If you missed the news, on Friday The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump's would-be military parade turned would-be Veterans Day military parade has now morphed into Donald Trump commandeering Washington, D.C.'s, Fourth of July fireworks celebration to move its location, add "entertainers," and insert himself into the festivities.
The new tentative plan is for Donald, being the most important thing to have ever existed in America, past or present, to grace the nation with a speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, turning what has long been a nonpartisan event into an evening of Donald Trump Lying About Things. Will he use the event to once again attack his enemies, including federal investigators, Congress, and the free press? Will he deliver an extended rant about the dangers of immigration, or brag about new invisible sections of border wall? We don't know, and neither does he: The man is incapable of staying on script.
You may be wondering why exactly the Trump administration is seeking to make changes to the most cherished and best-run Fourth of July celebration in the nation. The answer appears to be that Donald is bored, and Donald wants pomp and circumstance, and so the entire federal government will now be tasked with making him feel good. The Post’s sources say that crafting the new event has now become a "top priority" for new Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who was assigned the duty early in the year.
So that's a plus, at least. Bernhardt's efforts to gut protections of the nation's federal lands are being at least partially delayed by his being Donald Trump's personal party planner.
Trump himself is described as absorbed in "the minutiae of the planning," with aides saying that it is holding his interest in ways few of his other, actual presidential duties can. (That appears to be intended as praise.) That is unsurprising, and in keeping with his character: Trump is not an intellectual and has no patience for things like national security briefings or knowing what is actually in the bills his staff presses for, but put some color samples on his desk and his eyes will light up. The man remains committed to inflicting his notions of glamour on as many victims as possible, and the idea of inserting himself into a much-loved national tradition must be making him positively bubbly.
While most objecting to Trump's still-nebulous changes to the event are pointing to the unknown additional costs or the very obvious impropriety of Shouty Angry Man inserting himself and his grievances into a traditionally positive and nonpartisan celebration, there seems a rather more obvious potential downside to Trump deciding even the "minutiae" of the new event as well: the fact that everything Donald Trump touches turns to garbage.
The man who had to be retroactively spliced into rough coherency by reality show editors is going to have a hand in creating an evening's national entertainment? The man who wrecked a casino is going to be in charge of where to put the fireworks barge?
Yikes.
