The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 26 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
This week, Donald Trump kicked off his celebration of our country’s 250th anniversary on the National Mall. It didn’t go well. Trump’s first event was widely described by the media as sparsely attended, and as one account noted, he actually asked for more people to attend the next rally. What’s amusing about this is that it came after Fox News worked really hard to pump up the event.
Trump and Fox both know that for the sake of their broader MAGA project, it’s absolutely imperative that this gala succeed. And that’s why it’s heartening that it’s doing so poorly. Matt Gertz of Media Matters has a good piece digging into the Trump-Fox dynamic around the 250th anniversary celebration, so we’re going to get into all of it with him now. Matt, good to have you back on.
Matt Gertz: Good to be here.
Sargent: So on Wednesday night, Trump’s so-called Great American State Fair had something like a launching event. NBC News put attendance at more than a thousand—not great. The Post said the crowd “thinly covered an area that’s smaller than some summer outdoor movie screenings.” Really not great. Matt, can you just set the stage here? What was this particular event and why was it so important?
Gertz: This was the kickoff event for what’s called the Great American State Fair. The idea is to create what’s effectively a world’s fair, but for each of the individual states, down on the National Mall.
Originally this was supposed to be a big concert with a bunch of different artists who were scheduled to play. But as it became more and more clear that these Freedom 250 events are extremely partisan, the artists decided to drop out. And eventually Trump kind of threw up his hands and said, instead of having this concert, we’re going to launch the state fair with what he called the greatest rally ever. It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.
Sargent: Certainly not. And Donald Trump himself seems very sensitive to the low turnout that this first event showed. Here’s what he said at the event about that. Listen.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Then on July 4, we will have the greatest show of all on the National Mall. Your favorite president will be speaking. So please show up. Because if we have two empty seats, you know what’s going to happen? The fake news is going to say he didn’t fill out the arena. Now, I’ll be speaking—I’ll be very proudly speaking—as we ring in our 250th year with the largest fireworks display in world history.
Sargent: Matt, you know, he’s not exactly wrong. We damn well will make an issue of this if turnout really is bad, just as we’re doing right now. But there’s actually a reason for that. He tried to turn a celebration of America’s 250th birthday into a Trump rally.
This is like the epitome of personalist rule—turning this into an imperial, dictatorial display of self-glorification. It’s important that Americans reject this and not show up to this. Can you talk about that?
Gertz: I mean, I think what we have here is a president who does not respect any sort of separation between himself and the country at large. And so he views the idea of celebrating the nation’s birthday as one and the same with celebrating himself.
I think there’s no clearer way to see that than how he decided to kick off the festivities with what he personally described as a rally speech—a partisan speech in which he sort of ran down what he claims are his accomplishments and talked about himself, rather than the nation, rather than what brings us together. And that becomes more and more fraught as he becomes more and more unpopular.
Sargent: Yeah. And Fox News is really participating in the personalist side of this, hyping this event as a great thing for Donald Trump, as opposed to a great thing for the United States of America. And Fox is using this event to attack critics of the president. Let’s listen to a few examples. Here’s Kayleigh McEnany.
Kayleigh McEnany (voiceover): I’m very excited about tonight because Trump has said this is going to be the greatest rally he has ever done. And I’ve been to a lot of his rallies. But if he’s saying this is the greatest rally he’s ever done, I’m here for it.
Now let’s listen to Fox contributor Joe Concha.
Joe Concha (voiceover): There’s one party, it seems, Jesse, that is patriotic, even jingoistic, about the United States of America. And then there’s another party that is as angry as Rosie O’Donnell and George Conway. I mean, they are equally as petulant. They are downright miserable about the country, if not themselves.
And now let’s listen to Laura Ingraham.
Laura Ingraham (voiceover): So the entire lead-up to July 4, I consider it one big trigger warning to the Mamdani minions out there. Because after all, they’re happiest when foreign flags are flying. Because of them, red, white, and blue—the big extravaganza is like sunshine to a vampire.
Sargent: Matt, before we get into what all that means, can you kind of walk us through how Fox has been hyping this and what they’ve been saying in addition to those three there?
Gertz: There was a big push leading up to Trump’s speech on Wednesday night from Fox to put as much attention on it as possible. Several hosts did their shows from around the National Mall.
It’s been a tough few months for people who have to carry water for Donald Trump every night. And I think the idea here was that this would be an easy win for them, that they could focus on what they love to do—bashing Democrats, calling them unpatriotic, saying that they hate America. They spent a bunch of time using the New York primaries and the victories by more progressive candidates there as evidence of this.
And basically, they’re trying to use what should be a celebration of the Declaration of Independence, of America’s 250th birthday, as a partisan wedge issue, as a cudgel against the Democratic Party, while simultaneously talking up Donald Trump and his ability to pull a huge crowd and get them together for a big rally. So the failure, I think, of the kickoff event is a pretty big problem for them in the medium term as they try to keep that message going over the next 10, 12 days.
Sargent: It isn’t just that Fox is being partisan and using it as a cudgel against Democrats. Fox is kind of all in on this more sinister project, which is to make the celebration of the United States of America’s 250th anniversary synonymous with the celebration of Trump himself.
So they’re all in on the personalist, dictatorial, cult-like nature of what Trump actually wants to do here. You have watched Fox News for a long time. They are very willing participants in that project. Can you talk about that sort of more sinister goal that they seem to be pursuing?
Gertz: Yeah, I mean, they are the propagandists for Donald Trump. They are the people who get the base rallied, who get them excited, terrified, ready to march to the polls in November. And if that doesn’t work, who knows really what comes next.
They have access to their own network’s polls, which show that he is very, very unpopular on literally every issue. But they very rarely talk about that. They very rarely talk about the worst findings from those polls. They won’t talk about, you know, when he gets booed at a Knicks game—they’ll pretend that hadn’t happened.
And I think what underlies all of that is this idea that because Donald Trump is really so popular, the polls showing otherwise are all fake or discounted. What that means is that the only way you can get election results that don’t show him winning is through fraud, through rigging.
And so by refusing to help their viewers come to grips with the reality that the public at large is not on board with what Donald Trump has done, they’re really setting the stage for any effort that the president takes to subvert the results in November. And that, I think, is the most worrying aspect of this.
Sargent: Absolutely. And I do think it’s worth airing this once again, even though we’ve talked about it before, because it just never gets old. Every time Fox News tells the truth about Trump’s unpopularity by broadcasting their own polls, the network’s own polls, which they pay for, right? It’s supposed to be something that turns them into a real news organization. Here they’re gathering their own data to assess the state of the country.
Every time they do that, Donald Trump tells them to fire their pollster. And so they have to be extremely sensitive to what happens when they tell Fox viewers the truth about Trump’s tailspinning unpopularity, basically.
Gertz: I think that’s exactly right. I think what we’ve seen from the Dominion filings—the filings in the defamation case that Dominion Voting Systems filed against Fox News because the network was lying about how it was rigging the election—we see from the internal communications that were released in that case that people at Fox are very acutely aware that Donald Trump has the potential to damage their brand, to scare away their viewers, and to make their paydays come to an end.
And so because of that, there’s a reflexive desire to present the rosiest possible picture of the world for Donald Trump to consume, because he is part of that audience. He is watching all the time, and they’re all very aware that at any moment he could declare some sort of crusade against them.
Sargent: I want to pick up on something you said before about the effort to mobilize the base, because this seems like it really gets at the core of this in an important way. You mentioned that Fox News is seeing this as sort of a lead-up to the midterm elections. Now, the problem that they face is that Donald Trump is unpopular, including with elements in the MAGA coalition. Even non-college whites seem to be turning on Trump over the economy, for instance. That’s one of his most loyal groups.
He’s losing the groups that came to him temporarily in 2024 due to inflation and the post-COVID shock and so forth. All the Fox polling seems to show that the MAGA coalition is splitting along those lines.
And they know they’re heading into a midterm where, as it is, the pattern is always that the party out of power has all the energy and the party in power doesn’t have the energy. And so they’re looking at an absolute—they’re seeing events like this and the tarring of the left as unpatriotic over this event as the real sort of panacea for them heading into these potentially disastrous midterms, correct?
Gertz: I think that’s right. It very much reminds me of the lead-up to the 2018 midterms, where Fox was spending a lot of its airtime warning their viewers that if Democrats were able to take back the House or the Senate, that—effectively they were saying that a mob will come to your house and murder you.
It’s the similar sort of attempting to create some excitement from the base to go to the polls to stop the Democrats, even if they can’t get them excited about the Republicans. They’re hoping that they can use fear to mobilize that audience and get them to the polls on election day to keep the Republicans in power.
