"We're going to show off a little": Donald Trump celebrates his 79th birthday on Saturday, a military parade planned in Washington

Unbothered by questions about the timing of the event, Donald Trump is already relishing this display of strength and pomp , just the way he likes them. "We're going to show off a little bit," he exulted on Tuesday. "We have the best missiles in the world. The best submarines in the world. The best tanks in the world. The best weaponry in the world. And we're going to celebrate it," he had boasted a few weeks earlier.

Starting at 6:30 p.m. (12:30 a.m. in France), nearly 7,000 soldiers, some on horseback, many in military uniforms from different eras, and some 150 military vehicles, with some fifty planes flying over them, will parade along part of the Mall, the immense green esplanade in the heart of the capital. Paratroopers are expected to deliver an American flag to Donald Trump, the commander-in-chief. Nearly a hundred military vehicles crossed the country by rail from Texas and ended up arriving in Washington by truck.

For Ydelka Schrock, who lives in the region, "when you're strong, you don't need to show it." The forty-year-old plans to participate the same day in the national "No Kings" mobilization against "authoritarianism" and "the militarization of our democracy," which aims to be "the largest since Donald Trump's return to power." More than 1,500 rallies have been identified across the country. "If there are demonstrations, they will be met with great force; these are people who hate our country," Donald Trump warned Tuesday. "The president is, of course, in favor of peaceful protests," the White House has since clarified.

Saturday's parade, marking the Army's 250th anniversary, comes as the Republican president deployed nearly 5,000 military personnel, National Guard reservists, and even Marines to Los Angeles without consulting local authorities. Protests against the brutal arrests of immigrants have erupted in recent days in the second-largest city in the United States, a movement punctuated by sporadic, sometimes violent, clashes. At the forefront of the opposition protesting this extremely rare deployment of troops, Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom sees it as "the crazy fantasy of a dictatorial president."

In Washington on Saturday, "he's going to force our heroes to participate in a vulgar spectacle to celebrate his birthday, like other fallen dictators have done in the past," he denounced. "On his birthday, that's what fascists do," gasped John Tyler, a Vietnam War veteran who had come to demonstrate a few days earlier in the American capital to defend the interests of veterans.

"You cut a bunch of programs, but you're going to spend a lot of money to organize a parade. This man is selfish. He doesn't care about anyone but himself," the septuagenarian fumed. "I don't know how the American people haven't gotten that yet." The idea of ​​a parade had long been on Donald Trump's mind, inspired by the Bastille Day parade on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, which he attended in 2017. "We're going to have to try to do better," he had hoped at the time.