Big crowd at DC parade shows Trump on the rise
Photos: FLASH 90
W
hen I stepped out of the taxi on Virginia Avenue and 23rd Street, not far from the Lincoln Memorial, I found myself swept along in a human throng of thousands of people. Rain was falling, and it was extremely hot. Typical weather for Washington, D.C., in July, but nonetheless not exactly inviting.
The prevailing opinion in the capital was that only a few thousand people would show up for Trump’s “Salute to America” July 4th event. D.C. is not exactly Trump country — 90 percent of residents voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and the swamp-like conditions, the pundits said, would keep the crowds away.
How wrong they were. In fact, their misestimate is symbolic of the very wide chasm that has opened up between the opinion mandarins in Washington and the rest of the United States.
An hour. That’s how long it took me just to step foot onto the event grounds. Before me stretched an endless line of thousands of human beings, many wearing red Trump hats, and hundreds carrying prepared placards. I spoke with a father who came with his son all the way from Texas because that was the gift the boy wanted for his 18th birthday; I spoke with a small group of people who traveled 12 hours by train from Illinois; I spoke with a woman who used part of her pension money to book a flight from Indiana; I spoke with yeshivah bochurim from Maryland and New York (we’ll get to them in a minute). I even met three people who traveled all the way from California. Though the National Park Service did not provide an estimate of the crowd size, photos show that the crowd filled the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument.
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