An activist group has filed paperwork to allow protesters to fly a caricature of President Donald Trump near the Lincoln Memorial on the Fourth of July.
Activists with the anti-war group Code Pink on Monday requested a protest permit from the National Park Service to fly the 33-foot tall Baby Trump balloon over "any open grassy area nearest to (the) Lincoln Memorial," according to The Washington Post. The balloon depicts the president as an orange-tinted infant in diapers grasping a cell phone.
Code Pink announced in a statement last week that it planned to protest Trump's planned Fourth of July address at the Washington Memorial, The Hill reported.
"The president is shifting the 4th of July festivities to celebrate his administration," Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin said in a statement obtained by The Hill. "We will bring together people opposed to the pain and suffering caused by this administration, from family separation at the border to supplying weapons used by Saudi Arabia to kill Yemeni children."
The group initially planned to fly the Baby Trump balloon at a military parade that the president announced last year, the Post reported. However, that parade was cancelled amid questions over its price tag.
"We've just switched our plans from the military parade to the Fourth of July," Code Pink co-director Ariel Gold told the Post. "We're appalled that Trump is taking that day to spew his hateful and racist rhetoric … and we really hope this gets canceled, too."
Trump in February announced his plans to speak at the Lincoln Memorial for the Fourth of July. He said the event will include a “major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite president, me!”
Details surrounding the event have yet to be released, even to organizers of local events in Washington, WRC-TV reported. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser told the news station last month that officials believed they would likely need to move the annual fireworks show to West Potomac Park to accommodate the president's speech.
"The latest that we've heard is that there will be a speech," Bowser told WRC-TV last month. "We don't have the fine details of the plan yet."
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