Greetings, fellow Americans* (*designation of “Americans” does not apply to critics of President Donald J. Trump) and WELCOME to President Donald J. Trump’s “Salute to America” celebration of the Fourth of July and of President Donald J. Trump.
For the first time in our nation’s history, we have a president (Donald J. Trump) who is recognizing the Fourth of July and the important role it plays in American history, as well as the important role he (President Donald J. Trump) has played in finally getting Americans to celebrate the Fourth of July, a holiday never celebrated under previous presidents.
We’re so glad you decided to join us (and patriotically donate to President Donald J. Trump’s reelection campaign) and we’re VERY EXCITED to share with you all the America-loving fun you’re about to experience thanks to our great and benevolent president. (Shout his name! And buy something with his name on it from one of the President Donald J. Trump merchandise kiosks located throughout the National Mall.)
This day will be a celebration of all the things America holds dear: the honoring of one man above all others; the flaunting of giant machines of war; and soldiers marching in unison before a political leader who personally involved himself in every detail of a celebration for which he is the keynote speaker.
Big 4th of July in D.C. “Salute to America.” The Pentagon & our great Military Leaders are thrilled to be doing this & showing to the American people, among other things, the strongest and most advanced Military anywhere in the World. Incredible Flyovers & biggest ever Fireworks!
While media outlets like The Washington Post are reporting that the National Park Service “is diverting nearly $2.5 million in entrance and recreation fees primarily intended to improve parks across the country to cover costs associated with President Trump’s Independence Day celebration” and the event will also “likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars," we want to assure you that we will, as the Founders intended, patriotically call that Fake News without providing any evidence that’s true.
The last thing you should be worrying about while you’re in Washington, D.C., for the FOURTH OF JULY EVENT OF A LIFETIME (brought to you by President Donald J. Trump) is what it might be costing or whether bridges at your local parks might collapse. Lighten up! Worrying is for liberals!
The best way you can honor American greatness is to enjoy all this event has to offer, which includes:
— A first-ever Fourth of July fireworks display. The president himself had the idea to develop these decorative sky explosions that he dubbed “fireworks.” The night will conclude with a massive fireworks show, with Donald Trump Jr. lighting all the fuses himself!
— Jumbo high-definition television screens will be located throughout the Salute to America event grounds showing streaming video of DANGEROUS illegal immigrants being patriotically deprived of basic human rights in camps along the country’s southern border.
— A Virtual Reality Outrage Booster tent will allow visitors to put on VR headsets and watch as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do some of the same things President Trump has done. Your blood will boil as you watch Obama making money off foreign diplomats staying at a Washington, D.C., hotel he owns. And you’ll be filled with anger as you see Clinton letting her daughter, Chelsea, act as a representative of the U.S. government at high-profile meetings with world leaders! Can you imagine anyone besides President Trump doing that?!? The fury will engulf you for days!
— The Indoor Skydiving Trump Donation Experience uses a giant wind turbine to simulate skydiving while also sucking all the money out of your pockets and shooting it into a life-sized replica of President Trump’s pockets. You’ll have no idea you’re being taken for a ride!
— An entire row of all-American carnival games for kids and adults, including favorites like “Whack-A-Lib”; a tricky magnetic fishing pole game called “Put the Migrant Kids in Cages”; and a high-stakes guessing game called “Who’s the Daughter Who’s Not Ivanka?”
There will be, as the president promised, “the brand-new Sherman tanks” on display in the Definitely-Not-Overcompensating-for-Something Dome of Manliness. (Don’t believe the LYING MEDIA claims that Sherman tanks were last used in the 1950s. These Sherman tanks will be new, and they will be MAGNIFICENT!)
BREAKING: Donald Trump has now ordered the U.S. Navy to “sail two huge air craft carryings” onto the National Mall for his Fourth of July celebration
There will be powerful military jets flying overhead, accompanied by Eric Trump making “ZOOOOOOOM!!!!” noises over the loudspeakers.
And of course, the highlight of the night will be a speech by our great leader, the best president in the 1,000-year history of America.
Best of all? Everyone will have great seats to hear President Trump detail how great he has made America and how grateful we should be for his greatness. And by “everyone,” we mean everyone who has done their civic duty and donated large amounts of money to President Trump.
