Me, the animals, yoga, jogging, nothing is exciting.
Really? I mean, my story is totally...
Steuja, how do you feel about the story? Yeah, I have a lot of time to get over 1,000 euros. Do you have connections or exes or supercrafts? No, just like Steuja is. Wow, and that's easy.
Yeah, the taste is almost automatic. I feel like it's so... In Spain, you have your money. You have a 30-year-old friend, Yuri. What?
You have a lot of fun with this story. Oh, yeah. This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
In the run-up to Donald Trump's gala celebrating the nation's 250th anniversary, we've been arguing here that it was important for a to fail. Trump delivered his speech, and there were some pretty bad highlights, but perhaps most notably, it was beset with chaos after Trump overruled officials who recommended calling it off amid storms,
causing an exodus from the mall. But we're going to dig deeper into the bigger failures here. This was the moment when we were supposed to celebrate the American experiment enduring for a quarter of a millennium, and Trump still couldn't help but make it all about the crowd sizes that were supposedly there for him
and all about his pet obsessions. We're talking about all of it with New Republic senior editor Alex Sheppard, because Alex predicted very early on that Donald Trump would lose the culture, including on this on the celebration of the 250th. Alex, good to have you back.
It's great to be back.
So what we now know is that Trump finally delivered his speech after 11pm,
on July 4th, after what the Washington Post called a chaotic scramble. This was the result of officials essentially saying this thing should be canceled, and then him overruling them. Trump claims 150,000 people were there in the end, while saying that at least twice or three times as many had been there before the evacuation.
Alex, you saw the imagery of the empty seats.
“What's your take on the claim of 150,000 for the speech?”
I mean, there have been a lot of ridiculous Trump crowd size claims, but I think this is one of the more brazen ones. I mean, the VIP section of this speech wasn't even full. It was half full by the middle of the speech. You know, people that love Trump and that need things from Trump
were willing to stay the entire time. I mean, the weather was awful, but I think mostly people did not want to sit through what Trump had promised to be a very long speech. It wasn't actually that long. I think it was like 30, 35 minutes.
But, you know, it was exactly what you would expect. It was this kind of endless recitation of the familiar grievances. You know, with a few kind of new half-baked, you know, insults thrown in. So, you know, it just felt exactly like a perfect encapsulation of where we are with this president right now. Somebody who's just almost bored, I think with it,
but it was no real argument to make to the American people, and it's still just kind of falling back on these very, very tired arguments.
And, of course, crowd sizes were really essential for Trump before leading up to it.
There was reporting saying that he had been an absolute rage about pictures of the, of the crowd sizes during the events leading up to this. And they had really set him off quite miserably in many ways.
“Well, I think going back to that, too, it's, you know, there's this larger failure”
of the great American state-fair project. This kind of idea that there was supposed to put on almost like a world's fayer in the national mall, you know, that increasingly got taken over by Trump people. And, you know, between the weather and I think the lack of real draws. I think you're just seeing nobody coming through here.
And, you know, I think that, again, like the president can be furious about this as much as he wants. But it's just another example of him living in this total fantasy world. It's like when he posts about polls, or he's, you know, or 70% of the people love him. It's just absurd. It is. Well, let's check out what Trump said during the speech about the size of his crowd. Listen.
And they estimated that 375,000 people before everybody had to leave. And they now have 150,000 people. It's a craziest thing anyone's ever said. At least. But then on truth social afterwards, he suddenly inflated the number. He said quote, "The crowd at 705 and the evening was 422,000 people."
“I mean, I think it also gives it a sort of historic register.”
And he wants this to be like the march on Washington. He wants this to be like, I don't know when they tried to levitate the Pentagon or something. But I think what you're seeing is the president trying like really, really hard to use his theoretical superpower, which is to just manufacture reality.
Right, he's a, you know, disciple of the power of positive thinking.
