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He’s been to London, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Orlando, and even Grand Rapids. Now, “Baby Trump” is making what appears to be its first appearance in the nation’s capital on Thursday to protest President Trump’s Fourth of July celebration.

The National Park Service has authorized a group of protesters to bring a 20-foot, diaper-clad effigy of Trump as a petulant child, holding a cell phone, to the National Mall.

Code Pink DC, an anti-war activist group based in Brookland, raised more than $17,000 and got a permit to display the baby blimp amidst this year’s unusual Independence Day festivities.

Trump announced that he’d be hosting a special “Salute to America” celebration after his plans for a military parade were dashed. Upending years of July 4 traditions, the event will feature tanks, military flyovers, an extended fireworks show, and a ticketed area for VIP guests.

It’s also drawing various forms of resistance, including boycotts of the event, a flag burning, and sales of small Trump baby balloons.

But the big Trump balloon will be grounded. NPS will not allow it to be inflated with helium, so it won’t be able to float off the ground.

Code Pink hosted a press conference on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to protest the restriction on Wednesday. The whole point of the protest, organizers say, is for the president to see “Baby Trump” in action, and the Park Service’s restrictions and their assigned spot won’t allow that to happen.

“They’ve given us a tremendous runaround,” said Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin. “It is a sad state that the president can order in B-2 bombers to fly overhead, but we can’t lift the Baby Trump blimp off the ground by two-feet.”

A 2016 NPS guide to event planning on the Mall states that “structures […] cannot be more than forty-five feet in height.” Per basic math, the 20-foot balloon would fall well within these guidelines, even if allowed to fly two feet off the ground.

But park officials are concerned that the balloon could float off into restricted airspace even though it will be securely tethered to the ground, according to Benjamin. The group was unable to obtain a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The demonstrators weren’t granted their preferred spot to protest, either. They requested to be near the base of the Washington Monument in order to put the balloon in the president’s line of sight.

Instead, the blimp will be located at 17th Street and Constitution Avenue, on the eastern end of the Reflecting Pool, Benjamin said.

Anne Wright, a 72-year-old member of Code Pink, flew in from Hawaii to attend the Code Pink protest, which is slated to run from noon to 6 p.m.

“D.C. doesn’t have the money to be doing a salute to Trump, which is what this is,” said Wright, a former U.S. Army Colonel. The Fourth of July is “supposed to bring our country together, it’s not supposed to be for militarism. This is kind of like Red Square, Pyongyang, and Tehran, where all of the military troops are brought out as a form of nationalism. That’s not what we do here. This is a thing for Trump. It’s not for the nation, it’s for Trump.”

Elly Yu contributed reporting. 

Filed Under: baby trump, donald trump, fourth of july, july 4th, national mall, protest,