MONDAY, JULY 6, 2026
With the exception of this morning's report, the Fourth of July continues.
Tomorrow: Who is Jeffrey Rosen?
LONG ENDURE: Can some such nation long endure?
MONDAY, JULY 6, 2026
Jeffrey Rosen's concern: Yesterday, we tried to click our way through the sitting president's speech.
(You can start by clicking here.)
We refer to his rain-delayed public address of July 4th of this year. Due to the lightning the gods sent down, he wasn't able to start until 11:16 p.m. local Washington D.C. time. When he finally started to speak, the sometimes-invaluable Rev lets us see that he started by saying this:
PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/4/26): Good evening, America! You think that was easy? It wasn't.
AUDIENCE: Applause
The president was referring to the chaos of the rain delay. Then, as he proceeded, he tossed out a number--a number he may have made up:
PRESIDENT TRUMP (continuing directly): And I want to thank everybody because they did the right thing...
And they estimated they had 375,000 people before everybody had to leave. And they now have 150,000 people. It's the craziest thing anyone's ever seen. At least!
When the president describes some alleged accomplishment or some event, the accomplishment is routinely said to be something "no one has ever seen before." An invented number will often be present, perhaps to be embellished at some later date.
The initial number may be replaced by an even larger number! And so it went on this occasion, as Mediaite reports:
‘422,000 People!’ Trump Makes Wild Claim About Crowd Size at His July 4 Event
On Sunday, President Donald Trump revised his initial claim that 375,000 people gathered for the America 250 celebration on the National Mall before the crowd was forced to evacuate due to weather.
“We’re here, we’re here, we’re here. There’s no way we can be deterred. They estimated they had 375,000 people before everybody had to leave and they now have 150,000 people. It’s the craziest thing anyone’s ever seen,” Trump said during his speech that began after 11 p.m. Saturday.
Trump revised that [first] number upward on Truth Social Sunday afternoon.
“The Crowd at 7:05 in the evening was 422,000 people! All were forced to leave because of the weather, the event was cancelled, and everyone was gone because of lightning,” Trump wrote.
By now, the initial crowd was said to be substantially larger. To peruse the Truth Social post, you can just click here.
Back in real time, back in the actual speech on Saturday night, astounding flattery of us the people quickly began after that. He was flattering us the American people. Here's how the fluffing began:
PRESIDENT TRUMP (continuing directly from above): And I want to just thank you, and I feel so badly about some people they left, and they couldn't get back.
But you're very special people, and we have a very special country. Thank you very much.
Those who stayed were "very special people." That's how the fawning began.
That might have seemed like a sensible word of thanks directed at loyal followers. But as the president's speech continued, the delusional flattery grew.
By the time it was 11:18, the president was saying this:
PRESIDENT TRUMP: For two and a half centuries, our American Republic has stood as the crowning achievement of human history...And we're doing better now than we've ever done before.
No people have done more good, shown more courage, made more progress, righted more injustice or achieved more greatness than you, the American people. For 250 years, the United States of America has been the hope, the promise, the light, and the glory among all of the nations of the world.
All over the world, they try and be like us. Nobody can be like us. And with God's help, we will always be this, or even better.
Nobody can be [as good as] us, the president had now said. Later, on several occasions, he traveled that road again:
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Americans must never forget that we are a historic and heroic people with a heroic spirit and a heroic purpose on this beautiful earth of ours.
We are made of the courage and the fire and the flesh and the blood of the best and the bravest people this world has ever produced. We are the bravest and the best.
Tonight we pledge allegiance to the flag they gave us, and we say, "God bless the immortal patriots of 1776 and long live the cause of independence." May it reign forever and ever and ever. We will always be on top. We will never let our country fall. We will always be the best.
"We will always be the best," the president said. As he continued, he turned to this:
PRESIDENT TRUMP (continuing directly): Our founders not only won our liberty, they secured it with the most righteous political document ever conceived. It's called the Constitution of the United States. Very special.
And it's because of their genius that we remain the finest people on the planet after 250 years.
We're the finest people on the planet! So this severely challenged, disordered person now said.
