This Might Have Been the Most Embarrassing Part of Trump's Military Parade
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On Saturday evening, as millions of Americans turned out for a nationwide spate of anti–Trump administration “No Kings” protests, the unpopular president arrived at the National Mall to stage his long-planned military parade for the Army's 250th birthday (and Donald Trump's 79th , and also Flag Day). It was a low-energy display: The audience numbers were underwhelming , and the planning was so shoddy that many attendees left even before the festivities had officially wrapped. The telecast of the party looked so wimpy that its corporate sponsors stood out all the more, and not in a good way: The branding for Trump-connected tech companies like crypto exchange Coinbase and data firm Palantir regularly juxtaposed with the piddling crowds and oversize tank processions that cost tens of millions of dollars to set up.
Coinbase and Palantir weren't the only Big Tech companies involved; defense contractors Oracle and Lockheed Martin were also prominent partners , along with combat-sports empire UFC, which is headed by Meta board member Dana White. But the presence of those first two firms made for a particularly in-your-face and cynical exercise, beyond the surreal optics of a supposedly distinguished government ceremony that featured blatant advertisements for private-sector firms. More pointedly, it was a sign of the extent to which Silicon Valley players are appeasing the Trump administration for favorable contracts and regulations—and how willing they are to debase and humiliate themselves in the process.
Just five summers ago, when the mass protests responding to George Floyd's murder spurred even crypto companies to declare support for Black Lives Matter, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong dismissed his employees' requests to such a public stance, insisting that the crypto exchange would remain “ apolitical .” Later, it would become clear how selective his rationale was: In 2024 he ramped up fundraising efforts for political candidates who showed sufficient fealty toward the cryptocurrency industry—and spent ample amounts to take out elected officials who had been more skeptical of digital assets.
After Trump won the 2024 election, Armstrong advised the incoming administration and influenced the corrupt , deregulatory , and alarmingly risky approach that Trump's second term has taken toward crypto. Now it has culminated in this hollow pro-military facade that has left even Coinbase fans upset by Armstrong's self-serving hypocrisy . (Not to mention the many, many former politicians Coinbase has taken on as advisers, including widely disliked ex-Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and former Barack Obama aide David Plouffe .)
Palantir's parade sponsorship was also rather controversial—and not merely among anti-DOGE and pro-immigrant libs. The Peter Thiel–founded data-analysis company, which has long enriched government itself from military and surveillance contracts, is headed by a CEO who views his company as a tool for expanding America's empire . In literal form, this has meant supplying Israel with AI tools for use in the country's massacres of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In more theatrical form, this ethos has led to Palantir's CTO being sworn in to the Army, just one day before the parade, as a member of the military's new “ innovation corps ” for advice on AI, featuring other tech execs, like Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth and OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil. In essence, the tech powerhouse can be seen as the emblem of the military-industrial complex, a ubiquitous presence from increasingly arbitrary immigrant crackdowns in California to the US–backed wars abroad .
And it's not just the left that's angry by this. In May, a group of ex-Palantir employees, who are often forbidden from criticizing their former workplace, appended their names to an open letter that deemed the firm “complicit” in “normalizing authoritarianism” and called out executives for their “increasingly violent rhetoric.” Hardcore conservatives on (Some of the scrutiny has also taken a more anti-Semitic direction, referring to the Palantir CEO's Jewish identity.)
If Coinbase and Palantir execs thought they were joining a widely loved state celebration, they were wrong. When it comes to Palantir, the war on Gaza , the anti-immigrant cruelty at home , and the preying upon Americans' data are increasingly unpopular with cross-partisan segments of Americans. Even Trump-loyal congressional Republicans are apprehensive about the prospect of Palantir's mining through so much of Americans' personal data. Meanwhile, crypto adoption remains rather low , and Americans are more worried than bullish about the sweeping Trump-era financial deregulation for which Armstrong has been advocating. And Coinbase itself is facing backlash not just for the military-parade opportunism but for a mass leak of consumer data that executives had been aware of since January but disclosed to the public only last month. (The affected customers are not very happy about that.) Armstrong's call for ex-DOGE staffers to join Coinbase after gutting federal services—an initiative that, again, was unpopular with broad swaths of Americans—didn't get the types of responses he would have liked. To top it all off, the Trump administration's otherwise-crypto-friendly Securities and Exchange Commission has been probing Coinbase over accusations that it knowingly inflated user numbers in public disclosures from previous years.
This weekend's military exercise, then, may just be the latest illustration of how poorly Silicon Valley executives' supplication to Trump has been working out for them. Elon Musk is out, and Tesla's reputation has been tarnished . Meta's Bosworth may now be enlisted in the Army, but the Big Tech giant is locked in a legal battle with the Trump administration's Federal Trade Commission—a longtime case that Mark Zuckerberg explicitly tried to get Trump to drop. Google is still battling regulators over antitrust concerns . Apple hasn't been able to sidestep Trump's hypertargeted tariffs threats . Microsoft is losing foreign clients over its ties to Trump.
But these companies are no longer even pretending to care about the everyday consumer. For them, getting in good with Trump and earning some favors in the process is the single best business decision they can make—at least until Americans' growing anger with the Trump regime boils over and targets them too.
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