At a much contentious Independence Day celebration, President Donald Trump has praised US military, parading America’s military weaponry and power.
The event was different for the people of the United States, because for the first time in the country's history, an American president used the holiday to commemorate it with jets, tanks, and military might.
Making his speech next to military equipment and leaders, a weird aspect to Independence Day, Trump swanked about America’s “extraordinary heritage” with conceited rhetoric, celebrating the US as “the most exceptional nation in the history of the world”.
While concealing major US military campaigns against other countries in the last one hundred years, the president gave a celebratory history of alleged defense against foreign raids and terrorism.
“We will always be the people who defeated a tyrant, crossed a continent, harnessed science, took to the skies, and soared into the heavens, because we will never forget that we are Americans, and the future belongs to us,” he said.
His implicit warnings to enemies were punctured by sporadic “USA! USA!” cries from his supporters.
Trump also muddied over his famous interview with ABC in which he criticized US military intervention in the Middle East, claiming that the American army “brought America’s righteous fury down to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and cleared the bloodthirsty killers from their caves.”
US troops, he claimed, “liberated Fallujah and Mosul and helped liberate and obliterate the ISIS Caliphate just recently in Syria.”
The holiday turned into a glorification of each arm of the military and an implicit celebration of some of Trump’s most controversial policies such as border control.
As he spoke, hundreds of demonstrators torched the US flag as an objection to Trump’s policies.
His critics condemned the event as a waste of tax-payer money and politicization of the holiday which is usually about fireworks, family reunions, picnics, and parades.
Senator Bernie Sanders twitted: “This is what authoritarians do: Donald Trump is taking $2.5 million away from our National Park Service to glorify himself with a spectacle of military tanks rolling through Washington.”
CNN carnival barker and American Urban Radio Networks correspondent April Ryan criticized Trump as “looking like a dictator from another nation.”