Here is an excerpt from a column by Maureen Dowd that is featured in The New York Times. To read the complete article and check out others, please click here.
Credit: Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Such a ho-hum birthday celebration. If only someone added some excitement.
Halloween is sugary. Thanksgiving is fattening and fraught. Christmas is expensive. New Year’s Eve is annoying. Memorial Day is laced with melancholy. George Washington’s Birthday isn’t even on his birthday anymore. Columbus Day has some issues.
But we could always count on the Fourth of July.
Such a nice carefree American celebration, smack in the middle of summer, redolent of cookouts and the Beach Boys crooning “Fun, fun, fun,” and still on the same day that those wicked-smart guys in Philadelphia pulled off that miracle.
It’s a great big national picnic, especially in Washington, where we have a sparkling, sprawling party every year on the Mall. Last year, I went to hear Jimmy Buffett sing with the remnants of the Beach Boys, surrounded by surf boards and beach balls, with pyrotechnics lighting up the monuments.
I must have taken 50 blurry pictures of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial framed by red and green starbursts. It was one of those nights when you’re just happy to be an American.
But now Donald Trump, certified Roman candle, is spoiling America’s fireworks show. On a whim, he has decided to bollix up one of the better days in the nation’s capital.
Trump is going to turn a holiday that had somehow managed to remain nonpartisan and playful into a MAGA rally, dragging his perpetual resting bitch face and American carnage onto the Mall.
So much for Good Vibrations.
Trump tweeted in February that he was going to hijack the Lincoln Memorial on Independence Day for “Major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!” Like no one had ever thought of fireworks on the Mall before.
We got confirmation of his plan while he was in France, sitting by a cemetery full of white crosses for D-Day heroes who fought the Nazis, the scene of his interview with Fox’s Laura Ingraham.
Defiling the sacred with the profane, Trump offered his usual bag of arsenic cookies. He talked about what a “fool” Robert Mueller is — even though Mueller is a real war hero, not a bone spurs bloviator. Trump told Piers Morgan on “Good Morning Britain” that he didn’t want to fight in Vietnam because “it was very far away, and at that time nobody ever heard of the country.” The president is such a scaredy-fraidy that those around him think he can’t even summon the strength to look at a Navy destroyer with the name of a dead war hero who defied him.
Trump ranted to Ingraham that “Nervous Nancy” Pelosi is “a nasty, vindictive, horrible person” whose San Francisco district has “drug needles all over the place.”
Narcissistic, infantile and heedless of tradition, Trump is now yanking away the one day devoted to celebrating all Americans and rebranding it in his own image. It’s one thing to have the TRUMP sign on a hotel or winery. It’s another to slap it on the face of the nation.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times best sellers, became an Op-Ed columnist in 1995. In August 2014, she also became a writer for The Times Magazine. More