The Daily Blast: Trump 250 Rally Takes Humiliating Turn as MAGA Ally Harshly Mocks Him

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"This is the daily blast from the new Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent." "Dunnel Trump is desperately trying to salvage the concert series, celebrating America's 250th anniversary after a number of celebrities pulled out.

He unleashed a weird tirade on truth social in which he basically declared, "Don't worry, I'll be there, so it'll be great." But we think this whole saga illustrates something deeper about Trump and Maga's growing toxicity inside the culture. Indeed, another Trump tirade about all this was strikingly revealing on that front.

And this is all becoming apparent to even some Maga figures, who have reacted to all of it in surprising ways. New Republic Senior Editor Alex Shepherd writes really well about Trump, Maga, and cultural politics, so we're asking him what gives about all this today.

Alex, always good to have you on, man.

That's great to be back. So the organizers of what's being called the Great American State Fair, which is being produced by the Trump-backed group, freedom to 50, to be held on the National Mall, recently announced the Slate of Celebrities in Musical Acts, who are set to attend.

But then people started pulling out. The rapper, young MC, poisons, Brett Michaels, country music star, martina McBride, the Commodore's, all out. Alex, can you recap what happened here? Well, I mean, it's a little hard to figure out,

but based on the initial announcement and statements from the artists, what it seems like happened is that this group that is organizing the Great American State Fair went to artists, and seems to have maybe downplayed the political nature of this, this sort of pro-Trump rally, essentially.

Since it's sort of as fallen apart after it became apparent what this actually was, Trump is trying to step in and save it with his own star power, essentially. Well, Trump puts out this tirade on truth social, in which he suddenly says, "We don't really want singers there." He goes on and he says, "The fabulously greenwood will introduce me,

and the singer Christopher Machia will sing plus a few musical groups from the Armed Forces, and then Trump hits his climax, saying that the event will be attended by, quote, "a fine and highly dignified gentleman known as President Donald J. Trump." Close, quote, "Oh, I don't know Alex, that doesn't sound like a must-see,

does it?"

“I mean, I think I would still probably rather sit there at Trump rally”

than watch Vanilla Ice and Milly Vanilly perform, but no, it does not seem very good. You know, I mean, this is, it's a farce, right? Because, I mean, again, how much can a concert featuring Vanilla Ice and Milly Vanilly really celebrate America,

but still, the idea here was to have some sort of event befitting of the country's 250th anniversary birthday, whatever you want to call it. And instead, we're just going to get another Trump rally on the national mall. Exactly. I just want to highlight one other thing, Trump says here in this

tirade. He says this quote, "We don't want singers with no talent, we've told them all to stay home," close, quote.

I mean, Alex, that's basically you're not breaking up with me.

I'm breaking up with you, isn't it? I mean, your thoughts on that? I mean, where's the lie, right? Like, he's not, he's not wrong, but, you know, as with many of, you know, him calling out Omarosa or whatever,

“you're like, you invited them to begin with, right?”

Like, it's embarrassing for you that you invited them. It's even more embarrassing that they pulled out, and it's even more embarrassing than that that you're doing a rally with Lee Greenwood who, by the way, I had to look this up before,

And this guy who's like an imitation of poverty, it's preposterous,

“but again, I think it does kind of capture like where we are less than two years into the second term.”

Well, let's talk about that because you've written really well on it, you've written on the fact that after Trump won in 2024, there was kind of an opening for Trump and Maga to really make inroads into the culture. It was like there was a little Trump boom, but there was sort of a passing sense or at the time it didn't even feel passing.

It felt like scary durable. At that moment it felt like Donald Trump has tapped into something that we didn't know is there. And that was a scary feeling for a while there. Can you talk about that atmosphere at the time and what people kind of concluded about it?

Yeah, I mean, it was something that I was writing about and reporting on a fair amount

“right after Trump won, but I think that there was a sense that for the first time”

since his movement really started in the summer of 2015 that there was like car blanche to just love Trump if you wanted to or to embrace Trump without

repercussions. People have obviously always embraced him,

but there's always a sense that doing so would have kind of professional, personal, familial, you know, whatever repercussions you can think of. And I think what we saw like immediately after, you know, I wrote at the time about like we were just seeing the Trump dance like at every NFL game, you saw it at U.S. Men's National Soccer Games. And it was this sense that like the culture had just kind

of said, like this is who we are, right? This is part of where we're going. And I think that, you know, I had felt like I missed that and you saw this too, like, you know, things like there was a UFC fight right after the election and like Joe Barrow, you know, was like, you know, embracing him, the quarterback for the Cincinnati bankals and just kind of felt like something that wasn't there before. And it felt alarming because it seemed like

there were just inroads, particularly with like whatever we call it the manosphere now, but I think even bigger than that, right? Like NFL, like men's, you know, U.S. men soccer, these kinds of things. And you know, even some hip hop music too. And now it's just all gone. It's just none of it's there, right? Like again, young MC, or economic bride, right? Like that's the best that they could do more stay in the time. That's the best that they could do to start here.

