We begin today’s roundup with Jeet Heer at The Nation, who explains why Democrats don’t need and shouldn’t pander to people like David Brooks who claim the party needs to appeal to conservatives:
The best thing about Brooks’s column is his frank use of the first person singular. Although he makes gestures to other hypothetical moderate voters, he is candid that the question is whether the Democrats will nominate someone “I can vote for.” This “I” is honest, since Brooks is speaking for a tiny faction, Never Trump conservatives, who twice demonstrated in 2016 that they were a powerless rump minority in the real world of politics. Never Trump conservatives failed to stop Donald Trump from getting the Republican nomination. They then failed to mobilize a sufficient number of voters to support Hillary Clinton and keep Trump from his Electoral College victory. Yet the humiliation of these defeats has done nothing to hamper their self-confidence in offering political advice.
Although minuscule in numbers, Never Trump conservatives have an enormously outsize voice in the American mainstream media. They beloved by mainstream outlets that want to present a balanced editorial voice, but are also horror stricken by Trump’s vulgarity and corruption. Besides Brooks, the New York Times op-ed page has two other conservatives who are mortified by Trump, if not always Trumpism: Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat.
At The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson reflects on Trump’s speech:
All week, reporters and citizen-journalists spotted heavy-duty Defense Department hardware being trucked into town for Trump’s martial-themed celebration of “your favorite president, me” — Bradley Fighting Vehicles, M1A2 Abrams tanks, an M88A2 Hercules recovery vehicle. The flyovers included a B-2 stealth bomber, two F-22 Raptors, two V-22 Ospreys, two F/A-18 Super Hornets, two F-35s, one of the planes used as Air Force One, the famed Blue Angels and various other military aircraft. All that was missing was a reviewing stand, like the one on Red Square where grim-faced Soviet leaders used to watch the tanks roll past.
Oh, wait, there was a reviewing stand of sorts — a closed-off VIP section near the Lincoln Memorial where Republican Party donors and bigwigs could sit up front, basking in the glow of their maximum leader. Democratic Party luminaries were not invited.
That is outrageous, of course, but not surprising. It was clear from the beginning that Independence Day meant nothing more to Trump than an opportunity to choreograph a made-for-television reelection event and give himself an obscenely expensive ego massage.
Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast:
The situation is without precedent and it is terrifying. A president who has no personal morality and nothing but contempt for democracy. A Senate Republican leader who cares only about party power. A congressional GOP that will disagree with the president here and there, on tariffs, but on the fundamental crimes he commits on a weekly basis—his abuse of power, his destruction of norms, his bending and breaking of the law—not only turns a blind eye but actively cheers him on.
The parade (which now appears to be stationary!) is a joke—but it’s not. Who else has military parades? Yes, France. Hilarious, don’t you think, that conservatives now cite France of all places to defend their actions? The Bastille Day Parade dates to 1880, around the dawn of the rise of Social Darwinism, and when France was still licking its wounds from the Franco-Prussian War and the calamities of the Commune. The Third Republic was on shaky ground. So, voila, a military parade!
So France—but among civilized democratic nations, basically only France. Other than France, guess where?
Here’s Molly Jong-Fast’s take:
It was a triumph of low expectations.
Donald Trump’s “Salute to America” speech could have easily devolved into chants of “Lock her up!”—but instead he proved that he could, in fact, read a Teleprompter. And read he did. It was a speech that had all the excitement of an excerpt from one of Bill O’Reilly’s YA history books. It was middle-school story time from hell.
The problem is that not-so-insane Trump—much like his ultra-sanitized, faux-feminist daughter—doesn’t have the oratorical skills to stir a crowd without the crazy. The other problem is that when Trump tries to speak on American values he inadvertently highlights all the norms he’s crushed with his explosive rhetoric and banana republic-style presidenting.
And on a final note, former national security appointee Patrick Granfeld provides some added insight:
Trump staged his speech in the shadow of a monument to a president who spoke of “malice toward none,” a message nearly the opposite of his own political strategy; he was just a stone’s throw away from a memorial to American dead in Vietnam, a war he had avoided.
One of the many unusual things about this Fourth celebration was its VIP tents; I watched it from thesecond of four separate areas reserved for VIPs, a dozen or so rows from the podium but with a view of the president somewhat obscured by a decorative military personnel carrier. Around me were numerous service members and their families; closer to the president, and among the multiple military honor guards, were men and women with bars on their starched sleeves indicating the number of combat tours they had served, most at least two or three, others even seven or eight.