In keeping with our all-American ethics, the White House has reserved prime seats for Republican donors and political appointees. This is truly “the people’s event,” and the people seated closest to the president will be the ones who donated the most money, as well as those who served their country by not responding to congressional subpoenas or flipping like rats.
So welcome to President Donald J. Trump’s glorious Salute to America. Enjoy your day, donate money until you feel American glory coursing through your veins and give a full-throated cheer to CELEBRATE ALL AMERICANS, except for: the pro-crime liberal LOSERS; the late Sen. John McCain; Robert Mueller; certain Gold Star families who have criticized the president; anyone who has ever criticized the president; all the president’s ex-wives; all former presidents; and the entire U.S. women’s soccer team.
God Bless (Certain Parts of) America!
Rex Huppke
My take: As for us back here we are just laughing our heads off but before we go let's consider this little analysis from Politico's Jeff Greenfield. Have a great fourth!
And on a more troubling level, what Trump is doing is wreathing himself in the most potent symbols of American history—delivering a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, site of the 1963 March on Washington, looking across at a landscape of monuments—without any appreciation for the history that made that whole landscape possible. Perhaps uniquely among American presidents, he sees himself without any connection to the American story, any link to presidents past, other than his manifest superiority to any of them.
Trump prefers to think of himself as the lone, overarching figure who can bend history to his will. “I alone can fix it,” he said in his 2016 acceptance speech. Neither that speech, nor his inaugural, invoked the name of any past leader. He appears to believe that the American economy turned 180 degrees on the day of his inauguration, rather than moving on the same upward trajectory it had been on for the better part of a decade. Nor is he bound by the restraints that have guided his predecessors in understanding when partisan politics ought to give way to more unifying themes.
This is, after all, a president who went to a CIA commemoration of its fallen agents and bragged (falsely) about the size of his inaugural audience and the number of times he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. This is the president who has repeatedly made blatantly political arguments in speeches to different branches of the military, when his long line of predecessors as commander in chief all somehow managed to observe the bright line between national leadership and partisan brawling.
There’s also a more personal dimension to the Trumpification of the Fourth. Throughout his presidency, he has taken outsize delight in over-the-top celebrations and honors given him by foreign governments, a delight that seems to translate into bizarre foreign policies. Receive the Gold Medallion from Saudi Arabia, and you brush aside the kingdom's murder and dismemberment of an American resident. Enjoy lavish banquets in China, and the brutal crackdown on a million Uighurs goes unmentioned. Get a “beautiful letter” from Kim Jong Un and maybe North Korea can keep its nukes. (And would you really be totally shocked if Kim showed up at the White House to help Trump celebrate the Fourth?)
It is not much of a reach to imagine that in the president’s mind he will see the flyovers and the fireworks as a nation paying tribute to the greatness of a man, rather than the other way around.
Trump has been obsessed by the idea of a massive military parade ever since attending the Bastille Day celebration in Paris two years ago, first ordering up a Veterans Day parade for 2018 that was canceled only after the price tag proved embarrassingly high. For someone who literally cannot grasp the possibility that more people voted for his opponent than him, or that fewer people came to his inaugural than his predecessor’s, it is not much of a reach to imagine that in the president’s mind he will see the flyovers and the fireworks as a nation paying tribute to the greatness of a man, rather than the other way around.
It is true that, on some public occasions, Trump has been able to subordinate this vanity to a sense of occasion, at least in his literal words. His speech in Normandy at the 75th anniversary of D-Day was an unexceptionable tribute to the men who stormed the beaches, although a different White House might have thought better of staging an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in front of a graveyard filled with the bodies of those men. He has delivered State of the Union speeches without describing Democrats in the House chamber as treasonous, or the media in the press sections as enemies of the people.
What remains unsettling, however, is the thoroughly reasonable conviction that when the president delivers such homilies, he has no real connection to those words. At any moment, it’s plausible to expect that the id will drive the superego from the podium, and the explosion of grievance, self-pity and rage will erupt—dominating a day that has in recent times been free of political division.
To be fair, however, that would not be the worst result of a presidential Fourth. Back in 1845, President James Polk presided over a fireworks display at the White House. During the festivities, 12 rockets were accidentally fired into the crowd, and two people were killed. If the worst thing that happens tomorrow is just a speech, we can be thankful for small favors.
- JEFF GREENFIELD
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