And you know, when we got to the end of the road, it's not even that. Yeah, I think another way to put this is that Trump and Maga had this brief moment and this brief chance at winning the culture that that was sort of created by a bunch of flute conditions. Joe Biden's age, Biden's refusal to get out of the race in time, the post-COVID shock inflation and an information environment that was just so deeply screwed up that all these low-information

voters, young people who were just starting to get into, you know, voting and into politics, made their decisions based on TikTok videos, mocking Harris and TikTok videos just lying to them about Trump's true agenda. And that was like a weirdly kind of devastating moment, but Trump and Maga just pissed away the chance that that was created for them by this weird confluence of circumstances, I think. I think there were two other things that I don't think

that you mentioned, right? One was the arrest in the mugshot in particular and then also the assassination attempt in the photograph. And I think that there was a sense of there being a kind of transgressiveness, right, that this was like edgy and it reflected something that was different, right, then Joe Biden, you know, stumbling around or Kamal Harris is kind of like carefully, you know, a focus group, you know, campaigning. And, you know, I think that in a lot of ways, right, like

I was certainly alarmist about it and I probably like should have just looked at recent history

when I was a catastrophizing because I think what happened is what always happens, right,

which is that one, you know, you realize that this guy is completely incompetent out of his mind, and he's completely self-obsessed to you, right? So you don't get to graft onto him, right? Like, it always ends up the other way around. Like, he always, like, destroys anything that that sort of, like latches on to him and that, you know, ultimately you have no choice but to separate yourself from it because it just is all consuming blob, essentially, that just devours anything that gets

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Yeah, and I think there's another thing about this as well. It's a little bit darker, which is that, you know, Donald Trump had this chance to really make these types of inroads,

“but then they decided to hurt the country instead in every conceivable way that they could, right?”

It's like, it's not like all these artists who are pulling out are simply expressing their personal distaste for Trump. It's not like they have Trump derangement syndrome. It's that they have these fan bases that hate Trump and Maga, and for a reason, right? They hate Trump and Maga, because Trump and Maga are hurting and fucking over a lot of people and wrecking our country and our common life together, right? Trump, when he came into office, was writing this wave, and he

loved it, right? He was finally getting the kind of adulation that he always wanted from the sources

that he always wanted, right? Not the dumb hicks that come to his, his events like from the actual culture, and he could have continued to get that if he had tried to govern like a normal president. And again, he's just not capable of it. Instead, he's governing like Donald Trump. And I think you know, with this event, he's been really kind of hidden from the public view in a lot of ways, but he's, you know, this event is going to be one of several, you know, instances in which he's

like stepping out into the open, I think between now and July 4th, really. I think it's also worth reflecting on the fact that Maga is alienating the culture because of Maga's actual vision for the

“country, right? Let's remember that the culture started to turn on them pretty rapidly after that”

kind of brief moment they had in large part because of the ice raids, which ended up flooding people's phones for months on end with searing imagery of Trump's paramilitary army's terrorizing immigrants and Americans and shooting people in the head. They threw away their chance to win the culture because they were so hell bent on not just hurting as many people as possible,

but also in service of this kind of vision of a wider country who with a hundred million people

deported via violent ethnic purges and race war. I'm sorry, I'm pissed about. What can I tell you? No, I mean, it gets right ending. Also, there's Trump's own bizarre ideas and his efforts, I think, in this term, to make himself a great president, whatever that means, you know, like the liberation day tariffs, right? The insane kidnapping of Magaro and Venezuela, the war in Iran, what the Kennedy Center renaming, right? All of this stuff is this sort of desperate legacy building,

exercise, right? That is backfire tremendously, but again, it's what happens when you have an old man with a sort of broken ego running the country. Trump got annoyed by all these people pulling out of the show and he tweeted this quote, "I am thinking about bringing the number one attraction anywhere in the world, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis and his prime, the man who some say is the greatest president in history to take the place of these third-rate artists."

Close quote, Alex, who's he talking about? Well, he is talking about himself, you know, and again, like if Colonel Tom Parker had treated Elvis with the respect that his celebrity deserved,

“maybe he would have played to even larger crowds, but I digress. I mean, I think that this is the”

problem here, right? Is that like there's nothing else, and part of it again is if you look ahead, just it's hard to look ahead right now, but if you look ahead just a little bit to the future, right? You know, it makes me wonder about Trump's succession plans kind of because he can't let anybody else take this spotlight. And so his only answer when there is a sort of problem like this is just like I will fill it, right? That my celebrity. And one, I think this is more of a risk than he's

considering, as is I think his plan to attend game three at Madison Square Garden of the MPA finals, as is I think his probable appearance at, you know, at least the World Cup final in July because people hate him right now, right? Even his own supporters are turning away from him.

