After record heat and severe thunderstorms forced America’s 250th birthday party to downsize and later evacuate the venue for fear of lightning strikes, President Donald Trump forced the show to go on so he could have his star turn at the center of the show long after many Americans had finished celebrating.
While Trump mostly stayed on script to highlight America’s success over the last 250 years, he did get in his partisan shots about his modern agenda. One frequent target was his common anti-communist refrain that has used after progressive wins in recent elections.
“We’re not going to let it happen,” Trump said on Saturday. “We like to stop a threat like that immediately, and before it begins. It’s like a cancer, you got to cut it out, you got to cut it out fast.”
The president took to a stage on the National Mall at 11 p.m. — with less than an hour remaining to mark the country’s semiquincentennial — so he could deliver remarks preceding what the White House-aligned Freedom 250 organization characterized as the largest fireworks show in history. He walked on to “Hail to the Chief” accompanied by First Lady Melania Trump, immediately following a live performance of “God Bless the USA” — the 1990s-era paean to American pride that he’s used as a partisan anthem for the last decade.
After praising organizers for taking precautions for the lighting, he proceeded to immediately lie about the size of the crowd who’d come to see him, telling attendees there’d been “an estimated 375,000 people” present before the evacuation and “150,000 people” remaining — despite no evidence that the crowd was anywhere near that size.
He then launched into a speech that was little different from what he would deliver at one of the campaign rallies that have been a mainstay of his decade atop America’s political scene.
At first, he offered generic patriotic platitudes appropriate to the occasion, calling the U.S. “ the crowning achievement of human history” and claiming the country is “stronger, freer, richer, safer and prouder than ever before.”
But he quickly pivoted to partisan rhetoric by claiming that Americans “don’t want communists in our country,” a veiled attack on a group of Democratic House candidates in New York and Colorado.
“Americans have fought, bled, and died not just to secure those rights, but to expand them to citizens of every race, religion, color, and creed. Because we are one people, we are one family. You showed that tonight with one flag, and as our Declaration of Independence tells us, we are all made in the image of one almighty God. And a communist will never say that, that’s for sure,” Trump said.
Invoking the heroism of elderly veterans who he had brought on stage during his speech, Trump said American “warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America.”
He also offered up unverifiable boasts about “record” military and police recruiting while claiming that “people respect and love our country” again before later touting the “Save America Act,” a partisan voting restriction bill that he claimed would keep his Republican Party in power for the next century if allowed to become law.
The president’s partisan, campaign-style remarks were the culmination of more than a week of events put on by the MAGA-aligned group, which has injected the celebrations around the country’s milestone with a political tinge while largely sidelining the bipartisan Congressionally-authorized organization that had spent a decade planning how to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
But those events, including the Great American State Fair that has taken up much of the National Mall since last week, have taken on a shambolic quality with sparse attendance and record-high temperatures leading to paltry crowds despite Trump’s frequent boasts to the contrary on social media.
The heat, which topped 100 degrees Saturday, forced organizers to delay the planned program and set up multiple cooling stations to accommodate crowds who were forbidden from bringing in food, drink or much of anything at all by heavy-handed Secret Service-led security teams.
But even those precautions weren’t enough to prevent Washington’s chaotic summer weather from putting a damper on Trump’s big speech plans.
Though the night’s program had been scheduled to kick off at 7 p.m., within half an hour of that time, organizers were evacuating the entire venue due to what Freedom250 organizers called “approaching severe storms.”
Hours went by while lightning could be seen around the Washington area, but Trump refused to be deterred by the danger or the potential downsides of forcing rallygoers to wait for him in the rain.
At 9 p.m., he posted on Truth Social that the storms would “bring good luck” and “make events a little bit more exciting.”
“We will wait it out, I don’t care if it’s 2:00 O’Clock in the morning, or in one hour from now,” he said.
“It’s Saturday night, LETS HAVE SOME FUN, even if we are out late tonight. They say 11:00 O’Clock for the speech. Who cares???”
Not long after, a Freedom 250 spokesperson said the event venue would reopen “at President Trump’s direction” with his remarks pushed to 11 p.m.
While Trump went off script to brag about his accomplishments and some partisan shots, he spent most of his speech talking about America and the freedom it provides to its citizens.
“We may be the oldest Constitutional Republic on Earth, but our country is just getting started,” Trump said, “because the best is yet to come.”