The people who stayed to watch the speech heard themselves praised in such ways. Much later, the president added the strangest claim he's ever made--the strangest in a fifteen-year public career of extremely strange public assertions:
PRESIDENT TRUMP: After two and a half centuries, this American republic still stands tall and strong and we love each other.
Say what? Do we the people love each other? American citizens, please!
As you can see by clicking this link, we love each other so much that this very same sitting president did this the very next day:
Trump also posted a doctored picture of ex-President Barack Obama and ex-First Lady Michelle Obama boarding Air Force One; the pic showed “BLM” and Obama’s slogan “Yes We Can” spray painted onto the plane, as well as some Arabic writing.
Another doctored photo--and how strange! In the rendering posted by the apostle of love, Arabic writing had been spray-painted onto the side of President Obama's Air Force One!
You can see that post if you click that link. (If you do, you will also read about the latest insults the sitting president has directed at Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister.)
As we've noted, we tried to click our way through the entire July 4 address. Eventually, what we took to be a succession of (tasteless) acts of "stolen valor" persuaded us to stop.
We thought we were watching extremely tasteless behavior. Presumably, many of our fellow citizens didn't see it that way at all.
Way back when, President Lincoln almost seemed to wonder if a nation constructed like ours could hope to "long endure." His famous speech started like this:
PRESIDENT LINCOLN (11/19/1863): Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure...
That nation has endured, right up to the present day. The population has actually grown, from something like 33 million back then to something like 345 million today.
Lincoln's nation has endured, in the most obvious sense. But in a recent essay for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Rosen suggests the possibility that the nation President Lincoln described may not endure much longer.
Who the heck is Jeffrey Rosen? And why is he saying such things?
We think his thesis is very strong. We also think it will be ignored, except right here at this site.
Tomorrow: Who is Jeffrey Rosen?
SATURDAY: The messaging continued along...
SATURDAY, JULY 4, 2026
...right at the base of Mount Rushmore: In the last two weeks, we've alerted you to the rise of the sudden new messaging.
Last night, the messaging continued.
The sitting president was standing there, right at the base of Mount Rushmore. Sixteen minutes into the tapioca, he made an adjustment.
All of a sudden, out of nowhere, at 9:21 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time, the messaging began:
PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/3/26): You must love our country. There has never been anything like us anywhere on Earth, and we are not going to let anyone take that away.
Yet as we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack. A generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of Communism, there is now a resurgence of the Communist menace in our land.
With that, the messaging started. The president moved away from one childish theme—we're the best people who ever lived—directly to another.
Shawn McCreesh was on the scene for the New York Times. In this morning's news report, he describes the sudden pivot:
At Mount Rushmore, Trump Veers From Patriotism to ‘Communism’
Four months before tough midterm elections, President Trump used the backdrop of Mount Rushmore one night before the nation’s 250th birthday to characterize his political opponents as “godless,” “evil” communists.
“We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish stupid and unwise,” he said...
The larger purpose of the speech wasn’t hard to miss. He was sharpening a line of attack that the White House has started to use to head off a newly insurgent progressive wing of the Democratic Party that appears to be resonating with liberal voters.
Mr. Trump read from an apocalyptic script as the stony faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln looked on. He said the word “communism” so many times, you might’ve thought the Cold War was still on.
With respect to those stony faces, observers swore they saw a tear emerge from Mr. Lincoln's eye even as the current president executed two flyovers in his new Qatari jet.
(Will he use the plane for personal travel if he actually leaves the White House? No one seems to have nailed down the answer, and our news orgs don't much seem to care.)
Back to the president's address:
Just exactly how many times did he say the word "Communism?" Moving one step beyond McCreesh, we offer a provisional word count:
Word count, Mount Rushmore address
"Communist:" 6
"Communism:" 8
By our preliminary count, that's 14 usages in the six minutes devoted to this part of speech, with one additional "Marxist" thrown in.
(As best we can tell at this time, he didn't say the word "Commie.")
For the record, who are the Communists creating the current Communist menace? On what basis was he assessing them to be Communists?
The president didn't say. But as the messaging spreads during the summer and into the fall, you aren't likely to see any serious discussion of that second question. Our national discourse simply doesn't function that way.
