John,
Next month, a $45 million military parade—complete with tanks, warplanes, and 6,600 troops—is reportedly set to roll through Washington, D.C.
So what’s the occasion? Donald Trump is throwing himself a taxpayer-funded birthday party. It’s a page ripped straight from the authoritarian playbook.
But you wouldn’t know that from how The New York Times covered it.
While DOGE and Elon Musk are busy gutting federal agencies and slashing essential services, The New York Times couldn’t bring itself to directly call Trump’s $45 million military parade what it is—a wasteful, authoritarian spectacle meant to project power and feed Trump’s view of himself as a king.
Instead, the piece sticks to a familiar “both sides” formula:
- It neutrally reports the cost, scale, and potential road damage without questioning whether $45 million for a parade is necessary or responsible given the administration’s broader efforts to slash funding for the federal government.
- And it reduces the Democratic response to mere partisan pushback, skipping any serious engagement with the deeper issue: Trump’s normalization of authoritarian spectacle in a democracy.
- It presents Pete Hegseth’s spin of the event as a patriotic celebration of the military—without holding Hegseth accountable for glossing over the fact that the parade is happening on Trump’s birthday. Take a look:
There’s no fact checking. No examination of what it means to militarize an American city for the President’s birthday. No context for why this kind of kingly display is deeply out of step with American democratic traditions.
This is what both-sides journalism does. It neutralizes stories that aren’t neutral. It takes a deeply corrupt act—militarizing the streets of our capital to honor one man—and flattens it into a “he said, she said” about optics.
At COURIER, we say it. Clearly. Loudly. And to millions of Americans online every day.
Thanks for standing with us,
The COURIER Team