Hooray! Trump's parade goes the way of his wall. [View all]

[DonViejo]

By Jennifer Rubin
Opinion writer
August 17 at 12:00 PM

The Post reported Thursday that President Trump’s grand military parade is on hold:

-snip- (three paragraphs about the cost being up to $92 million)

That prompted Trump on Friday to cancel the parade, declaring: “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 canceled it.” Yeah, who would have come up with such a silly money-waster?

The parade episode provides a possible strategy for dealing with Trump’s illegal, wasteful, dangerous and illogical demands. (To put the parade in context, as of May, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe had cost about $17 million.) Want a wall? Fine, but later. Want to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin? Sure, but in 2019, or 2020. How about another summit with the human rights menace Kim Jong Un? Definitely, but we’ll have to check the calendar. (A year from Sunday, perhaps?) The capital gains cut on the super-rich? Of course — but in 2020.

Then there is the president’s proposed space force, the subject of much mockery. The military doesn’t seem too keen on the idea. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis originally opposed it, and according to a recent CNN poll, Americans do, too, by a 55 percent to 37 percent margin. The Pentagon cannot even say what it would cost, but it could be billions. Next time the president brings it up, perhaps his staff can tell him it will work better in 2019 — you know, after “Star Wars Episode IX.” (Maybe the realization that Congress is never going to vote for this juvenile fantasy led Mattis to conclude that he might as well not buck the president on this one.)

Whether it was launching a trade war, separating children from their parents at the border, piling up debt, making concessions to dictators or hobbling Obamacare with no replacement, the country would have benefited had we waited — indefinitely — before acting on Trump’s proposals. The same is true of Trump’s grand plans that have yet to come to fruition. By the time 2019 or 2020 rolls around, he might have forgotten about some of them or become dismayed by the cost. He might not even be in office. And, most critically, one or more houses of Congress might be in Democratic hands. Then, like his loopy plans for a parade and the wall, his space force will amount to no more than a punchline.

And by the way, the next time Republicans want to cut the National Endowment for the Arts or Meals on Wheels or the budgets for foreign aid, national parks and the National Institutes of Health, Democrats might want to remind them that all of those things are a heck of a lot more valuable and popular than Trump’s cockamamie ideas for wasting taxpayers’ money.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/08/17/hooray-trumps-parade-goes-the-way-of-his-wall