Trump's tacky party reflects the needy man I knew. All Americans share his shame
On the National Mall last week, the President of the United States stood before a half-empty field and did something future historians will study as a portrait of decline. He asked America to show up for its own birthday party. Please come, he begged viewers. If there were two empty seats, he warned, the “fake news” would say he couldn’t fill the event. He was a man reading his own nightmare aloud.
Donald Trump wasn’t wrong about the empty seats. But there were vastly more than two. And like other recent debacles, the dismal turnout for America’s 250th birthday celebrations has become symbolic of the President’s second term.
He was dealt the easiest hand in modern presidential stagecraft. The date for these celebrations was fixed in 1776, and short of the dissolution of the country, no opponent could move it nor scandal cancel it. The national birthday belongs to everyone, and in theory, everyone could be easily rallied to support it. All he had to do was step aside and let America celebrate itself.
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Researchers said that people with strong pecs, back muscles and torso are also less likely to die within the next decade.
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It said that all kinds of exercise, and not just strength training, can improve muscle density.
It is fascinating that people’s skeletal muscle could be linked to their risk of having a heart attack. I am now personally interested in exercises like cycling, planks and pilates, which I enjoy and may have an effect on these muscles.
What are the things that you do to keep yourself healthy? Your mind might jump straight to the run you do a couple of times a week, or the choices you make about what to eat, the amount of sleep you manage to get each night or the friends who make you feel seen and heard. And you’d be right. These are all things that keep us healthy.
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How much the price cap will increase from Wednesday, 1 July.
The average gas and electricity bill will jump to £1,862 a year.
There are currently 27 fixed deals available that are cheaper than July’s price cap, with average savings of £285, so act now to save yourself money. The price cap is going up, but your bills don’t have to.
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Instead, his “Great American State Fair” has become indivisible from Trump himself, leading even D-List celebrities to cancel their performances for fear of association. The festivities have been so sparsely attended that Fox News (which had hyped it for days) suddenly found other stories to cover. Entire US states decided not to send delegations and left their booths empty, like place settings for guests who’d sent their regrets. It has been, in a word, embarrassing.
None of it should surprise us. Every humiliation of this administration, however small or large, is the result of one thing: Trump unfiltered. The institutional strainer that once stood between one man’s festering foolishness and the entire apparatus of the American government has been removed.
How did we get here? Let’s travel back a few years. When I served in Trump’s first administration, the system worked more or less the way it was supposed to. Was it perfect? No. But many despicable inputs — like a proposed worldwide “Muslim ban” and schemes for torturing migrants — were tamed by law, process and propriety. The system worked like a water purification system with a series of filters, each designed to catch a different toxin from the relentless stream of idiocy and proud illegality emanating from the Oval Office.
On any given day, Trump might be sitting in the anteroom to the Oval Office, watching flattering coverage of himself on Fox News (the task that consumed more of his presidential energy than governing ever did) and shouting ideas for tweets to his social-media gopher – perhaps a schoolyard barb about the physical appearance of an opponent.
Meanwhile, upstairs in the White House Counsel’s office, lawyers might be meeting to prepare a briefing for the President on why it would not be legal for him to unilaterally declare a “rebellion” in the United States, as he told them he planned to do that night, in order to send troops into American cities to enforce his immigration edicts.
Back downstairs in the Chief of Staff’s office, aides might be in an emergency huddle to stop a government shutdown after Trump had decided on a whim he might shutter agencies in pouting protest for not getting something he wanted in a bill (his staff knowing a shutdown would get him nothing but would leave federal employees penniless and services hobbled).
In the Situation Room, officials from the Pentagon and National Security Council might be in tense discussions about an early-morning presidential directive sent out via Twitter — on which he’d consulted no one — that had plunged US forces overseas into mortal danger.
In the White House mess, a US senator might be lunching with senior administration officials, warning that if Trump kept trying to spend money he didn’t have on a priority Congress hadn’t approved, he’d be breaking the law and risking impeachment.
Over on West Executive Drive, a Cabinet secretary might be stepping out of an armoured car, having conceded the President was too dim to follow a briefing, carrying a stack of pictures to re-explain an issue for the fourth time.
And across the street in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, experts in a dozen fields might be working to propose alternatives for the President on matters where his first instinct was to break the law – trying to find him a way to do what he wanted without using the Constitution as a rag to polish his black-laced Oxfords.
I lived each of the above scenarios. Usually, Trump was talked off the ledge.
