I just got back from the Trump parade and I have to say it was legitimately the worst executed mass attendance event I’ve ever seen One overarching thought: how do you spend $80 million and fumble the basics? Many more thoughts - 🧵 🧵 🧵

First - I’m not just saying this as a hater (although I am a hater) - I’ve also planned an event on the Mall that was larger than this (and it was fourteen days notice and a tiny fraction of the budget, but who’s counting)

Let’s go chronologically through - somehow this checkpoint was closed by six pm (parade started 30 mins later) - they had miles of bikerack set up, somehow I don’t think this was their designed plan

So this funneled everybody to just one single checkpoint, and about 15,000 people were trapped on Constitution Ave because there was just one 10 foot wide entrance point to access that massive checkpoint on the Mall

This poor soldier probably passed Ranger school with flying colors but he wouldn’t last two days as a campaign crowd advance guy

But how is anyone supposed to know where to go? These maps are the sum total of what they put out and they’re total garbage How is a regular person supposed to figure this out?

So one THREE MILE TWENTY FIVE MINUTE scooter ride later, I zipped alllll the way around to the southern side of the single mass checkpoint where naturally…

…there was literally no line way to go, gang

…dozens of empty checkpoints that are fewer than two blocks as the crow flies from 10,000 people waiting en masse…

Just on the other side of the mags, this is the view of thousands of people stuck in a bottleneck because of poor crowd design

oh for crying out loud on the other side of the mags, EVERYONE has to go up one of two bridges to go up and over 15th street this is necessitated by the parade route design (which sucked)

SURELY this won’t be a problem when the 100,000 people who loaded the event space over the course of four hours all try to leave at once, right? (this is called foreshadowing) And by only doing mesh and not a fully opaque covering, they made the whole thing an elevated

(I am obviously not part of this problem but just a humble shambolic logistics documentarian)

WHO BRINGS A TINY BABY AND A ***STROLLER*** TO THIS SHITSHOW MAKE BETTER DECISIONS

love 2 celebrate the troops (from behind a 8 foot fence plastered in legal warnings) 🇺🇸 💪👊🏻

we should now address the crowd it was sparse. but not surprising at all my no BS estimate is around 100k but a lot of variance because it was very spread out so +/- 20k. Trump people will probably say 200k, I would too, ha This was taken at 7 pm ET

this is the unforgivable crowd sin though. Same as my first post in this thread. These are VIP bleachers on the north side of constitution (closer to the WH than the main crowd) And they are EMPTY. We are talkin’ Trump 1.0 inauguration empty. Someone fucked up here.

Brave? Or stupid? Or BOTH. Either way there were LOTS of dissenting signs, mostly ignored by the larger crowd

They did acknowledgements for sponsors throughout. Such as the UFC. Because OF COURSE. Like just take a step back and look at this image. What are we even doing here, team?

Sir hello, Mr. President 45-47 Sir And yes the soundtrack was all classic rock instrumental covers like this And yes the entire setup is this garish And yes I could get this close at 730 with no special ticket

They had giant water containers (but no cups) and secret tents of mountains of bottled water (but nobody handing it out) - which I think was for the possibility of serious heat which they (luckily) avoided. Mountains of trash all over

The vibes from the crowd were truly low energy. The whole parade was this: green vehicle after green vehicle. Not many bands. Not much variety. Single file. Lots of space between each thing.

Many of the troops driving the hardware seemed to be thrilled and I was happy for them - lotta waving. Would have been better if it was shorter, with the gear more densely packed Which maybe isn’t safe? But live a little, who cares, let’s go three wide with the tanks like

The flyovers were cool but they too should have been more numerous and more packed together. They were like four groups of 8, five mins apart (obviously smashing them into each other would not be ideal but that’s show business baby!)

$80 million does not come with a warranty on the jumbotron:

Time to start trying to GTFO because I knew this exit situation was gonna be a cluster and sure enough - the “single stairway out” was jacked up by 8 pm If they had: More people than this More heat than this Severe weather Or (god forbid) a violent incident This

Let’s pause for a moment to say: the set design itself was proficiently executed in a “Leni Riefenstahl has an unlimited budget” kinda way Hard to screw up the White House backdrop Just ask the Harris folks - they did it first! No tanks, though.

I’m an attention to detail guy And not leaving whatever these objects are parked in your main shot is not attention to detail

Wouldn’t be a Trump event if there wasn’t an absolute firehose of people leaving before he speaks (timestamp: 8:10p ET)

What’s the phrase? “many fine people on both sides”

A hearty salute to whoever got the “No Kings” art up on the light poles - well done

yes