Soldiers came down the parade route dressed in the uniforms worn by various generations of troops dating back to the Army’s founding in 1775. The parade also included paratroopers who jumped out of planes overhead.

Thousands of people gathered in the nation’s capital for the first military parade in Washington, D.C., since 1991. The parade route itself was a short distance down Constitution Ave.

The parade grounds leading up to the event were filled with people in patriotic and MAGA-themed garb, while thousands of protesters took to the streets to oppose the president and Army celebration across the country. There were a few individual protesters at the Army celebration itself, though Trump warned earlier this week that if “any protesters want to come out, they will be met with very big force.”

The cost of the celebration is estimated to fall between $25 million and $40 million, though Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has defended the price tag by citing the potential recruitment benefit from the event.

“We believe that so many Americans are excited about this and will tune in,” Driscoll said during a Senate hearing last month. “And it will quantitatively fill up our recruiting pipeline for the years to come. We think it is absolutely worth the investment.”

The president’s desire for a military parade predates even his first administration.

“We’re going to show the people as we build up our military,” Trump said in an interview with the Washington Post in 2017, shortly before his inauguration. “That military may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades. I mean, we’re going to be showing our military.”

The desire was strengthened after experiencing France’s Bastille Day celebration in Paris alongside French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017. 

“It was one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen,” Trump told reporters a couple months after the parade. “It was two hours on the button, and it was military might, and I think a tremendous thing for France and for the spirit of France.”

“We’re going to have to try to top it,” he added.

Trump’s first defense secretary, Gen. Jim Mattis, said it would “harken back to Soviet Union-like displays of authoritarian power” but that he would look into it, according to Holding the Line, a 2019 book by a former Mattis aide and retired Navy pilot, Guy Snodgrass.

It didn’t end up taking place before the end of his first term. 

Trump’s current secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is more aligned with the president and less devoted to the tradition of the institution than the secretaries from Trump’s first term.

The Army began planning the celebration for its 250th birthday before Trump won his second term. Trump’s long-held desire for a military parade and sharing a birthday with the Army’s founding set the conditions for a much more extravagant celebration.

Saturday’s parade comes at a tense moment in the United States and abroad.

Israel and Iran are launching unprecedented full-scale military operations against one another, which began with Israel’s military targeting Iran’s nuclear program.

U.S. forces in the region are assisting Israel in intercepting Iranian-fired missiles, a U.S. official told the Washington Examiner.

Israel’s initial salvo came only days before U.S. and Iranian officials were set to meet for the latest round of talks regarding Tehran’s nuclear program. Those talks have been called off, according to the Omani foreign ministry, which has been hosting the talks.

Closer to home, the president took the unusual step last week of deploying about 700 active-duty Marines and roughly 4,000 National Guard troops, without Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) support, to help quell riots in Los Angeles. The riots were spurred on by the administration’s mass deportation efforts.

Hegseth defended the deployment during his own appearance on Capitol Hill last week.

“It’s about maintaining law and order on behalf of law enforcement agents who deserve to do their job without being attacked by mobs of people,” he said.