He believes he can just kind of manipulate reality by saying things and that by the time people
“correct him, it'll be too late. But I think what we've seen again and again, especially since”
the start of this year, is that he's just totally lost that ability, right? He can just say this stuff and people just ignore it doesn't matter anymore. I mean, it's almost like one final humiliation for him to not only only get 150,000 by his own invented estimation, but that's actually this huge bump down from this bigger number that he estimated. And then he turns around and undermines even that bigger number by inventing
another wall. I think Trump at his best in a kind of non-value judgment way is sort of like the grateful dead or something where people are going because there might be these parts that are not very good, but there's going to be 20 or 30 minutes that are genuinely surprising and new and interesting. And I think that's like what brought people into Trump in 15 and 16. And I think now you're seeing like the Trump as the grateful dead when Jerry Garcia was on loads of heroin or
“something that it's just like a very familiar and it doesn't work at all. And I think people are”
just bored by it, right? And part of it is that he's the president, right? So he's just repeating the same kind of points over and over again. But I think that what we're seeing is just a present that's just not actually engaged with people or with the culture in a larger way. And the speech itself to me failed a numerous grounds, but I think one of the reasons why people were not coming is just it was just this really familiar recitation of grievances. And I think of kind of like really
pro-forma points that that Trump himself doesn't even really care about. So let's talk about a few highlights here. Trump claimed that we built the empire of liberty. He slurred his speech numerous times a lot of screw ups. He actually talked about the need to end male balloting, which is really truly bizarre. Talk about grievances. That's something that like a lot of Republicans don't want to hear him talk about anymore. And then there's one quote that really left out, I think. It was
this quote. As our declaration of independence tells you, we're all made in the image of one
Almighty God and a communist will never say that, close quote. Alex, like to you what substantively
“about the speech really kind of jumped out. I think part of it to me or the big part of you just”
got it. It was that this really new move from Trump, which is to try to kind of re-energize the Cold War or to sort of make the larger fight for the country. One of capitalism against communism. Essentially, the idea here seems to be to use Mombani as the kind of symbol of the democratic party heading into the midterms. But part of the issue here is maybe all the sound like Barack Obama in the debate against Mitt Romney. But I'm like, the Cold War was a long time ago. And like
one of the reasons why, and you see this, I think Steve Bannon is not somebody who's words should be taken literally most of the time. But I thought he had a very interesting point about the rise of kind of democratic socialism after this sort of Colorado results last week, where he was essentially saying, yeah, you know what, these people are speaking to people who are dissatisfied with our current politics. And they're organizing really effectively around that. And I think that
with Trump what's notable here is that Trump first rose, you know, speaking to a similar kind of person, right? Somebody's disaffected, right? Somebody who is, I think, you know, fairly concerned about the corruption of our politics and looking for people who don't fit the mold of regular politicians. And that was Trump for a while, right? But now Trump is himself trying to say, oh no, I am the
kind of symbol of capitalism always running them, you know, the most corrupt and crony, you know,
you filled administration that you've ever seen. And I think that that to me, like, points to somebody who's just lost his touch to some extent that, you know, he's wanting like, this is the laziest argument that you can make in politics essentially, oh, my, you know, my opponents are all communists, right? Well, like, you know, people like Mom, don't you, right? Like he's, he's made himself a kind of like a very approachable kind of kind force in American politics. And I think it's actually
organized really effectively in a way that Trump has as well. But, you know, I think what we're seeing here is just this effort to kind of like narrow device his way out of this, this mess and like the narrative that he's offering is one that Republicans have been pushing since Barry Goldwater, right? And like sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn't. And that's absolutely right. I want to home in a little bit on his characterization of the Declaration of Independence, though, when he
says, quote, we are all made in the image of one Almighty God, he's referring to the fact that the Declaration says we hold these truths to be self evident that our Creator made all people equal and so forth, but Trump very much and visibly dispenses with the equal part. And also our Creator is not the same as one Almighty God, our Creator is a much more generic way of putting it,
Which is deliver.
sense. Yeah, I mean, I think Thomas Jefferson certainly would be a Paul by that, right? Like
as a DS, he was not somebody who was thinking about the our Creator endowing us with anything.
