Tanks for the Memories
Two tanks arrive for Trump's National Mall speech. In yet another you-can't-make-this-shit-up moment, Donald Trump delivered a hackneyed, mostly non-partisan address mainly to his biggest fans while flanked by two state-of-the-art yet obsolete war vehicles. Getting the tanks to the Lincoln Memorial entailed an enormous feat of engineering, as simply driving them through Washington would have caused extensive damage to streets and infrastructure. Instead, they had to be shipped first by rail, then on flatbed trucks on a carefully selected route to the Lincoln Memorial, where they were parked on pads designed to distribute the enormous weight and protect the surface underneath. As journalist and Iraq War veteran Elliot Wood points out in a New York Times op-ed, tanks are relics of a form of warfare that no longer exists. These mobile bunkers were created to break the brutal, bloody stalemate that was trench warfare, and they accomplished that goal: World War II saw fa...