Somebody call Pamela Anderson

For his 59th birthday, Donald Trump went big. He held a party at the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City – it would go bust 11 years later – with a 15ft cake. He even paid Pamela Anderson to attend.

Twenty years on, the now president wanted to go even bigger. Trump had wanted a military parade for a long time, and he finally got one, a celebration of 250 years of the US army that just happened to fall on his 79th birthday. But when the parade finally came, it just wasn’t quite all that.

The weather in Washington on Saturday was awful. Despite the White House’s claims that 250,000 people attended, there were large gaps in the crowds – “attendance appeared to fall far short” of predictions, the Associated Press reported – while some of the tanks, supposedly a show of military might, squeaked loudly as they drove down the National Mall, prompting widespread mockery on late-night TV shows.

Corporate sponsorship gave the whole thing a cheap air. An announcer declared: “Special thanks to our sponsor, Coinbase,” as one group of fatigue-clad military members walked past. A giant screen hoisted above the Mall showed black-and-white images of soldiers during the Gulf war and the “global war on terror”, a solemn remembrance only interrupted by the announcer thanking Ultimate Fighting Championship for its sponsorship. ScottsMiracle-Gro, a lawn seed company, was another to receive a shoutout.

Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, was filmed yawning less than 30 minutes into the three-hour affair. Even Trump appeared to fall asleep during the end of the ceremony.

“Just kind of lame,” one attendee told my colleague J Oliver Conroy.

The edge was further taken off Trump’s parade by the larger public response. Multiple polls found that most Americans thought the parade, which cost up to $45m, was not a good use of public money.

And the real star of the weekend, of course, was the mass demonstrations against Trump held in cities across the US. The “No Kings” protests were attended by millions and dominated news coverage, drawing attention, which Trump likes, away from the president.

“They’ve defied our courts, deported Americans, disappeared people off the streets, attacked our civil rights, and slashed our services. The corruption has gone too far. No thrones. No crowns. No kings,” read the blurb for the demonstrations, which riffed on Trump’s comparison of himself to a monarch earlier this year.

The signs that people were carrying, many of which were gleefully shared across social media and on mainstream news, were not kind. The Guardian’s Melissa Hellmann attended the Philadelphia protest and reported:

“Victor, a 56-year-old chef originally from Argentina, held a hand-painted sign that depicted Trump as a pig, with ‘Oink’ painted atop his image in large letters. ‘Other people have the right to work hard and make a life for themselves when they come from a country where they can’t do that or are facing political oppression or are desperate,’ he said. ‘This is supposed to be the land of opportunity and a land built on immigrants.’”

In Texas, one man carried a sign with the message “Dump Trump” above an unflattering photo, captured from the rear, of Trump playing tennis.

There was no mass demonstration in Washington, but about 60 people were arrested at a protest near the parade. In a fitting symbol of our times, one of those arrested was an 87-year-old military veteran who was using a walker.

“It feels like a betrayal,” John Spitzberg, an air force veteran who lives in a retirement home, told ABC, “of the Americans and other people who served this country for the purpose of keeping democracy, freedom.”

Trump wanted a parade for his birthday party. Instead he got a nationwide demonstration that his lurch towards authoritarianism will not go unchallenged. Maybe he should have just stuck with the giant cake.