Sargent: One of the most amazing things about your piece was you got into how Fox News has reacted now that the turnout was pretty bad at the first go-around of this thing. Can you talk about that? They just kind of suddenly went quiet, in essence.
Gertz: Yeah, it’s been as sparse as the crowd. For all of the lead-up that they had, on the day of the event, the morning after was extremely quiet. They’ve spent very little time discussing any of this. Which I think tracks with their effort to shield viewers from understanding how unpopular the president is. If you can only get like a thousand people to come to this rally, then he must be in pretty sad straits.
Sargent: I would think that Donald Trump took notice of this, took notice of the fact that Fox News barely covered the aftermath of this thing, don’t you think?
Gertz: I think so. He put up a Truth Social post in which he claimed that 45,000 people actually showed up. And it’s got on it these photos where you can really just tell that it’s like a low angle that tries to make it look like a huge crowd. But the space that he’s filling is actually quite small. If you’ve been to the Washington Mall, the actual area that had people in it is tiny by comparison.
But I think this brings us all back to the first weekend of the first Trump administration, where Sean Spicer went out to say that this was the biggest inauguration crowd in the history of the world, when in fact everyone could tell that Obama’s was much bigger.
It’s the sort of thing that drives Trump crazy. He can’t stand that he had such a small audience. And I think, as the clip you played shows, he’s voicing that a little bit. I think we can expect some sort of push to try to get more people to show up for the big July 4 event that’s planned.
Though I have to be honest with you, Washington, D.C. on July 4 is not a pleasant place to be. And they are predicting an extreme heat wave late next week. So we’ll see how all of this goes. But it doesn’t seem likely to turn out well.
Sargent: It sure doesn’t. I would assume he’s going to get better turnout than he got here. And as you say, there’ll be this big push, but who knows? Just to close this out, I think we should bear down on this point, which is Donald Trump isn’t calling for people to show up at this thing on July 4 solely because he wants adulation and big crowds, right?
Although of course he does want those things, and it drives him absolutely insane when he doesn’t get them and when others get larger crowds. This is just a fact of Trump’s tortured psyche. We know this.
I think there’s something else going on too, though. What Donald Trump wants is lots and lots of Americans, a big swath of the American people, to buy into the project here—to buy into the depiction of the United States of America’s 250th anniversary as this kind of personalist celebration of him, as this effort to turn it into an imperial, dictatorial, self-glorifying extravaganza. And that’s why it’s important that Americans not show up.
He wants lots of Americans to buy into that conflation of America with him. And we can’t do that. Can you talk about that?
Gertz: Sure. I think what’s important here is, when we talk about America’s birthday, we’re not dating it to when the first president took office. We’re not dating it to the establishment of the Constitution, we’re not dating it to the victory over the British. We’re dating it to the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
And that’s because we are traditionally a nation that is more than its blood and its soil. We are a creedal nation that holds these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that we have certain unalienable rights like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We form governments to secure those rights, and they operate with the consent of the governed.
These are principles that we as Americans are all supposed to share. They’re ones that we try to live up to, often failing throughout our history, but that everyone from suffragettes to civil rights leaders has sought to expand to a larger share of the population.
What Donald Trump, what the MAGA movement has done over the last several years is try to take away what makes America special—to make this a country that is about the people who have lived here for a long time, the “heritage Americans,” quote-unquote. And that is just really anathema to our entire history.
And to let Donald Trump and his movement seize control of the American story and cast off everything that truly makes it a great country would be, I think, a huge error, and one that I’m not sure we could really return from.
Sargent: In fact, you could even argue that in very important respects, Trump and the MAGA movement fundamentally don’t accept many of the principles that the Declaration embodies. And so that’s why this is quite literally a celebration of him more than these ideas, right?
Gertz: Yeah. I mean, you just can’t imagine Donald Trump credibly speaking on the importance of the consent of the governed or of the fundamental rights of man. He just doesn’t have that broader context, that understanding of what America is all about. And that, I think, is a real shame.
I think the fact that we are not going to be able to have a real celebration of America’s 250th birthday—one that respects how far we have traveled, how far we have to go to live up to those words—it’s a real shame that this is what we’re going to get instead. A would-be authoritarian ruler trying to make it all about himself.
Sargent: You can’t even imagine Donald Trump credibly talking about the Declaration’s promise of equality either. Matt Gertz, all very beautifully said. And folks, let’s hope this thing is a total disaster, as it looks like it’s going to be. Matt, thanks so much for coming on. Great to talk to you.
Gertz: Thanks for having me.