The LuLac Edition #5, 714, July 15th, 2026
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This week we loom at a recap of the Trump 4th of July celebration and how it went over with his MAGA followers. Did they get treated right or like cattle? You be the judge.
AUTOPSY ON TRUMP'S 250th PARTY
Hours before Donald Trump addressed the nation on its 250th anniversary, the National Mall was in chaos. A storm was on the way, and law enforcement had ordered the MAGA faithful to evacuate — a process that did not go smoothly. People had waited in the extreme heat for hours to celebrate Trump and America; now they argued with the Secret Service and chanted “USA, USA” out of fury. As the lightning descended, the New York Times liveblog began to sound a little incredulous. A Times reporter heard a man blame the order on “liberals in the weather service.” Crowds seeking shelter found nearby buildings locked up for the holiday. An officer in front of the Commerce Department “shrugged” when someone asked him how to get inside, the liveblog noted. Others huddled inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Although Trump eventually appeared on the Mall for his speech, the spectacle had grown damp and strange, a fitting conclusion to months of disorder.
By now the mess is familiar. The Great American State Fair attracted small crowds; some states even declined to participate. Bret Michaels backed out, and so did Martina McBride. The Real Milli Vanilli said they would not perform. When a Washingtonian reporter visited the scene, an Evangelical preacher was holding forth from the main stage without an introduction; “the handful of other spectators” said they don’t know who he is. A mock-up of Trump’s triumphal arch oozed a puslike substance, and a robot dog danced alone in the mud. Nearby, the reflecting pool sat green and full of algae, lethal to ducklings and irresistible to protesters, who demonstrated next to it in costume. A grand jury indicted an Olympic canoe racer for touching a piece of the pool’s disintegrating bottom liner. Two days before the storm, a portion of the stage broke off and nearly struck dancers who were in the middle of a rehearsal.
Trump’s tastes have always been entertaining, if garish. Lately, though, the seams are fraying. Last weekend’s semiquincentennial shitshow is almost the least of it: The White House is now a construction site, and the entrance of the Kennedy Center is covered by scaffolds and wrapping. A spokesperson for the center told The Atlantic that the tarps are there for a maintenance project, but they also hide the building’s name, which, because of a recent court order, is no longer Trump’s. The landscape is ugly. Worse, it’s dull. If Trump can’t throw a good party or make everything golden, what’s left? Loyalists have leaned on MAGA for glitz and a little excitement. Without spectacle, the future of the movement is in jeopardy.
In 2015 and 2016, Trump’s rallies were notoriously extravagant. The crowds grew, inexorably; they fawned, as no one has ever fawned over Ted Cruz. Against a star-spangled backdrop in state after state, Trump made the mob laugh and channeled its libidinal hatred. He returned to the same lines, played the same songs, and it generated a kind of emotional bond among the crowd. People wept. At times, the frenzy spilled into violence. Trump said he’d like to punch a protester in the face, and some events broke out into brawls. Protesters “walk in and they put their hand up and they put the wrong finger in the air … and they get away with murder. Because we’ve become weak,” he said at one event in Fayetteville, North Carolina. As the election approached and stories of Trump’s sexual misconduct went public, rallygoers started booing the press at his urging. “For them, it’s a war,” he said of the media. The crowd cheered.
, The vibe reminded me of worship services I’ve attended, but there are other, secular antecedents for the role of spectacle in the MAGA world. The tea party has always known how to make itself the center of our attention. People dressed up as various Founding Fathers and warned of death panels. In college, I attended one rally in Springfield, Ohio, and observed a middle-aged white man wearing heavy chains, which he would rattle to make a point about the injustice of taxation. A report in The New Yorker described the feeling as one of “festive despair,” fed by grievance. Texas Monthly saw George Washington on horseback, leading rallygoers in “a rag-tag march” around the state capitol before asking them to “swear an oath of enlistment” to his cause. Participants thought D.C. could not hear them so they made themselves obnoxious — so successfully they and their moneyed patrons reshaped the Republican Party. The tea party was not a cult of personality, like MAGA, but theatricality was key to the movement. It sparked interest.
Before the tea party, there was George Wallace and his third-party run for president in 1968. A vicious segregationist, Wallace ran on racial hierarchy — or law and order, as his modern-day compatriots like to call it. Wallace had flair, if nothing else; a country-boy affect and slapstick grin helped him sell the poison. In Alabama, a rioter “gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all,” he said that year. He kept his fans laughing and worked them into ecstasy. The writer Garry Wills described a Wallace rally in Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man, in grotesque terms. “This middle-aged group, so critical of the hippies’ four-letter words and ‘immorality,’ had already, at eight o’clock, donned the ten-o’clock faces of an all-night party at the Elks Club,” he wrote. Wallace radiated “a gritty nimbus of piety, violence, sex.” He railed against communists and journalists and the ungrateful youth of America while supporters honked their air horns and shook their fists at hecklers in their midst. “Their happiness is enough to break the heart,” Wills wrote. Wallace lost, but the Equal Justice Initiative says he is still “the most successful and popular independent candidate in modern presidential election history,” having won 10,000,000 votes during the general election and the electoral votes of five southern states.
As with Trump, hate was as much a part of Wallace’s campaign as the spectacle. To his followers, he pledged counterrevolution, the revival of their power over Black Americans. The tea party began, arguably, with Rick Santelli’s rant against foreclosure aid to struggling homeowners. From there, it absorbed various outrages — over big government and health-care reform and taxes — represented by the nation’s first Black president. MAGA combines the same counterrevolutionary fervor and racial prejudice with standard conservative policies and the father worship of Donald Trump, plus a kind of joie de vivre that anticipates better days ahead. If Trump can’t sustain that energy through rallies and fun and whatever else he dreams up, he looks less like an idol and more like a man. For now, grocery prices are high, people are losing their health care, and the job market looks weak. Deportations are up, congratulations to all, but wailing children and dead protesters leave an impression.
There won’t be a mass epiphany within MAGA. Online, the most conspiratorial Trump supporters blamed sabotage for the Fourth of July weather; there are traces of Jade Helm to be seen. But others may experience something more subtle, like the sense of being had. Trump understands his vulnerability, on some level, which is why he is obsessed with the size of his crowds. Without them, he’s just another president. In the absence of spectacle, corruption and cruelty are more difficult to ignore. MSN NEWS, LuLac)
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posted by David Yonki @ 7:10 AM
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