EDITORIAL
Trump Gets His Parade, Pulling Us to War

May 4, 2025

The U.S. Army has scheduled a military parade on June 14, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Army’s founding.

There were a few historic dates they might have chosen: April 5, 1775, American militias went to war against the British colonial army; June 15, 1775, the Continental Army was established; September 17, 1787, the U.S. Constitution was signed, establishing a United States Army.

Instead, the Trump Administration settled on June 14—which isn’t any of those dates. But it is Donald Trump’s birthday!

This parade is supposed to be a grandiose affair, containing 150 armored vehicles, seven bands, and 6,600 soldiers marching from the Pentagon to the White House, 50 helicopters hovering overhead, fireworks set off in the evening. Ten major U.S. wars will be “re-enacted.” Trump wants tanks to rumble into Washington. The cost just to transport, house and feed men and the other vehicles will exceed 100 million dollars.

If this were only Trump, a WWE “wannabe,” pretending to be George Washington, we could all have a good laugh.

But this parade is no laughing matter. It’s a retelling of the past in order to lure us into support for future wars.

Trump’s executive orders come tumbling out so disconnected, and so rapidly, that it’s hard to make out what they all mean.

But look closely! Among Trump’s 141 Executive Orders spat out in his first 100 days were attacks on various parts of the working class—public sector workers, immigrant workers, union workers, women workers, black workers—all of us. And there were attacks designed to crush all opposition to what Trump is preparing.

Those attacks are real and they are serious. And mixed up in the middle of them are the preparations for a new global war—plans to restart old shipyards. Plans to turn out millions of more drones. Plans to rush ammunition production. Plans to drag more men and women into service. Plans to divide and disarm the working class.

Trump says he wants to rename the World Wars—U.S. Victory Day I and U.S. Victory Day II.

There were no victories in those wars, there were only colossal losses on every side. In World War I, the overall human cost from battle and its immediate aftermath was over 25 million. World War II cost humanity over 100 million. For decades after, people were killed by epidemics, starvation, and social collapse. With every war, the moral cost hit the troops. More U.S. soldiers committed suicide than were killed in the Vietnam War itself.

Only a cynical man like Trump, who never saw a day of military service in his life, could refer to war’s human destruction as a “victory.”

War is not a WWE “Smackdown.”

War is what the capitalist class of every country turns to when it is unable to solve the economic disaster which its own system creates.

Today, the capitalist class of major countries is lining up—their companies against companies, banks against banks, governments against governments.

Warren Buffett, who knows capitalism and its financial system from the inside out, had this to say: “A tariff is an act of war.... It may not draw blood immediately, but make no mistake—it’s an act of aggression that invites retaliation.”

Retaliation to another country’s tariffs can end in trade war. Trade wars end in shooting wars.

This is our future—unless the working class finds the way to throw out the capitalist class and its whole bloody system first. We are heading into the next global war—unless the working class comes on the stage of history, independently as a class in its own right, using its position in the middle of the capitalist economy to bring capitalism down. Whether the workers act before the war or during, our class holds humanity’s future in its hands.

Rosa Luxemburg once made the point clear: either the workers will find the way to socialism or everyone will face capitalist barbarism.