Evening in America

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By Dan Zak July 5 at 6:00 AM

From the president’s vantage point, his supporters looked like they were in cages. Their fingers curled around chain-link. Bellies smushed against butts. When their knees gave out, they sat on ponchos and muddy blankets and squares of wet cardboard. The air, scented by sodden socks and bug spray, sagged with humidity. When the breeze picked up, so did the sensation that everything was surrounded by a battalion of toilets ...

“Think of it as a frequency, as a resonance,” said a Q guy from Atlanta who declined to give his name because he preferred to be “clandestine.” He had a shirt that said “TRUMP/JFK JR. 2020,” which was not meant to be interpreted as a literal ticket, he said, but as an occasion to liberate your mind from the usual parameters of, uh, life and death and the space-time continuum — maybe? They’re awfully nice people, these Q people here, and they love how President Trump has exposed the cracks in our accepted reality. They love how the light is shining through now ...

Trump’s been doing this kind of thing for years, though never with the U.S. military as his production team. In April 1990, when he opened the doomed Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, a 43-year-old Donald Trump arranged 5½ minutes of fireworks that were half-obscured by his own building, insinuated that he had cured a disabled guest of honor and — after his podium spittled theatrical fog — told the crowd to “have a nice life.” (His business would file for bankruptcy the following year.) ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/evening-in-america-what-it-felt-like-on-trumps-4th-of-july/2019/07/05/1ed1aade-9ec5-11e9-b27f-ed2942f73d70_story.html?utm_term=.c37ac0b4d73d

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1. Sad, strange, somewhat Soviet spectacle

By TOM NICHOLS
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
JUL 05, 2019 | 7:45 AM

... It wasn’t bad in the way most of Donald Trump’s speeches are bad, in that it was not overtly objectionable. It was relatively free of the populist claptrap and barely disguised racism that characterizes so many of the president’s rally addresses. In some ways, it was even anodyne, and certainly not even in the same league as his hideous “American carnage” inaugural address.

Instead, it was just a poorly written speech: a long, cliché-plagued, rambling trip through American history that tried to name-check battles and famous people as applause lines. Imagine “We Didn’t Start the Fire” if Billy Joel had been born in 1776 and his producers told him to take as much time as he needed to finish the song.

... it was never meant to salute America, but rather to provide the military display Trump has wanted for two years. Like any enforced celebration, it was flat and labored. There were no memorable phrases, no vivid images and no bold proposals — unless you count a promise to NASA stalwart Gene Kranz to plant a U.S. flag on Mars one day. It would have been a challenging speech to deliver even for a better speaker, and Trump, who hates reading from prepared remarks, plodded through it with a strangely detached presence and a certain amount of mushy enunciation, including a weird blip where he referred to the glorious military capture of some airports in colonial America ...

Mining the glories of past military battles while flanked by defense chiefs is the kind of thing Soviet leaders used to do while droning from their reviewing stand in Moscow. It wasn’t patriotic or stirring; it was cringe-inducing ...

Nichols is a professor at the Naval War College and a former Republican Senate aide ...

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-trumps-sad-strange-fourth-of-july-20190705-57dkgu2gvnfdho7x4gdnqb4rpm-story.html

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2. A tale of three different celebrations

Christal Hayes, Sarah Elbeshbishi, Max Cohen, Elizabeth Lawrence, Olivia Sanchez and Jason Lalljee
USA TODAY Published 12:42 a.m. ET July 5, 2019 | Updated 7:00 a.m. ET July 5, 2019

... The president's role in what is usually a nonpartisan celebration created what felt like three different events: Protesters who decried his administration and its policies; a campaign rally where supporters cheered for him to keep the White House for another term; and those who simply wanted to enjoy hot dogs and fireworks with their families for the annual Independence Day festivities.

On a holiday marking America's birthday, the country's divisions were on full display.

There was a giant blimp depicting the president as an orange infant. There was also a sea of red, "Make America Great Again" hats. And there were families spread out along the National Mall with blankets and children anxiously awaiting the fireworks display and not focused on politics ...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/07/05/4th-july-trump-put-divisions-display-protest/1653535001/

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3. A second-rate Red Square rally

Dave Maclean
Washington DC

... Donald Trump had wanted these war machines to rumble through the rarefied streets of the nation’s capital until he was thwarted by engineers.

Send a fleet of these 60-ton monsters over the bridge from Arlington National Cemetery, they said, and it could crumble into the Potomac River.

Plan B: they were plopped into static positions outside the Lincoln Memorial after being delivered by train at an estimated cost of around $750,000 ...

There were no legions of troops, no tanks rolling down the Mall, and some of the war machines that did end up on display - like the M4 Sherman - last appeared on the battlefield for the US in the 1950s ...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-july-fourth-red-square-independence-day-salute-to-america-a8989151.html

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4. Showed off favorite toys at soggy military parade

BY GABRIELLE BRUNEY
JUL 5, 2019

... Though supporters packed the mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial, early reports of a scramble to secure VIP attendees were further confirmed by The New York Times. The paper reported that though Trump requested the attendance of all of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, most were "on leave or travel" and did not make an appearance.

The Trump administration has been silent on the question of how much the display cost taxpayers, but The Washington Post reported that to fund the event, the National Park Service redirected close to $2.5 million for the ceremony. During the event, 24 military aircraft performed flyovers, at a cost the Post calculated to be at least $560,000 per hour. And according to The New York Times, the ceremony cost the Pentagon more than $1 million.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a28302028/trump-military-independence-day-parade/

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5. Confuses history of Battle of Fort McHenry in speech

Lillian Reed
The Baltimore Sun

President Donald Trump appeared to bungle a few history facts during his Independence Day speech Thursday ...

The president .. appeared to confuse the Continental Army as being involved in the Battle at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, which took place during the War of 1812 ...

https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/bs-md-trump-speech-20190705-story.html

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6. Bad, sad showmanship

by Anne Kingston
Jul 5, 2019

... The former reality show star clearly had no Leni Riefenstahl, or even an HBO director, to stage manage. Fears America would see some sort of Soviet-style military parade now parroted by authoritarian leaders in China and North Korea didn’t happen, despite images of tanks entering the capitol on flatbeds. Nor did Trump come close to replicating France’s Bastille Day parade, whose origins he clearly didn’t understand ...

And yes, there were repeated shout-outs to military might. The overall result, however, exposed a president denuded by removal of his own arsenal of hatred, bullying and mockery. Trump was constrained in what he could say. He couldn’t allow the Independence Day event to turn ‘partisan,’ even as VIP tickets had been given to donors and GOP stalwarts — any mention of Democrats would result in an ethics violation ...

The president’s shout-out to Gold Star families also triggered memories of his own bigotry toward the family of U.S. Gold Star soldier Humayun Khan, and his disrespect for the late Senator John McCain. Trump celebrating the heroic bravery of the military, and calling for people to enlist, was the president at his most hubristic given his own draft-evading history due to alleged “bone spurs.”

Even when Trump wasn’t focused on the military there were problems. His congratulation to a woman who helps hurricane victims reminded us of his savage treatment of a ravaged Puerto Rico. He proved himself a president unable to make an inspiring rallying cry for national achievement, short of planting the American flag on Mars ...

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/trumps-bad-sad-independence-day-showmanship/