Trump's July 4 Sees Crowds As Small As His Tiny Hands
The president's 4th included extreme heat and Nazis. Yeah, that tracks.
How was everyone’s July 4 holiday? Hot? Humid? Filled with friends and family and mass consumption of artery-clogging food and joy and unbreathable air thanks to the Trump administration turning the annual fireworks show on the National Mall into an endurance challenge?
Yes, no one had a July 4 quite like they had in Washington DC. Pavement-melting heat! A parade canceled because of extreme weather! The white supremacist militia Patriot Front marching through the streets demanding ... we’re not sure what. White supremacy, obviously. Attention. Water. Subway tokens. Women who won’t laugh at them.
Fortunately for the masked weirdos, it seems to have been so hot that no one could even be bothered to jeer them too loudly. They came, they marched, they rode the Metro, they went home and returned to their carefree lives being sex-free shut-ins who cannot form meaningful relationships with anyone outside their Nazi-themed Telegram channels.
The appearance of Patriot Front was just one of the more surreal moments of the holiday that we watched from the air-conditioned comfort of our home several hundred miles away. (Dom was there braving the heat, and you can read his on-scene report here.) But as with everything Donald Trump-related, there was a mixture of the absurd, the ironic, the tacky, the self-satisfaction that seems to have been beamed in from a parallel universe where the president isn’t a hugely unpopular loser.
Take the storms that forced the closure and evacuation of the Mall in the early evening. But before that, it forced the cancellation of many of the military flyovers that were supposed to go on for damn near seven hours straight, from one in the afternoon until about 8:00 p.m.
Unfortunately, the cancellation came too late for us to be spared this story:
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman flew a vintage jet fighter at the Fourth of July air show over Washington, D.C., despite objections by federal air-safety regulators. [...]
The FAA deemed the jets “very high-risk,” posing a potential danger to people and property on the ground.
Apparently, Isaacman is some sort of military-jet-pilot hobbyist who has been flying them for years. He claimed flying the F-5 Tiger II jet for this demonstration “fell under different rules than those governing civilian aviation.” Fine, whatever, it’s not as if there is any sort of history of military aircraft endangering civilians as they fly through DC’s crowded airspace.
Once the storms started really bearing down on DC in the early evening, people on the Mall were told to shelter in nearby buildings, which led to the hilarious sight of the MAGA faithful hanging out in the National Museum of African American History and Culture where they were bombarded by wave after wave of DEI indoctrination. We are told that there were survivors.
MAGA fans also sheltered in the Natural History Museum, beneath the skeletons of the dinosaurs the more religious ones are sure lived 6,000 years ago and were ridden by Jesus.
Other spectators were forced to shelter in the Canadian embassy, which is technically Canada’s sovereign soil. Canada had the chance to do the funniest thing and slap these asylum seekers into immigrant detention centers. But Canada did not do that, because they are much nicer to us than we have been to them for the last 18 months.
We’re honestly a little shocked Markwayne Mullin or Stephen Miller didn’t dispatch Border Patrol agents to check the refugees’ passports before they were allowed to exit the embassy and return to America. What if any of them were pregnant???
Naturally, some wingnuts claimed that liberals had geoengineered the bad weather just to mess with Trump. This was followed by reports of Trump fans refusing to believe there was a storm coming and they needed to evacuate because — and we are not making this up — liberals run the weather service.
Personally, we would have left the Trump fans out there, secure in their apparent belief that there is no precedent for lightning strikes in Washington killing people.
Eventually, the Mall reopened so the festivities could continue. Trump took credit for this, of course. Supposedly officials wanted to call the whole event off and he said Nein:
A word about these numbers: we don’t know where he got them, and even if we did, we would assume they are bullshit. The National Park Service long ago stopped releasing official estimates of crowd size at events on the Mall. We have been scouring other news reports for estimates and have not found anything as of Monday afternoon.
But 422,000 is a weirdly specific number. Why not round up to 425,000? Or even down to 420,000?
We know, we know, we’re thinking too hard about this. Anyway, 150,000 people returned, allegedly. Or as we think of it, even if we were pretending to believe Trump’s numbers, then almost 300,000 people didn’t return to listen to Trump speak. Losers. They missed gems like this one. Who knew that fighting in the Civil War was a big deal in the 1860s?
Trump spoke for a surprisingly brief (for him) 40 minutes before turning things over to the lung-polluting fireworks. As we mentioned on Friday, the event’s organizers were trying to set a world record for number of fireworks shot off in one show. This was going to result in air pollution over the capital being dangerously high, to the point where people were warned to stay inside or wear respirators if they went out. Did that work out? It sure did. According to The Washington Post:
[A]ir over parts of D.C. was deemed “unhealthy” until around 11 a.m., and “unhealthy for sensitive group” until around 1 p.m.”
Congrats to every respiratory specialist in the greater Washington DC area. You can start shopping for those vacation homes now.
One final note: the weather forced everything to be delayed by several hours. So Trump started delivering his speech at 11:00 p.m. Which is late for a man of his advanced years, as everyone noticed not long after he finished speaking:
His minions go to the trouble of planning the biggest fireworks display in history, and he was just too plumb tuckered out to stay awake for it. Sad!
OPEN THREAD.
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I'm watching the sportsball on Telemundo hoping to absorb more Spanish.
I have a good understanding because living in Washington Heights for 16 years you are immersed in it. But I have always been terrible at trying to speak it.
I have some dear friends originally from PR that I knew back in NYC, and they would love that I tried but we just would end up laughing and they would translate for me when it was a big group, so I could participate.
I always loved that so much, they didn't treat me like an outsider and if I didn't understand they helped me to understand.
I miss those friends, we all scattered to places outside of NYC.
Monday Bear!
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-289121175?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc