Trump’s July 4 Event Is Coming Apart at the Seams—Literally

The sky is actually falling at the Great American State Fair.

The stage for Freedom 250’s July Fourth celebration fell apart during rehearsals Thursday, with a large component of the structure’s ceiling falling roughly two stories down and landing behind a group of dancers and musicians. Miraculously, no one appeared injured.

Online commenters were quick to flame the stage’s apparently dangerous construction.

“That’s what happens when you don’t consider merit in hiring,” wrote one X user.

“This is why you never let Trump select the subcontractor based on percentage of kickback,” commented another.

Even a lawmaker joined in on the roast.

“Feeling more and more like the Hunger Games,” wrote Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie.

Practically every component of Trump’s wildly expensive plan to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary has turned out to be a dud. The $15 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool failed to rid the iconic monument of algae; a multi-week lineup of music acts had to be cancelled after practically every artist pulled themselves from the program; and a fleet of buses carrying a contemporary retelling of American history have failed to make a splash in their journey across the country.

The Great American State Fair was supposed to be the centerpiece of the celebration, yet even it is more of a potemkin village than a sincere homage. The booths, which offer space for each state to represent its heritage and culture (pet a replica of a bison at the North Dakota pavilion, or walk away with a bag of chips from Maine), are ideologically pitted against the seismic presence of the federal government and Trump’s authoritarian expansion (banners featuring Trump’s grim face flank the event, while a small-scale replica of his proposed “Triumphal Arc” sits center stage). As The Atlantic’s Kelsey Ables put it, “the president is bringing down the mood.”

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced Thursday that a grand jury had indicted former Olympic canoeist David Hearn on charges of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The indictment seems rather flawed, as Hearn, 67, maintains that all he did was dip his hand into the pool and touch a piece of peeling paint.

“I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told The Washington Post the day after his arrest last month. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”

At a press conference Thursday, a reporter asked Pirro why Hearn was being charged with a felony over something so small, and she struggled to explain.

“There was an effort, a violent effort, to rip up the sealant from the pool, and irrespective of whether or not we think that there is some situation that preceded it, we can state, and prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that he caused damage, and that damage is worth over a thousand dollars,” Pirro said.

When asked how she could prove that, Pirro said, “With an expert,” and urged the reporter who asked the question to come to the trial. The reporter incredulously asked if Hearn used his bare hands, to which Pirro affirmed yes, both hands. The reporter then asked if the pool wasn’t already damaged before.

“Oh, he damaged it. He damaged the pool. He damaged this pool,” Pirro repeated. When the reporter brought up videos showing that the pool’s paint was already peeling, Pirro said, “Well, good. I’m glad you got that evidence. Come on in the grand jury and you can testify.”

It all seems nuts, as the poor state of the pool, from algae growth to peeling paint, had been documented for quite some time before Hearn visited it. The paint had been peeling because hydrogen peroxide was dumped into the pool in a vain effort to kill algae growth. Hearn is clearly being made a scapegoat to satisfy President Donald Trump, who is blaming nonexistent vandals rather than admit he messed up the pool.

A heat wave in Washington, D.C., is making attendance at President Trump’s July 4 festivities even worse.

U.S. Capitol Police have already restricted Thursday night’s rehearsal for “A Capitol Fourth Concert” to essential personnel, posting on X that they came to the decision after consulting with the Capitol’s Office of the Attending Physician.

“For safety reasons, the public will not be able to attend tonight’s rehearsal concert,” the post read. “Everyone is sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. The National Weather Service is forecasting an extreme heat watch with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.”

The post added that an update will come Friday by 10 a.m. on the status of the full concert, which is scheduled to take place from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday night.

Similar warnings are hitting the Great American State Fair; organizers have already had to cancel a rodeo demonstration scheduled for Thursday night. Attendance at the fair overall has been depressed, and some visitors are complaining about the weather. U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer had an audience of maybe 25 people when he spoke about tariffs on the main stage Thursday afternoon.

Many booths at the fair don’t have air conditioning, leading at least one visitor to overheat. She told a reporter she finally found relief at a baptism tent, where she took a dip to cool down.

Even without the heat, the fair is coming across as tacky, with empty booths and a lack of energy. The food is expensive, reviews are abysmal, and people aren’t coming, enraging the president. When it hasn’t been hot, it’s been raining. America’s 250th anniversary was already going poorly thanks to Trump, and now the weather may cement the once-in-a-lifetime event’s status as a failure.

Yet another Republican lawmaker is missing in action.

Florida Representative Neal Dunn’s office told Punchbowl News Thursday that he won’t be voting unless Republican leadership says they need him.

Donald Trump put the 73-year-old lawmaker on blast in March, prematurely revealing at a White House event that Dunn was suffering from a terminal heart problem and would be “dead by June.”

“Congressman Neal Dunn of Florida had had some real health challenges, and it was very serious, and had had a pretty grim diagnosis,” House Speaker Mike Johnson admitted at the event at Trump’s behest. “I mentioned it to the president. I said, ‘Congressman Dunn is a real champion and a patriot because he’s still coming to work, and if others got this diagnosis, they would be apt to go home and retire.’”

“What was the diagnosis?” Trump pressed.

“It was—I mean, I think it was a terminal diagnosis,” Johnson said.

“He would be dead by June,” Trump interjected, before Johnson confessed, “That wasn’t public.”

Dunn has not been on Capitol Hill since June 11 and has so far missed 11 votes, according to his voting record. Nonetheless, he has not announced any plans to truncate his time in office. In January, Dunn released a statement indicating that he would not seek reelection, though the former Army surgeon is apparently not planning to formally bow out before the end of his term.

Dunn has a bad track record with missing votes. Since he entered the House in January 2017, Dunn has missed 246 of 4,992 roll call votes. That means the septuagenarian has missed at least 4.9 percent of the votes that took place during his term, according to an analysis by Govtrack.us, which is much more than the median of 2.1 percent missed by other representatives.

But he’s not the only Republican who’s been missing in action. Representative Tom Kean Jr. was absent from Congress since March 5, sparking a Washington brouhaha that lasted until Tuesday, when he suddenly appeared before the House floor to share that his inexplicable multimonth absence was due to depression. Notably, Kean has voted repeatedly to block paid sick leave for his constituents.

The Department of Justice accidentally released the second volume of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on President Trump’s handling of classified documents in a legal case last month, according to a legal filing published Thursday.

DOJ lawyers sent the sealed report to lawyers for Carmen Lineberger, who was charged with stealing the report by emailing it to herself disguised as a cake recipe. On June 3, DOJ officials handed over discovery items on flash drives to Lineberger’s lawyers. Included in those drives were documents embedded in electronic messages that were required to be disclosed. On June 9, the defendant’s attorneys reported they found three documents and contacted the government to confirm if they were supposed to be part of discovery materials.

After they reviewed the documents, DOJ lawyers confirmed that they were actually copies of Smith’s report. Defense attorneys told the government they stopped reviewing the material before examining the report itself, deleted the discovery materials they had downloaded, and handed the flash drives back to the government. Thursday’s legal filing was to notify Judge Aileen Cannon, the judge presiding over Trump’s classified documents case.

The accidental leak has to be embarrassing for the government, considering Trump’s successful effort to keep the Smith’s report hidden from the public after he won the 2024 presidential election. The defense counsel could have leaked the documents, but considering that their client was accused of improperly handling them, chose to follow the rules.

The situation is ironic, considering Smith’s report was all about how Trump allegedly mishandled classified documents by keeping them at Mar-a-Lago instead of returning them to the government. Smith’s case wasn’t allowed to go to trial thanks to Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissing it on flimsy grounds. It seems that the public may never know the full details of what Trump did.