White House budget director Mick Mulvaney suspects the city of Washington, D.C., was motivated by political reasons to undermine President Trump’s desire to host a military parade in November commemorating 100 years since the end of World War I.
“First of all, if the parade had been canceled purely for fiscal reasons I imagine I would have been in the room when that decision was made and I wasn’t, so my guess is there were other contributing factors,” Mulvaney said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
“But come back to the relationship between the city and the president. I like the mayor, she seems like a nice lady, but face it: This is a city that voted probably 70, 80 percent against the president,” he continued, referring to Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, who is seeking re-election in 2018. “So to think that maybe the city council of Washington, D.C., is not trying to help the president accomplish what he wants to accomplish shouldn’t be news to anybody.”
Trump’s parade, inspired by French Bastille Day festivities he saw in Paris in 2017, will no longer take place on Veterans Day this year and has been rescheduled for sometime in 2019 if not later, the Defense Department announced Friday. The change in plans followed a Pentagon official estimating that the parade would cost the government $92 million.
Trump then took to Twitter on Friday to apportion some of the blame to Washington lawmakers.
“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 cancelled it,” Trump tweeted Friday.
“Never let someone hold you up! I will instead … attend the big parade already scheduled at Andrews Air Force Base on a different date, & go to the Paris parade, celebrating the end of the War, on November 11th. Maybe we will do something next year in D.C. when the cost comes WAY DOWN. Now we can buy some more jet fighters!” he added.
[More: DC politicians criticize Trump after he blames them for canceling his military parade]
Bowser responded, saying she finally got through to Trump with the “realities” of holding such an event in D.C.
Mulvaney would not comment Sunday when asked about a New York Times report that said the Trump administration was planning this week to propose new regulations that will allow individual states to set their own rules governing how coal plants deal with emissions.
