On Saturday, iron tank treads will grind along Pennsylvania Avenue while Apache rotors hammer the June sky. Officially, the Army calls it a long-planned semiquincentennial salute to 250 years of patriotic service. But it also lands on President Donald Trump’s 79th birthday — and serves the purpose of fulfilling his long-held fantasy of soldiers marching in lockstep past the White House. It’s a spectacle unprecedented in American presidential history — a sharp, unsettling departure from a tradition in which presidential birthdays meant cake, not cannons.
From the republic’s founding, leaders recoiled at monarchic pomp. Congress turned February 22 — George Washington’s birthday — into a national holiday, but the man himself wanted none of it. As president, he declined gilded coaches and martial fanfare, and after his death in 1798, Americans paraded for the virtues he represented: unity, independence, and republican values.
Following Washington’s lead, American generals-turned-presidents and wartime commanders-in-chief have traditionally gone hard in the other direction — though they experimented with spectacle, none deployed tanks.
Congress turned February 22 — George Washington’s birthday — into a national holiday, but the man himself wanted none of it.
Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t summon fanfare, he seeded it. In 1934, FDR repurposed his Jan. 30 birthday into a nationwide campaign against polio. In armories and ballrooms across the country, his “Birthday Balls” attracted tens of thousands of revelers, and with them, money to research the disease that had paralyzed their president. At one event in St. Louis, 15,000 people raised $50,000 (more than $1 million today). FDR didn’t attend any of the balls, though, he stayed behind the Resolute Desk, his voice crackling over the radio, binding the country through distance. The glitter wasn’t centralized. It was distributed, communal, voluntary. The tanks stayed parked.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would warn Americans against the growing “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex as he left office, struck a middle course on his birthday in October 1956 — which was conveniently three weeks before voters determined whether or not he got a second term. The Republican National Committee and private financiers, not taxpayers, paid for “Ike Day,” a coast-to-coast goodwill festival: cake contests, swing bands, celebrity cameos beamed into living rooms. Despite the strategic political timing of the event, Americans didn’t receive it as shameless electioneering. The Washington Post reported, “without a single plea for partisan votes, it was the most politically effective program of the week.” The Philadelphia Inquirer agreed, stating the program “was worth dozens of speeches.” And yet, not one troop formation darkened the skies.
John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday at Madison Square Garden in 1962 fused politics and pageantry. Ella Fitzgerald, Harry Belafonte, Peggy Lee, Jack Benny and Henry Fonda lent glamour — but it was Marilyn Monroe’s sultry performance of, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” that became legend, and a reminder that even the tightest script can be hijacked by a single moment. Future historians won’t ignore the price tag on Trump’s unofficial birthday bash — which is currently estimated at anywhere between $25 million and $45 million — nor how using active-duty soldiers as “entertainment” shredded civilian-military norms. They’ll note the tone-deaf timing — tanks roaring in D.C. as troops deployed to Los Angeles against the governor’s protests — and call it what it is: military politicization. In America, military parades have always been about shared sacrifice, not solitary showboating. In May 1865, scarred Union veterans slogged past Abraham Lincoln’s muddied lampposts, their march a ragged promise kept. In March 1991, George H.W. Bush watched the 1st Infantry Division lumber home from the Gulf War under slate-gray clouds — grim thanks, not a backyard birthday bash. Until now, a battlefield procession hasn’t ever served as the centerpiece of a president’s special day. When the last Abrams roll off and the rotors fall silent, Pennsylvania Avenue will look the same. Whether America does is another story.
Alexis Coe
Alexis Coe is a presidential historian and a senior fellow at New America and the New York Times bestselling author of "Young Jack: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1957" (2025), "You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington" (2020) and "Alice+Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis" (2014). 
