Don’t Let Trump Hijack Our July 4th
What does the president have to do with national independence, anyway?
The White House’s access reporters at Axios report that Donald Trump “lashed out” at Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu over Israeli strikes in Lebanon yesterday, saying that Netanyahu is “fucking crazy,” would be “in prison if it weren’t for me,” and that “everybody hates Israel because of this.”
Not so, respond Netanyahu’s access reporters at Israel’s N12 News: “Trump did not make personal remarks about jail or claim Netanyahu is hated globally.”
And hawks in the American media are beside themselves over the whole thing: “THE LEAK IN AXIOS WAS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW AND PROVIDED SUPPORT TO THE IRANIAN REGIME AND ITS HEZBOLLAH PROXY,” conservative radio host Marc Levin fumed.
So negotiations to end the war seem to be going great, is the point. Happy Tuesday.
Join Bill and Andrew for Morning Shots Live today at 10 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.
Not His Holiday
by William Kristol
I wrote last week that it’s increasingly and painfully obvious that Donald Trump’s attempted hijacking of our 250th birthday celebration has become a national embarrassment. But Trump’s celebration of the 250th anniversary will be his embarrassment. We need not allow it to be ours.
Embarrassment is an emotion unknown to Trump, and so he’s forging right ahead. Construction is proceeding apace in turning the White House South Lawn into a vulgar venue for Trump’s gladiatorial circus scheduled for June 14, his eightieth birthday. Active-duty military are being pressured to attend, in uniform, to act as props for the birthday boy whose painful bone spurs precluded his own military service.
Then, ten days later, on June 24, to make up for all the performing artists who’ve pulled out of his “Great American State Fair,” Trump plans to take over the National Mall for a speech. And God only knows how much Trump will go out of his way to make himself the center of the festivities on Independence Day itself.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to agitate, in honor of our 250th, for the issuance of a $250 bill with his face on it and for the construction of a 250-foot high imperial arch that only he wants that would loom over our national cemetery.
So here in Washington, D.C., Trump is trying to make America 250 all about Trump all of the time. As David Frum lamented,
a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. . . . Trump has made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment.
It can all be a bit dispiriting. One’s natural reaction can be to look away from this year, and look beyond towards a brighter future. That was my reaction last week, that “we can reasonably hope that one day soon, after this unfortunate interlude, we will once again have elected leaders who will celebrate our national birthday in a way fitting and proper for this great nation.”
But we can do better than merely hope for a brighter future. We can refuse to allow Trump’s desecration of our 250th to be our desecration.
And this doesn’t actually require that we do anything that special. All we have to do is to go ahead and celebrate the Fourth of July as we usually do. After all, the Fourth has never been about one big spectacle anchored by the president in Washington, D.C. It’s always been about family and local and community events across the nation, about family cookouts and community parades and fireworks at local high school football fields. It’s never been about looking up to something given to us by Washington. It’s always been about our gathering to commemorate our anniversary.
These events around the nation aren’t and shouldn’t be particularly solemn. They typically don’t and needn’t feature conspicuously deep reflection about The Meaning of America. They should be fun. John Adams was hardly the most fun-loving of the Founders, but it was he who wrote in 1776 that he hoped to see the anniversary of our independence marked by “Shews, Games, Sport, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.”
Dispersed, local, fun events are what we’ve done to mark July Fourth over the years. That’s what we can do and will do again this year.
But this year, our normal July Fourth celebrations can make a kind of statement. They’ll be making a statement that July Fourth is our celebration, not Trump’s. That America is our nation, not Trump’s. That here, we the people rule, not Trump.
So rather than be demoralized by Trump’s effort to hijack our holiday, we can view this July Fourth as a moment for remoralization. We can see it as an opportunity for a renewed dedication to the real meaning of Independence Day. We can look away from Trump’s sad simulacrum of kingly spectacles in Washington, D.C. Across the length and breadth of this land, of our land, we can enjoy July Fourth as our celebration of our independence.