We were struck by one part of the president's description of the Communist menace. No one believes that he's religious, but he stressed this set of claims:
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Communism is the exact opposite of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It's death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.
The godless Communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about inhuman visions and to really propose [sic] what's good. They don't love God and they don't want God. They don't love religion and they don't want religion, and they won't have it. But we won't let them win.
The unnamed foes aren't simply Communists—they're actually godless Communists.
They don't love God and they don't want God. By prevailing rules of the messaging game, observers are supposed to believe that the sitting president does.
Presumably, this will be the messaging as we move toward the mid-term elections. It wouldn't hurt for us Blues to recall the various ways, down through the years, that we helped create this mess.
REVERSIONS: Will the Democrats win either House this fall?
FRIDAY, JULY 3, 2026
Can we find a way out of this mess? Karoline Leavitt is back on the job at (what's left of) the White House.
Last evening, she was advancing the messaging which has taken shape since last Tuesday, when the mayor's three candidates won.
Assessed by standard cultural norms, the lady did look fabulous. On the other hand, as she started to speak, here's what the lady said:
LEAVITT (7/2/26): That was quite a monologue...This is not your granddaddy's Democrat [sic] Party. This is not the Democrat [sic] Party of JFK. This is a full-blown Communist revolution that is taking over Capitol Hill right here in D.C.
Let's be fair! In Red America's agitprop circles, it's been against the law to say the actual name of the Democratic Party for at least three decades. The childishness of that conduct is part of basic anthropology, but the refusal to say its name—the refusal to say its actual name—is not a MAGA invention.
That said, the claim that the Democrat Party is a coven of Commies is a piece of messaging which blew up last week when Mamdani's three candidates won.
As for Leavitt, she was guesting last evening on Jesse Watters Primetime. During the opening monologue to which she referred, the chyrons had assisted with the messaging in the ways you see here:
COMMIES DON'T MAKE GOOD LIFE CHOICES
COMMIES ARE WELCOME IN THE "BIG TENT"
COMMIE: THEY'RE AFRAID OF OUR POWER
TECH CEO: I WARNED YOU COMMIES WERE COMING
DEMS GO FULL COMMIE BEFORE MIDTERMS
As Watters delivered his monologue, large visuals behind him had offered additional thoughts:
COMMUNIST REVOLUTION
A CUP OF COMMUNISM
PERV WATCH
No explanation was offered for the PERV WATCH visual. We're guessing that it wasn't meant as a description of Watters himself, but this is the way Red Americans are being messaged in the wake of last Tuesday's primary wins.
This is no country for nuanced discussion! (Few things could be more clear.) As she continued to speak with Watters, Leavitt was soon saying this:
LEAVITT: The way that we stop this Communist revolution in its tracks is for great Americans across the country who love America, who are celebrating her and 250 years of our great nation this week, to vote against this Communist revolution, vote against the Democrats.
There's only one choice. It's President Trump, the Republican Party, and it's common sense. Communism versus common sense.
"That's a good way to frame it," the thoughtful Watters thoughtfully said. "If the Commies get in, they're going to blow things up."
So it went as the messaging agents pushed the message along. The emphasis is somewhat different this time, but a reversion to the days of Joe McCarthy can almost be discerned at such times.
That said, are any actual Communists getting nominated in Democratic Party primary elections this year? For example, is New York City Assemblywoman Claire Valdez a Communist?
Under the circumstances, you're asking a fairly obvious question! That said, consider what happened when Valdez spoke with CNN's Erin Burnett, one day after she was nominated by New York City voters for a seat in the House:
As we noted yesterday, Burnett mentioned the fact that President Trump was already messaging Communist. But wouldn't you know it? Burnett failed to ask the obvious question:
Are you now, or have you ever been, a Communist or something like that?
Burnett didn't ask, and Valdez didn't say. For the full transcript, click here.
That said, even as the interview started, producers posted a list of stances Assemblywoman Valdez was said to support. Six proposals appeared on the screen. This is what viewers saw:
CLAIRE VALDEZ POLICY PROPOSALS
Universal rent control nationwide
"Medicare for All"
Shrink private sector, grow public sector
Abolish ICE
End all arms sales to Israel
Support Palestinian statehood
Has Valdez actually made those proposals? In part because we watched this interview, we can't tell you for sure.
