Thread by @dougblandry

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 viewing platform that people naturally stopped and gawked on

(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 it’s Talladega

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 bottleneck would have been a mass casualty event

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

a moment of self promotion:

First, smash that follow button, I am always this dynamic and entertaining and you won’t want to miss out

Second, I’m not (just) some jerkoff online, I do events like this professionally at @50Thirteen so you can hire us! To do better than this!

for example, just eight short days ago we did a giant rally and concert for veterans on the mall and it was decidedly awesome

(still no tanks though)

A word for the Trump events & advance guys that put this on (I know a few - it's a very tight group who do their stuff):

don't worry -- this was a hard ask and you did your best and yes it wasn't great but you didn't kill anyone and made a TON of money. It's going to be okay.

And my original content comes to a close with this post (but don’t worry! I’m gonna pivot to seeing what other people thought and posted and keep this going because your likes and follows fuel my soul)

This event ended as it began: a total mess. They routed all exiting guests via one narrow lane who No Kings and Gaza protestors promptly pounced upon as a captive stream to yell at - DC Police response unit stepping in to keep it separated and safe.

An advance friend writes that these *elevated,* *metal* structures would have been a genuine risk in any sort of egress situation amid a lightning storm.

This is the correct take on the vibes:

It was like the Falls Church, Virginia annual parade took a couple wrong turns and ended up on the mall

not wrong:

Courtesy of a reader who sent in the guidance they got as a "blue special guest" attendee which had maps for where to enter, I've marked it up to show a little bit what happened:

The huge checkpoint (I tweeted all the bikerack earlier in this thread) was allegedly at "capacity" by 6 p.m. so then the only functioning checkpoint was the MASSIVE one that ran north south on 14th Street. The problem there is: all the demand from the north side all hammered that end and the army was directing them all a block east to 12th Street through one sidewalk's width to get south to the Mall to get in line

Instead of just opening up the orange arrow option.

On the south end of the single ginormous mag pod, it was smooth sailing getting in

They just simply allocated the mags and designed the ingress plan with a insufficiently thought out plan for who would come from where.

Y'all want to do a little math?

The post reported that there's 19.5 miles of antiscale fencing at the event - that's the big tall angry looking 8 foot black metal fencing. It's generally about $70-100 per foot, installed, depending on the size of the contract and who's doing it.

So that's 102,960 feet. Carry the one....

Somewhere between $7.2 and $10.3 million dollars for just the fence.

And that's how you get up to that $80 million # real quick.

Now I'm going to settle into the official broadcast a little bit. Follow along:

I would bet my right arm the fancy hollywood producers who came up with all these shots for the broadcast here thought this particular shot just 58 seconds into their scripted opening package would be WALL TO WALL bodies by the time they needed it and were shocked to see grass in the damn picture:

We are under 90 seconds and there's already a technical boo boo - this is the helicopter taking this aerial shot's landing skid getting in the way of the shot

Happens all the time in like, televised LA car chases

Not so much in prestige live television broadcasting

If people were saying I was giving them King ick I would probably have not had the full “President’s Own” royal banners affixed to my people’s instruments

Solved the mystery of what was left in the shot during Trump’s remarks. It’s the honor cannons for the 21 gun salute. Prob could have put those almost anywhere else fellas.

now with the benefit of an aerial shot we learn that these goobers parked those cannons in the ONLY spot out of the ENTIRE ellipse where they would muck up the head on camera shot

Again, not being a hater, but this broadcast is MESSSSSSSSSSY in the early going

- missed or choppy camera cuts
- wonky audio - it's coming from all sorts of different mics and bands and it's a muddled mess
- dead air at times

i'm sure they're excellent army parachute team folks but waiting for these specks to land on tv is like watching paint dry

did no one think: "what if we gave THE PARACHUTIST a camera and add that unique angle?

you know, like they do on Elon Musk's rockets? That fly to FUCKING SPACE?

This is what I mean on the choppy audio

There’s…dogs barking?

The whole thing sounds small city summer air show commentary.

Then there’s huge load prebuilt video packages slam in.

Nothing cohesive

Here’s what sounds like a microphone scratching randomly for ten seconds, followed by ten seconds of dead air…then BLAMMO with the next rewritten package

And here’s the live commentator/host totally booting a date:

Alright, I’m going to bed. Final gems for today - maybe there will be more tomorrow:

Follow this account @dougblandry

Hire my company (@50thirteen) and we’ll do awesome stuff for you that people won’t pick apart online.

Happy 250th Birthday to the Army (only) and its brave men and women. I’ve never served and are grateful for those that raise their hand.

And I believe that the best way citizens and civilian leadership in this country can honor our soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and guardians starts with not asking them to dumb shit - and this parade was tops in that particular department but I hope there aren’t others soon.

And then to continue to honor the basic bargain that when you serve America, America will take care of you after. The VA is under assault and we all have a responsibility to ensure veteran care isnt severely impacted.

And last, we hope you had a Happy Flag Day - our company was founded on this day AND named after the US Flag - 50 stars / 13 stripes, get it? So
It’s a big one for us. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