The Fourth of July is a mere three weeks away, and the District of Columbia remains largely in the dark about what changes Donald Trump plans to make to the city's famous celebration. It's mid-June, and the National Park Service has refused to divulge just what the hell the city, which shares security responsibilities during those celebrations, should be expecting.
“The city is scrambling to figure out what to do, because all they have is the outline of what (the White House) wants,” [District of Columbia Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton] said. She said she approached the Park Service for details but: “They wouldn’t tell us a thing. You know why? Because they don’t know a thing.”
Will the fireworks be set off from a completely different location this year? Probably! Will Trump be speaking in front of the Lincoln Memorial—the bit of self-promotion at the heart of his original plans—or will he show up somewhere else? What will the security perimeter be? Can the general public even attend Trump's "patriotic" speech, or is it going to be fenced off and restricted to his own guests and supporters? We don't know! The city doesn't know! The Park Service doesn't know! Nobody knows!
It's in three weeks!
A week ago, reports were that Washington’s mayor had been given confirmation that Trump would be speaking at the Lincoln Memorial; it sounds like even that location is still not completely assured, though, much less the finer security details.
Donald Trump has supposedly tasked current Interior Secretary David Bernhardt with reformatting the event as a "top priority," and Trump himself is described as involved in "the minutiae of the planning." That, presumably, means that at least Trump himself has some very clear ideas about what he thinks the event will look like, and that Bernhardt has been working to make the event look like whatever Trump is most recently demanding it look like.
But if more than an "outline" of a plan exists, Team Trump isn't yet sharing it with the Washington, D.C., officials responsible for making it not-disastrous.