Is the J6 Slush Fund Dead?
by Andrew Egger
The so-called “anti-weaponization fund”—the $1.776 billion slush fund for allies Donald Trump announced last month as part of a so-called settlement with the Treasury Department—has been an interesting test of a scholastic sort of thought experiment: Can the president create a humiliation so large his congressional allies can’t swallow it?
Remarkably, in this case, the answer now appears to be “yes.” As I wrote last month, House and Senate Republicans were ballistic with anger on the news of the fund’s creation. Even more remarkably, that indignation only grew stronger during the congressional recess, and many lawmakers returned to Washington this week determined to stop the thing. Yesterday, Trump seemed to throw in the towel: Multiple outlets suddenly reported yesterday afternoon that Trump was quietly telling allies he would abandon the fund altogether.
Could this still just be a feint on Trump’s part? The specifics are worth drilling into.
First, the slush fund had received a pair of judicial setbacks late last week. On Friday, after a group of plaintiffs including a January 6th prosecutor sued in federal court to block the fund, a federal judge in Virginia temporarily blocked all payments both from the Treasury to the fund and from the fund to claimants. Meanwhile, Judge Kathleen Williams, who had been assigned to the Trump–IRS case that led to the settlement in the first place, wrote Friday that she still intended to investigate whether Trump’s lawyers had “abused the judicial process” by filing “a frivolous lawsuit for the sole purpose of forcing a settlement.”
By this point, the fund seemed to be in pretty bad shape. Trump and Co. had drawn it up specifically to avoid legal scrutiny, but legal scrutiny was arriving anyway, and their ridiculously shameless argument that lawmakers should approve of the fund because they themselves could apply for money from it wasn’t landing. But pulling the plug would be met with outrage by the core MAGA base. How to pick the lock?
Step one is to blame the courts. Although the judicial hold on payments to and from the fund was only a short-term order, the Justice Department’s statement yesterday made it sound as though the court had shut the fund down altogether. The court, the government claimed, had stated that “under no circumstances may the Department of Justice proceed with the Anti-Weaponization fund.”
“This fund was open to anybody who was so weaponized [sic], targeted, or persecuted, whether they were Democrat, Republican, Conservative, Independent, or otherwise,” the statement continued, in the language of an elegy. “The Department will abide by the Court’s ruling.”
What’s going on here is obvious: The DOJ is betting that the MAGA base is so incapable of reading and processing the specifics of the news that if the fund never materializes, Trump supporters will blame the courts rather than the administration.
But the particularly interesting bit is the way the administration seems to be making a similar case to Republican senators. These senators have a lot of sway at the moment: They’re currently considering legislation to re-fund ICE and the Border Patrol, legislation into which they could easily tuck language blocking the anti-weaponization fund from going forward at all.
The pitch from the White House seems to be: Hey, look, we’re backing off on the weaponization fund—lucky for you, now you don’t have to bother with banning it!
Even this, however, doesn’t seem to be landing. “It’s pretty clear that the president has to say very explicitly that there’s not going to be a weaponization fund” before the Senate will move forward with the reconciliation bill, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said yesterday, a sentiment that was echoed by many other GOP senators.
They should go further, though. The Senate should not ignore the possibility that Trump is trying to deke them: whisper enough sweet nothings in their ear to get them to pass the reconciliation bill, then go right back to trying to make the fund happen when their moment of leverage has passed. If blocking the fund was good legislation when Trump was trying to make it work in the first place, it’s still good legislation today.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Inside MAGA’s Fake Gay Motorcycle War… In False Flag, WILL SOMMER reports on the Dunces of Anarchy.
‘Masters of the Universe’ Review… it’s a feature-length meme, writes SONNY BUNCH.
Trump Is All-In on Authoritarianism…On the flagship podcast, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to discuss Trump’s unhinged late night bleats and why we need to be vigilant for Trumpian attempts to meddle in the midterms.
Bari Weiss is “Murdering 60 Minutes”... On Bulwark+ Takes, WILL SOMMER joins JVL to discuss the explosive showdown inside CBS News where Scott Pelley confronted Bari Weiss’s new executive producer on their neutering of the famed program.
