Trump took all that money and squandered it. The booths are lackluster intentionally. No one is going to the events on the mall. Everyone is looking back nostalgically at the 1976 celebrations with the lead up to the day, history lessons for school children, the tall sailing ships into New York Harbor, the insane fireworks displays.

But this year’s celebrations are flat, unexciting, and are missing all of the events that were originally planned.

Why?

I think it’s because Trump, Miller and the billionaire assholes who run everything don’t want us to feel any kind of national and civic pride. It might inspire solidarity. It might invite questioning of our nation’s current trajectory compared to only 50 years ago. Four years before Reagan we were a different country full of pride in our accomplishments and prosperity.

We celebrated the immigrant in 1976. Imagine that.

Well, we can’t have that. Americans might start to get ideas.

So the national country fair was scrapped to almost nothing. The money was pilfered. The reflecting pool debacle? I’m beginning to think there is something deliberate about it. Yeah, make it look like the entire capital is falling apart. Doesn’t a green swampy body of water with chunks of blue rubber floating in it scream patriotism and prosperity?

They want us to feel bad about it. Depression is an emotion they can work with.

But we all live in different states. So the solution is to celebrate locally. Go all out. Make it a July 4 no one will ever forget.

Maybe that was the genius of the United States. We are still states. We are still in charge.

Do the needful, Josh Shapiro. Ring that bell.

We’re finally on our own

This summer I hear the drumming.

More dead in O-HI-O

You know, just because the Supreme Court says you can do something doesn’t mean you have to.

I’d seen another study that the Covid vaccine also may have a protective effect against dementia. And the flu vaccine. In fact, the more flu vaccines you’ve had in your lifetime, the better the protective effect. AP now reports that there is an mRNA vaccine for the flu that will give recipients no excuse to not get one as mRNA vaccines don’t require infection with a carrier virus. I predict that the side effects of the mRNA flu vaccine will be negligible.

The reason why vaccines have a protective effect on the brain has something to do with inflammation. The shingles vaccine connection makes sense because the virus that causes shingles, herpes zoster, hangs out in your nerve cells for the rest of your life after you’ve gotten chicken pox. It turns out that viral infections of all kinds can have a similar effect.

I know what you’re thinking. Could it explain the political divide as well? If you’re a vaccine skeptic, are you more likely to vote Republican or MAHA? Oh, if only Trump hadn’t destroyed the NIH so we could find out…

It suddenly feels unsafe for everyone lately. Maybe this is part of the plan to sew unrest. Put pressure on people, make them hungry, make them work too hard for too little while the nine magpies in Washington hand down ruling after ruling making all of us more indebted to the wealthy.

It must be a kick in the teeth to Pittsburgh’s black community. I’ve witnessed some unpredictable behavior. Mood swings. Who can they trust?

We will all need to be on our best behavior this summer, to treat each other with patience, kindness and compassion.

The bad guys don’t recognize Juneteenth so the rest of us have to go out of our way and never go back.

Here’s a proposed Trump double down monologue in the style of Tommy Flanagan, pathological liar:

“Yeah, that’s not what happened. She begged me. Yeah, that’s the ticket!”

The Statement From Donald Trump

“Look, folks, Giorgio Meloni—terrible person, beautiful name, but a terrible liar. She’s saying she didn’t beg me for a photo? Fake news! Total fabrication.

She came up to me—she was crying, actually. Tears streaming down her face. Huge tears. Ruining her makeup. She fell to her knees. She grabbed my hand. She said, ‘Donald, please, please, you’re the greatest president in history, even better than Julius Caesar.’ Julius Caesar—I knew him, great guy, terrible ending.

And she said, ‘Donald, I need a picture with you or they’re going to throw me out of Italy!’

Yeah! That’s exactly what she said!

And I said, ‘Giorgio, I’m busy. I’m very busy.’ I was on the phone with… with the Pope! Yeah, the Pope. We were discussing… religion. He thinks I’m doing a fantastic job. Best Christian he’s ever seen.

But Giorgio kept begging. She offered me… a billion dollars. No, a trillion! A trillion dollars and… a Ferrari. A golden Ferrari.

And I said, ‘Okay, okay, one picture.’ So we took it. In fact, we took it on my private jet. While I was flying it! Yeah, I was flying the jet with one hand… and taking the selfie with the other!