For the record, three or four of those proposals tend to have majority support in nationwide polling. For starters, we refer to Medicare for All, to the abolition or replacement of ICE, and to support for Palestinian statehood.
Ending all arms sales to Israel? This recent Economist/YouGov poll found that only 24% of all respondents supported that position. (An additional 17% favored reducing such sales, with 21% of respondents saying they weren't sure.)
That said, ending all arms sales to Israel was favored by 35% of Democrats, and by 47% of liberals. It was the most prevalent of four possible positions among each of those groups. Especially among liberal respondents, it was the dominant stance.
Is Assemblywoman Valdez simply the equivalent of a liberal / progressive Democrat? Or is she somehow different? Given the current state of our public discourse, there's little chance that you will ever see anyone try to examine that question.
On the other hand, the cries of Commie started quickly and they continue to come. They came from the giant platform of the sitting president, and from the most powerful organ, by far, in the realm of round-the-clock "cable news."
That said, we advise you of this:
Reversions are widely present within our agonized nation. Cries of Commie Communist Commie strike us as a groaning reversion by the right, but human imperfection being what it is, there's no way to stop reversions from taking place wherever we humans may gather.
In a new essay for The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait offers what may seem like a peculiar thought:
Even today, Communists do exist within tour nation's population! Even today, there may be people who are drawn to such ideas, or at least so Chait says.
That may seem like a surprising claim. Chait's essay appears beneath this double headline:
IDEAS
There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists
The DSA was formed in opposition to the very thing it has become.
With the weekend drawing on, we don't have time to walk you through Chait's extensive history of Democratic Socialists of America—the DSA.
His history takes us back to the Michael Harrington era. We'll give you this small taste:
A tragic irony of history is that the Democratic Socialists of America was formed in opposition to the very thing it has become.
The writer and activist Michael Harrington helped found the DSA in 1982. His goal was to build a socialist movement that would eventually pull the Democratic Party toward more humane domestic and foreign policies. He believed that a commitment to freedom of speech, elections, and other democratic norms was an absolute requirement for any socialist organization. And generations of bitter experience taught Harrington and his allies that socialist organizations had failed because they allowed communists to infiltrate them and take control of their organizing structures. Its founding bylaws accordingly permitted the expulsion of members who were “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization,” a slightly jargonish way of describing communists.
A decade ago, the excitement generated by the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign on the left and the frightening rise of Donald Trump spurred an influx of tens of thousands of young members. Some of the new recruits were Marxist-Leninist organizers who saw the DSA’s growing membership as fertile ground.
And so on from there.
Chait sees the DSA as a source of trouble. We offer a personal note:
Some of (the parents of) our best friends have been Communists! That was true of the parents of a best friend in high school, but also of the parents of a close friend during our early years in Baltimore.
There's a (cherished) third example we could cite, but we aren't going to do so. However, also this:
In the street fighting days of the late 1960s. some of our best friends in college were drawn to the Communist-adjacent ideas of groups like SDS and the PLP. Other people were strongly drawn that way.
The ideas of those groups didn't make much sense to us—but they did to them, and our friends were very good people.
Full disclosure:
There are no ideas on the face of the earth which won't appeal to some people. Some people may even favor abolishing borders and abolishing police! (Burnett didn't ask about that.)
Chait is afraid of the DSA. We can't swear that he's wrong.
We can say that the cry of Commies Commies Communists is going to roll down like the waters of that famous mighty stream. The most challenging of the mayor's three nominees has already triggered a tsunami of negative messaging from the warrens of MAGA agitprop, and it isn't going to stop.
Beyond that, exercised Democratic voters may proceed to nominate candidates in certain districts and certain states who won't be able to win. (Or not!) Republican voters have taken that fall in the recent past. We Dems could do that too.
Will Democrats win November's elections? Evrything is possible, of course, but some things don't come to pass.
We don't know who's going to win. Nor are we sure that our struggling, routinely gonzo nation can find a way out of this mess.
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