And, you know, his idea is always to just do the same thing, which is like he's got to go on stage

and he's got to ramble for an hour and a half. He's got to read, you know, the snake poem or whatever, and talk about crooked Hillary and, you know, Jerome Powell's mortgage application or whatever is, you know, bothering him at that moment. And, you know, it's, you know, there was a point at which in the very early part of this where there was a kind of thrilling what will he say or do, like, attitude here. That was 10 years ago or more now. So, Justin responds to what Trump

tweeted that crazy thing about him being more popular than Elvis. We saw a mega-figure matte wallosh tweet something. He said this, quote, "I'm actually pretty pissed at how badly they bungled

work out, they decided to convert the event into a Trump rally where Trump will talk about himself for 90 minutes." Post, quote, "Alex Trump's mega-low mania has gotten so out of control that even mega-figures can't take it anymore." Even a fellow mega-low mania, he can't take it anymore.

“I mean, I think that, like, as with a lot of criticisms with Trump, it's sort of begs a question,”

though, which is just like, "Well, what was it supposed to be?" There is a sober celebration of America's culture, right? You can look, for instance, at things like the kinds of concerts that Barack Obama hosted in the White House throughout his presidency that were showcasing a diversity of American music and values, frankly, as well. And that's not possible here, right? Because everything has to be made from whole cloth, right? Or, you know, to use this sort of ballroom or

arch representative, it has to be this very rigid idea of America that's either, you know,

perfect classical architecture that's never really been, like, the sort of throughline in this

country, or something that perfectly embodies the spirit of Trump himself. There's just nothing that exists that fits that bill. And again, you know, we're a year and a half in and gas costs, you know, $5 a gallon everywhere. So, you know, who really wants to participate in that anyways? But I think that, you know, this is not somebody or this is not an administration that is interested in honoring or celebrating American history or culture to begin with. So why would you

expect that to even happen at all? Right. For them, the only thing that really is worth celebrating is the MAGA adjacent stuff in the culture. And I want to close on that kind of concept, because Trump's prop against our very sensitive to this idea, to this kind of hope that Trump can get

“penetration into the culture. So, during his first term, you might remember that any time he”

went to, I don't know, a college football game in Alabama or in a red state or something, and he'd get enormous cheers. His prop against us would plaster that all over Twitter, trying to show kind of Trump's penetration as this tribune of the people, right? As someone who was very deeply in touch with what's going on with the American bulk or the zeitgeist or whatever. But the thing is, they can't make much headway beyond the Trump adjacent areas of the culture, the MAGA adjacent

areas of the culture. You know, like they consider sporting events to be kind of their part of the culture, but then they deliberately avoid bringing ice to a Los Angeles baseball game, right? Because they know the fan bases there are heavily Latino and filled with a lot of liberals. So it's almost like they run up against a wall when they try to get outside of the MAGA adjacent areas

“of the culture. You know what I mean? I think this almost speaks to the speaks to like a robustness”

in the culture at its diversity that they can't kind of steam roll. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, I think part of it, too, is that so much of that is also limited to like celebrity and charisma of Donald Trump, right? That I think that he does, which I think is fairly resilient, right? That he does still represent and can still go to some places and get this kind of response as a metaphor for a kind of, you know, pugilistic and nativist kind of

American politics, but like people when they see that politics in action outside of Donald Trump, right? They recoil, right? The movement that this sort of MAGA movement is limited to Donald Trump, right? It hasn't, it doesn't have extensions in the culture really beyond like kind of a foothold in the UFC, right? It doesn't have even like extensions in American politics, like he will be

succeeded probably by Mark Rubio or JD Vance, but they will never have the kind of

adulation or like cultural resonance if he does. And so you're left with this kind of empty vessel, right? Which is this soon to be 80-year-old guy standing up and delivering a like 90-minute speech in place of CNC music factory and, you know, vanilla ice, right? Like, and those are your kind of options. And I think that, you know, in some ways, like, if you're looking for something to be hopeful about, it's that, right? It's that. There is, there is not been this kind of cultural

resonance. And again, like, with this concert, with probably Trump's appearance in Madison Square Garden on Monday, with probably Trump's appearance at least a, you know, US men's national team game or several World Cup games, right? There's going to be a real example of just what the American people think of him, and it's not going to be pretty. I think that's exactly right. I think what you're really getting out there is that, at the core of maga is this bizarre kind of

howling emptiness. There's just nothing really there except for Trump's megalomania and his

self enrichment and his absolutely bottomless need for attention and adulation, and he never gets enough