Quick Hits
15 MINUTES AT 60 MINUTES: There’s heated meetings, and then there’s what went down at 60 Minutes yesterday amid Bari Weiss’s purge of the program to install more pliable leadership and correspondents. Over at Status, Oliver Darcy has the painful tick-tock:
On Monday morning, the staff of “60 Minutes” convened for an introductory meeting with Bari Weiss’ handpicked new executive producer of the program, Nick Bilton. Bilton, the technology journalist who lacks both broadcast news and managerial experience, opened the meeting by reading from some prepared notes. He didn’t get far.
Scott Pelley, the iconic “60 Minutes” correspondent and longtime CBS News journalist, interjected and started grilling Bilton about what he dubbed “Black Thursday”—referencing the day last week in which Weiss carried out mass firings, terminating Tanya Simon as executive producer, ousting Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega as correspondents, and showing the door to other senior staffers.
In the extraordinary back and forth, an impassioned Pelley relentlessly pressed Bilton on Weiss’ intentions for the storied newsmagazine, pointed out that he has no relevant experience to helm television’s most prestigious news program, grilled Bilton on what he knew about the firings, and more.
“Bari loves this institution,” Bilton told staffers at one point during the highly contentious meeting. “She loves ‘60 Minutes.’”
“She’s murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” Pelley countered. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that.”
The meeting only lasted fifteen minutes before Bilton gave up and called it, but those were fifteen eventful minutes. Read the whole thing.
THE PEOPLE v. THE MACHINE: Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has taken a more populist, hostile approach to AI policy than the mostly pro-AI Washington GOP. Yesterday, the state sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, arguing that the company and its CEO had “chosen the AI race over the safety and security of our kids.” CNN has more:
The lawsuit, filed on Monday in Florida’s tenth circuit, accuses OpenAI of deceptive and unfair trade practices, negligence and violating product liability laws. It also seeks to hold Altman “personally liable for the harm he has caused Floridians,” including his alleged “utter disregard for the risk to human life caused by his firms’ conduct.”
The lawsuit lists a litany of accusations against ChatGPT, including helping mass shooters, encouraging suicide, causing “public humiliation,” getting minors addicted to a tool with “no parental oversight” and causing users to lose “critical thinking skills.”
OpenAI said in a statement that it believes minors “need significant protection” and that it has “put in place industry leading protections and policies.”
THE PENTAGON’S LITTLE TYRANT: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already gone to unprecedented lengths to neuter and muzzle the Pentagon press, beginning last year when he revoked the badges of pretty much every non-MAGA defense reporter after they wouldn’t sign a pledge not to report on “unauthorized” information. But the work against the Enemy of the People is never done! Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Defense Department has designated its press office a “classified space,” banning journalists—if any should ever happen to get back in the building—from accessing it at all:
While Pentagon reporters are still largely barred from the building, as litigation over the agency’s press rules continues, the change would have an outsize impact on them upon a possible return—restricting access to a space they have for years been able to walk freely.
People familiar with the change said it was driven in part by a shift that moved Pentagon speechwriters into the public affairs office. The office will be equipped with SIPRNet, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, so personnel can use the tool without decamping for a separate secured room. . . .
The latest designation creates a scenario in which even if journalists are able to access the Pentagon, their ability to interact with the department’s spokespeople will be reduced.
As the Post notes, Hegseth’s anti-press approach increasingly stands out even within the administration: Neither the White House nor other key departments like State have clamped down on access with anything like Hegseth’s zeal. Read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
Hi Bill. I’m going to quote JVL in response to you:
“For our semiquincentennial I want Donald Trump on stage ranting like a lunatic. We squandered our inheritance. We should be confronted with our choices.
America doesn’t need a celebratory retrospective.
We need a mirror.”
“This fund was open to anybody who was so weaponized [sic], targeted, or persecuted, whether they were Democrat, Republican, Conservative, Independent, or otherwise,”
This had to be in a written statement because nobody could keep a straight face while saying this into a camera.