His first term was flooded with noise and nonsense, overseen by a president who didn’t understand what his staff did and didn’t much care. But the filters caught the worst of it, though it didn’t feel like that to most Americans, who heard the President declare power grabs and shocking offences before the bad ideas were quietly ironed out or sent into the document shredder.
Russell Vought, who helps Trump oversee trillions of dollars in federal spending, reportedly laid out his second-term plans in a private 2024 speech: “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.” He left no mystery to what would come next. Strip out every guardrail. Remove every person who might say no. Build a government in which the only voice in the room is that of a man who cannot think in complexity and will not tolerate being questioned.
You’ll hear, from Trump and his hanger-ons, that this is why he had to go after the “deep state”. People like me – a bunch of unelected bureaucrats – were the reason the first term hadn’t gone so well. This is like saying the smoke detector is the reason your kitchen keeps catching fire.
In truth, these filters weren’t a “deep” state, they were the top layers of government filled by Trump’s hand-picked appointees. They got close enough to realise how observably incompetent he was and, in time, understood that someone had to stand between him and catastrophe. His lawyers. His Cabinet. His national security team. His people, trying to prevent impeachment or keep innocent people from getting killed.
Many of the challenges we had with Trump when I was helping run his Department of Homeland Security involved choices that could have resulted in agents or ordinary Americans or allies dying pointlessly. If that sounds like a “deep state” abomination to be dismantled, you may be the type who’d complain the sanitation plant is standing between you and “real” water. Fine. Strip it out. But understand you’ll also get the raw sewage, industrial rot and every poison the machine was removing before it reached your glass.
So it is in term two. In place of “adults” sit people like Natalie Harp — the aide known as Trump’s “human printer,” who follows him with a portable printer because he won’t read off a screen, funnels him a stream of laudatory coverage, and according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book, tucks adoring notes into his personal spaces. One reportedly read: “You are all that matters to me.”
That’s who is in the room now. Instead of people trying to prevent disaster, he’s encircled by people assuring him none could befall a man who turns all he touches to gold (if only because he orders everything to be repainted that colour).
This week, we are reminded what comes out of his mind when the filtration system is turned off. What you’ve seen on the National Mall for America’s 250th is raw Trump, from wrestlers to third-rate celebrities to the military flyover staged like a parade in a country that used to laugh at nations that relied on choreographed military force to “prove” their strength.
A CNN reporter offered a sense of how the celebrations feel, pointing to what he called “fake pillars and fake gold American eagles” where state pavilions were being erected, and a miniature version of the President’s proposed “Arc de Trump”. The focus is the US leader and his love for himself.
The proceedings have oozed desperation when they should have provoked awe. Anxious Trump fears empty chairs because this is a data point his reality-distortion field cannot change. A photograph of a lacklustre crowd is measurable and humiliating.
America’s semiquincentennial should have been a mirror in which a great country saw itself. Instead, it’s a cautionary tale. This is what happens when the filters are yanked out, and when a man with the comprehension of a pre-teen and the desires of a strongman is left alone with the machinery of a superpower.
Trump has spent his life terrified of being seen as a loser. I once wrote a memo to explain why he shouldn’t pull out of Afghanistan too fast, and it only seemed to work because I wrote that the terrorists might tease and mock him as “a loser” if he backed away during his first year in office. In reality, we were worried what would happen if he withdrew US forces suddenly, failed to negotiate a lasting security agreement and created a power vacuum that could be filled by the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
In moments like these, Trump has revealed the yawning canyon of his insecurities. He says he tries not to surround himself with successful people so he doesn’t have to listen to their stories and, apparently, so he doesn’t have to be compared to them. The irony isn’t lost on me that he’s built a near-vacant monument to that lifelong fear on the National Mall, and invited the world to watch people sulk through his “Great American Fair” like a parking-lot circus past closing time.
The shame spreads further than just one mediocre circus master, self-inflated by fool’s gold grandiosity. It spreads to all Americans who handed him this. We let a person who, in my experience, cannot hold a complex idea in his head turn the nation’s 250th birthday into an audition for his own applause. He failed so spectacularly that we are now standing with him watching that empty lot and feeling hollow.
Allow me to impart a final message to students capable of understanding reality a layer or two deeper than “winners” and “losers”. When you build a filtration system, whether in constitutional republic or a water treatment plant, you do it to protect something. To keep it functioning, uncorrupted, clean. It is not an enemy because it stands in between you and the real thing; it might be the only reason the real thing won’t kill you. If you tear it out, you’d better be prepared to drink what’s left.
For Americans today, that means drinking shit for our birthday.