🇺🇸 Trump Throws America’s WORST Birthday Party
The president refuses to hear the truth about his plans for the 250th anniversary of independence, as the whole shebang threatens to fall flat on its face. Also, Graham Platner has an AIPAC warning.
On this day in 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian passenger jet it mistook for a hostile aircraft. All 290 people on board were killed. The U.S. first denied responsibility, but ultimately paid $62 million in damages to families of the dead.
Good morning! Your ‘First Draft’ team is reporting for duty today together: Martin, Andrew, Prem, and Swin. We’re here to toast Donald Trump’s horrible, no good, very bad birthday party for America on its 250th. We hope you have a restful and rewarding July 4 weekend, and a better holiday than the sad souls who spend it in the nation’s capital with a president who despises them.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we take the temperature at the Trump White House and brave the temperatures on the National Mall to depict – visually, thanks to the usual great work from Prem – the sheer crappiness of the ‘Great American State Fair,’ centerpiece of all that is wrong with the administration’s sesquicentennial plans. We also look to Michigan and Maine, where Abdul El-Sayed and Graham Platner are warning about AIPAC and campaign spending, and attempt to keep pace with another day of amazing stories of staggering Trumpian corruption. On we go.
‘I Can Do Anything’ – Except Put On a Proper State Fair
There’s little to celebrate on America’s 250th birthday, living under the country’s first wannabe king. But Donald Trump will roundly punish those Americans depraved enough to want to mark the sesquicentennial with him in Washington.
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of attending a Trump rally, you know they are miserable. You get to wait many hours outside, no matter the weather, with no one to feed you or give you water. Andrew recalls, at a 2024 rally in New Hampshire, watching a MAGA man sitting outside near the front of the line, wearing shorts in a blizzard for hours on end, wondering as the man’s inflamed knee turned increasingly purple how many more days he’d have that leg. Such is the price of being a Trump superfan: They might love his racism and commitment to harming the vulnerable, but he has a shit sandwich for them, too.
Those who venture to the National Mall on July 4 are in for something similar. “It’s going to be approximately 107 degrees out, and I’m gonna go, and I’m gonna make a really long speech just to show that I can do anything,” Trump bragged on Wednesday.
That speech means the fireworks families travel to DC to watch are set to start far later than usual. Attendees are banned from bringing backpacks, coolers, folding chairs, or bug spray. The forecast: 97 degrees with scattered thunderstorms.
Trump’s fans and their kids are in for a world of hurt. As well as enduring the noise of a seemingly endless flypast, Trump’s new and enormously corrupt Air Force One included, they can expect to inhale an excess of fine particulate matter, as Team Trump is planning to unleash a record amount of fireworks.