Planned military parade off; Trump blames inflated costs
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday canceled plans for a military parade this fall in Washington, blaming local officials for inflating costs and saying they “know a windfall when they see it.”
Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, pushed back on Twitter, saying that she had “finally got thru” to the president to convey the “realities” of what it costs to stage events like military parades in the city.
Bowser put the number at $21.6 million, though the city’s costs are just a fraction of the total, with federal agencies also kicking in millions of dollars. A day earlier, the Pentagon said Trump’s parade to celebrate the military could be postponed to 2019, as officials acknowledged that the event could cost more than $90 million.
The parade, which was never widely embraced, was initially scheduled for Nov. 10 — Veterans Day weekend — this year.
While the District of Columbia would incur only about a quarter of the parade’s estimated cost, the city, a Democratic bastion where Trump is nearly universally unpopular, is an easy target for him.
The president also took a jab at the local government in Washington, saying the city is “poorly” run. Bowser, a Democrat, hit back, mocking the president by ending her tweet with a parenthetical “sad” — a word Trump often uses in his own tweets — and calling him “the reality star in the White House.”
Also Friday, Trump attacked Bruce Ohr, a little-known Justice Department official, calling him “a disgrace” and threatening to revoke his security clearance “very soon.”
Ohr, who has worked on antidrug and antigang initiatives at the department, has been targeted by conservative conspiracy theorists who say he helped start the investigation into Russian election interference. Ohr’s wife was at one time a contractor for Fusion GPS, which participated in compiling a dossier about Trump during the 2016 campaign.
Trump has embraced the conspiracy theory, casting Ohr and his wife, Nellie, as central players in what he calls the “rigged witch hunt.”
Asked about Bruce Ohr’s security clearance, Trump said: “I think Bruce Ohr is a disgrace. I suspect I will be taking it away very quickly.”
On Tuesday, Trump had included Ohr in a list of names of political critics, mostly former intelligence officials, who the president said could soon lose their security clearances. On Wednesday he stripped John Brennan, the former CIA director, of his security clearance.