“Really, I mean, I think that the idea here for Trump is that, you know, the white man who found”
of this country did so with very clear designs in that order that align with this sort of Pete Heggseth vision. And again, I think that speaks to a weakness within this administration to me, that Trump is parroting stuff that he doesn't care about, right? He's, you know, not a Christian nationalist. He's just doing this to try to pander to people within this base, right? And whenever Trump sounds like Pete Heggseth, I feel like he's he's really losing here overall.
And, you know, and I think again, like we're just seeing this kind of laziness, right? It's this really warmed over version of Republican politics, really like kind of mainstream Republican politics as bad as the Christian nationalism stuff has gotten a lot of the content of this speech would be familiar in a bad speech given by any Republican politician for the last 60 years. And
ordinarily, you would say, okay, well, that's fine. But the problem is that Trump's whole thing
“is he's not like those other people. So this speech, I think to me, captures the two halves of what”
we're seeing with Trump right now, which are on the one hand, did this really in like these really finely gray, finely ground grievances like the Save Act, right? That most people do not care about, things that Trump cares about quite a bit. And then on the other half, it's just this really familiar drivel that that is sort of characterized the conservative movement and the Republican party for decades. And I think when you combine these two, you get one just a really boring speech,
but you also get a picture of a presidency that's in total freefall. And let's point out the Barack Obama spoke at the dedication of his presidential center just around a month ago. I want
to read a sentence from his speech because I think it's really applicable here. It's sort of for
two of us that Obama's speech came sort of around a month before Trump's display because they really neatly bookend this moment in a really kind of telling way. Obama said that the story of America had its best rests on shared values that make democracy possible. They include this quote, a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government, a belief that our military and
law enforcement, O allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our constitution. You know, Alex, there was a time when a Republican president, whether he would meet it or not, would say something quite like that. But of course, let's be clear, like it's a defining fact of this moment that Trump and Maga don't accept any of those things to be true. What Obama said, right? Yeah. I mean, I think it's part of the law and run of Republican and
Democratic presidents giving speeches that subtractually rebuked Trump in this exact way, right? Like George H. W. Bush could have given a large part of what you just read as well. But you know, that's I think one of the other things that really jumps out about this moment and in some ways the tragedy of Trump being president at this moment, there are many worse things that are happening. But one of them, I think, is that this is an opportunity to reflect on the actual
meaning of this nation. And I think it's one of the things that Obama does very well. It's something that actually Mayor Momsdani here in New York City. I think also did very well in the speech of the Gave on July 3rd that was largely about immigration as part of the American story. But like there's just been this refusal to engage with that kind of narrativeizing, right? Which I think is an important part of building a culture. And I think what you see with
Trump is that he's only capable of essentially either when things are going well for him building a political movement or I think attempting to sustain or salvage it, which is what we're seeing now. And it's just the political movement, right? It's only things that are innate to Trump. And as you've mentioned, right, the Declaration of Independence is hostile to that project, right? Like the reconstruction amendments are hostile to that project. When you think about, you know, I think
the larger American story, which is, you know, which Obama has narrowed advised, I think brilliantly many times, of a country struggling to live up to the ideals and its founding documents.
“That's, that's, I think, a powerful story. But that's not the story that Trump tells, right?”
The story that Trump tells is, these people won't pass a save act, and, you know, so my elections are going to keep getting stolen. You've got the world cup really sort of acting as the perfect foil to Donald Trump's Christian nationalist display of our 250th. Can you talk about the contrast there for the most part, what you've seen in this world cup is it is being a celebration of the kinds of things that Obama talked about in that speech that I think you look at when you think about
The good parts of America, right?
