President Donald Trump’s Fox News propagandists would like to use this summer’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence to smear Democrats as unpatriotic. But if Wednesday night’s launch of the Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C. — a poorly-attended campaign-style Trump rally — is any indication, the strategy's fatal flaw is the president’s catastrophic unpopularity.
Trump, in collaboration with Freedom 250, the political group he launched to supplant the congressionally established organization overseeing the semiquincentennial, has turned America’s 250th birthday into a celebration of himself. After several musical acts originally slated to perform on Wednesday dropped out earlier this month in response to this politicization, Trump announced that he would be the night’s main attraction at what he termed “the Greatest Rally, EVER.”
Fox, led by Kayleigh McEnany, the former Trump White House press secretary turned network host, set the expectations sky-high in the hours before the event.
McEnany told viewers on Outnumbered that the president would be “kicking off” America 250 “with a massive rally on the National Mall.”
“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,” she added on Jesse Watters Primetime. “But if he's saying this is the greatest rally he's ever done, I'm here for it.”
But the event turned out to be a low-energy dud, with the listless president praising himself and his administration’s accomplishments to a shockingly small audience.
NBC News estimated attendance at “more than 1,000,” while The Washington Post reported that “the crowd thinly covered an area about the length of the National Museum of American History, smaller than some summer outdoor movie screenings.”
The Post further reported that the president “did not appear to enjoy the speech” and “wrapped in under a half-hour,” adding: "He asked for a bigger turnout for his next appearance on July 4."
“Please show up, he said. ”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.”
Trump’s performance, his attempt to refocus the semiquincentennial around himself, and the shrinking percentage of Americans who think he is doing a good job pose a problem for Fox’s effort to use the celebration as a cudgel against Democrats.
On Jesse Watters’ show, contributor Joe Concha used the events on the network to draw purported contrasts between “patriotic” Republicans and Democrats “downright miserable about the country.”
“As we see this communist takeover continue in major American cities, I mean, do you want to be the party that hates this country, they want to tear it all down because some people just want to watch the world burn, or do you want to be the party that embraces what makes this country so awesome?” Concha said.
He then provided a list of such things: “Amazon, Apple, White Castle, Top Golf, the Jersey shore, Savannah Bananas, Sydney Sweeney.” (Notably, he did not mention the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or any part of the American creed.)
“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 are happiest when foreign flags are flying,” host Laura Ingraham likewise sneered on Wednesday before Trump’s speech. “Because to them, red, white, and blue, the big extravaganza, is like sunshine to a vampire.”
But on Thursday morning, Fox’s coverage of Trump’s rally was as sparse as the previous night’s crowd. The network’s reality distortion machine is unable to countenance their beloved president’s unpopularity, and it will ignore or deny all such evidence in order to carefully shield viewers from the historic levels of dissent Trump faces.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
