Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA Press
Donald Trump, who skillfully avoided military service and once compared his own promiscuous sex life in the eighties with Vietnam, was forced to cancel his military parade after estimates of its cost ballooned from $12 million to $92 million.
On Thursday, the Secretary of Defense disputed the new estimate and suggested that potheads were to blame for news of it getting out, but the Pentagon announced that the parade, which was nominally set to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the first World War, would be “postponed” until sometime in 2019 to commemorate an as yet-to-be-determined anniversary. (The 101st anniversary of the end of the first World War? Prohibition?)
Trump, who misremembered key details of the film Apocalypse Now, seized the credit for the decision to cancel the parade on Friday morning heaping blame on the city government of Washington DC.
The local politicians who run Washington, D.C. (poorly) know a windfall when they see it. When asked to give us a price for holding a great celebratory military parade, they wanted a number so ridiculously high that I cancelled it. Never let someone hold you up! I will instead…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2018
….attend the big parade already scheduled at Andrews Air Force Base on a different date, & go to the Paris parade, celebrating the end of the War, on November 11th. Maybe we will do something next year in D.C. when the cost comes WAY DOWN. Now we can buy some more jet fighters!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2018
Perhaps only a fraction of a single jet fighter. According to the Government Accountability Office’s latest estimates, the procurement cost of a single F-35 is $140.6 million dollars.
