President Donald Trump raged at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over Saturday’s military parade, arguing that the soldiers were “hamming it up,” biographer Michael Wolff has said.
Wolff appeared on The Daily Beast Podcast, saying that the president wanted a “menacing” show of force in honor of the Army’s 250th, and his 79th, birthday on June 14. Instead, Trump got a “festive” parade, said the author.
“He’s p***ed off at the soldiers,” he said. “He’s accusing them of hamming it up, and by that, he seems to mean that they were having a good time, that they were waving, that they were enjoying themselves and showing a convivial face rather than a military face.”
Social media users noted that the soldiers weren’t marching in lockstep during the parade as they made their way down Constitution Avenue in downtown Washington, D.C. Wolff claimed that Trump blamed Hegseth for the lacklustre performance.
“He kind of reamed out Hegseth for this,” Wolff said of the president. “Apparently, there was a phone call, and he said to Hegseth, the tone was all wrong. Why was the tone wrong? Who staged this? There was the tone problem. Trump, he keeps repeating himself.”
“It didn’t send the message that he apparently wanted, which is that he was the commander-in-chief of this menacing enterprise,” the biographer added.
The White House called Wolff a “lying sack of s***” and a “proven … fraud.”
“He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, told The Daily Beast.
Trump, meanwhile, has claimed that the parade was a “tremendous success.”
“Last night was a tremendous success with a fantastic audience,” Trump told the press on Sunday. “It was supposed to rain. They gave it a 100 percent chance of rain, and it didn’t rain at all. It was beautiful.”
The parade didn’t attract as many people as expected, while thousands of “No Kings” demonstrations were held across the country on Saturday.
On Monday, Trump appeared alongside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the G7 Summit in Kananaskis, Alberta.
“We had the parade the other day. They said 100 percent chance of rain. It didn’t rain,” Trump told Carney.
The president departed from the summit early to return to Washington, D.C., pointing to the conflict between Israel and Iran.
