiers flanked by tanks made their way past empty bleachers along Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., social media users pointed out that the soldiers were marching out of sync, and the muted atmosphere appeared to match the gloomy weather.
That didn’t escape Trump, who pointed the finger at his defense secretary, according to Wolff.
“He kind of reamed out Hegseth for this,” the Trump biographer said. “Apparently, there was a phone call, and he said to Hegseth, the tone was all wrong. Why was the tone wrong? Who staged this? There was the tone problem. Trump, he keeps repeating himself.”
“Everybody was actually celebrating, celebrating the 250 years of the U.S. military—probably celebrating that more than Donald Trump’s birthday,” Wolff said. “But it didn’t send the message that he apparently wanted, which is that he was the commander in chief of this menacing enterprise,” he added.
Wolff said Trump had put the word out, via his spokesperson Steven Cheung, that at least 250,000 people were in attendance.
“That was from Trump,” Wolff said. ”‘Put it out, 250,000.’” Wolff said the people he knows who attended the event said it was actually “maybe” 40,000.
Responding to the claims, the White House blasted Wolff once again as “a lying sack of s--t” who “has been proven to be a fraud.”
“He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain,” White House communications director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast.
Publicly, Trump has insisted that his parade was a “tremendous” success even after it was overshadowed by “No Kings” demonstrations across the country, which drew in millions of Americans who protested against the president’s sweeping immigration agenda.
“Last night was a tremendous success with a fantastic audience,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “It was supposed to rain. They gave it a 100 percent chance of rain and it didn’t rain at all. It was beautiful.”
The parade was still on the president’s mind on Monday as he bragged about it to his Canadian counterpart at the G7 Summit.
“We had the parade the other day. They said 100 percent chance of rain. It didn’t rain,” Trump told Mark Carney as the Canadian prime minister smiled politely.
Trump had long dreamt of a big military parade. During his first term, he was left feeling envious after watching a Bastille Day parade in France in 2017. “We’re going to have to try and top it,” Trump told France’s President Macron a few months after the event.
His attempts to hold such a grand military spectacle on American soil were repeatedly frustrated over the following years. Washington officials worried about the damage that heavy military vehicles would inflict on streets in D.C., and Trump eventually backed down in his first term as cost estimates for a parade spiralled into the tens of millions.
Trump’s desire for troops to perform a military extravaganza persisted even as bombshell reports claimed he’d made disparaging comments about U.S. service personnel. In 2020, the Atlantic published claims that Trump had referred to fallen troops as “suckers” and “losers.”
Trump has always denied making the remarks, but John Kelly, Trump’s second White House chief of staff in his first term, confirmed the reports to CNN.