America, and they like to visit it because of Americans, and because of American culture. And I think
“we've seen quite a bit of that, and this tournament has largely been a huge reputation of”
Trumpism, the best player for the United States National Team during this tournament is somebody who is only a U.S. citizen because of birthright citizenship. It's a huge reputation of the president, but, you know, what we've seen since Sunday when that that player, Floor and Balagan, who had been suspended, he gets unsuspended, possibly because of lobbying from the White House and the president, the president certainly takes credit for it. And I think what you see is, it's not that dissimilar to
when Trump came to New York for Game 3 of the NBA Finals, but you see is this sort of party, right? This sort of joyous thing that's then poisoned by the president, but I think it's more notable here too, and that it's another example of his weakness culturally, right? Like the U.S. team is doing really well, but Trump doesn't own that at all, partly because again, like the this striker on this team, Floor and Balagan, is on the team because of birthright citizenship. His
backup or Cardo Peppy, his family is Mexican, right? You can, you know, the left back is English, the right back is Dutch, right? It's a complicated story of America, but it's one that refutes what the president's trying to say. And, you know, I think with this sort of 11th hour intervention, what you're seeing from this president is someone who can't own the narrative, so he has to force
“his way in. And then good, that's what we've seen here, and, you know, the U.S. will play Belgium”
after we talked before this episode goes out, but, you know, I think that the team may or may not, you know, respond to that, hopefully they are able to kind of compartmentalize it, but, you know, I think that for a lot of people, and I read about this for the new Republic site today, this has kind of poisoned the world up, and that I think is what Donald Trump has been doing culturally for the last year and a half, essentially, he's just kind of butted into things and
ruined them. And just to conclude, the Donald Trump is clearly trying to associate himself with success of the world's cup, but failing. And I think the dynamic that you're getting at is really that everyone just wants to be done with this guy and done with his movement already, right? Everybody just, at this point, sees how toxic Trump and Trumpism have really become, toxic forces in American life. I mean, the ethnic nationalism, the cruelties and the barbarities,
the corruption, the self-dealing, the oligarchy, right? The big upward transfer of oligarchic wealth, which was a major component of Trump's second term agenda, the displays of dictatorial, self-plorification, and him just kind of desecrating these symbols of republicanism, smaller republicanism in the nation's capital. Everybody just wants to be done with this, all these enmities, all these hatreds, all these degradations, all this nonsense already.
Yeah, I think that the U.S. team is a great example of this, right? So I mentioned Balagan being a sort of birthright citizen, but like, you don't have to know that to enjoy this team, right? There are fun team, and I think that they encapsulate a lot of what you would like to love about this country. If you're, you know, a maga person, you could easily get into a kind of like
U.S. a U.S. a version of this team. If you're a liberal like myself, you can find a million ways
to be excited about them, right? And I think that what you see about Trumpism, culturally here, is the inability to let those kind of like monocultural things stand, right? He has to kind of,
“you have to choose one or the other, Taylor Swift can't be Taylor Swift, right?”
He has to be an enemy of the maga movement, Bruce Springsteen, same thing, which is again, how you got the horrific music lineup at the Korean American state fair. But I think that, you know, you're seeing a kind of resistance to that now as well, right? And I think that this is a sort of political movement dying out, you know, in that, and that it's resisting Trump's efforts to co-opt it. But, you know, it sucks to be in the end stage of that too, because, you know, he is,
I think, really raging against the dying of the light right now for lack of a better term. Yes, I've been using the term late-stage Trumpism, right? It really is. It's got an end stage feeling to it, an end stage cult feeling. It's late. We're in the middle of late-stage Trumpism,
and everybody's just waiting for it to collapse in on itself, basically. And I think maybe the
ultimate tell here is for a Donald Trump to inflate the crowd sizes at the 250th event, right, which is supposed to be all about the country. And one last time, he makes it about himself, he makes it about his own crowd sizes, right? It's, it's almost the final humiliation. Well, yeah, it's how it all began, right? And that was literally day one of the Trump administration, when people were saying, oh, maybe this guy will be different, and you were just like, nope,
it's just going to be an even dumber and worse version of what we thought. And now we're just, you know,
It's crowd sizes all the way down now.
going to be brutal, but, you know, again, it's, it is the late stage.
“Late stage, Trumpism, folks. That's what America has become. Alex Shepherd, always a great pleasure”
talking to you, man. Thanks so much for all this. And you were really ahead of the curve on this
stuff. I'm telling you. Thank you. I appreciate it.