And then… my wife, Morgan Fairchild, walked in! Yeah! Yeah, that’s the ticket! Morgan Fairchild! She was there too, and she said, ‘Donald, you’re too generous with these prime ministers.’

So Meloni can say whatever she wants, but she begged. She begged like a dog. Everyone saw it. Ask anyone. Ask the Pope. He’ll tell you.

Yeah… yeah… that’s the ticket!”

No. No. No, John Thune and Mike Johnson. Trump didn’t kidnap you and hold you against your will.

Every last one of you, well, maybe not all of you, are able to think thru what was going to happen with Iran. Or you could have asked someone on the Armed Services committee. Or the intelligence committees. You could have asked Elizabeth Warren on the sly in a dark hallway what she thought closing the strait of Hormuz was going to do to the economy and working families.

You could have put an end to it the morning he started bombing Iran. Why wait? The ending was predictable.

But you did nothing. You gave Trump all the time in the world he needed to make money off of the highs and lows of the oil market. You let him get to the dregs of the strategic energy reserve. You knew damn well that short of nuking Tehran, there was no way out.

All you had to do, MONTHS ago, was tell Trump that if he effed around with the global oil market, you wouldn’t hesitate to 25th amendment him or impeach him. This time for real. God knows you had enough evidence of self-dealing and unconstitutional behavior.

That is not the path you chose.

I don’t know what has you guys finally spooked but it’s got to be bad – for you. It has to be you, right? You haven’t GAF about regular Americans for years now.

Now you have decided that you’ve had enough.

Yeah, I don’t buy it.

Whatever is coming our way has your names all over it and you deserve all the torches and pitchforks at every town hall meeting.

All of this gross incompetence and subsequent disinterest was anticipated by Mary Trump in her book Too Much and Never Enough.

There are a couple of things Donald excels at. He knows how to save his own ass and get others to protect their investment in him. That’s how he got banks to lend him money after bankruptcies. There’s a mafioso thugishness about him that should have made him a lot richer than he is.

His problem is some kind of intellectual deficiency or learning disability. Mary didn’t give a diagnosis but she did make this observation. Fred Trump knew Donald was ruthless and attention seeking. He was the flash in the front office. But Fred also made sure that the real decisions were done by others. Donald never worked by himself. He didn’t do the day to day operations. He was just the brand, not the brains.

Someone else always had their hands on the steering wheel to do the deals and transactions and make strategic decisions because Donald is simply is not capable nor has the ability to concentrate on executive functions.

So, in his first term, he had a lot of other people who covered for him and did the real work. They might have been evil f*cks too but they made sure to pull him back from his worst instincts. For the most part.

This time, he won’t let anyone do that. Sure Stephen Miller and Russ Vought are busily destroying the government. But it’s Trump who is calling the shots and literally doing whatever he wants. If he wants to rip down the east wing he does it. If he wants to start a really catastrophic war with Iran, no one can stop him. If he wants to tariff the sh^% out of us, everyone steps aside for him. Even his chief of staff Susie Wiles admits that are lets him indulge himself in whatever Chanel N°5 fantasy he can dream up. And it shows.

The support staff are still there but they’re just making it easier for him to do whatever crazy thing that pops into his head before breakfast. The other thing that’s still there is his inability to do the job he was elected to do. Trump is not a strategic thinker. Like most thugs, he thinks overwhelming force will solve the problem and now he has his fists around the most powerful military in the world. You can still ruin a fine piece of machinery if you don’t know how to use it. And learning how to use it requires a degree of intellectual diligence that he does not possess.

He is very lucky he was born rich and that people were more than happy to cater to him regardless of his deficiencies. Otherwise, he would have been a recidivist criminal after decades of convictions.

Again, it’s not that he’s making decisions that are not very good. It’s that he is incapable of making decisions based on the evidence. He can not learn. It’s a learning disability.

I guess it remains to be seen if that is an asset or a liability to us. If you can’t think, there might be a limit to how much damage you can do without triggering repercussions.

You know, I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to tell Trump voters that THIS was the ultimate Republican goal but they’d just rather focus on transgender athletes. That is much more important than whether they can stay in their homes and get treated by a doctor.

Heather Cox Richardson explains it all: