Hey everyone. Welcome back, and happy Monday. I hope you all had a great Fourth of July weekend.
Our top story is one I didn’t expect to be covering after America’s 250th birthday. On Saturday, hundreds of masked men from the white nationalist group Patriot Front marched through Washington with Confederate flags, chanting “Reclaim America.” And when a member of the President’s own Cabinet was asked to condemn them, but he couldn’t quite get there.
We’ll also get into the fireworks mess on the Mall, Trump’s communist crusade, the phone call he made to FIFA, and a NATO summit preview as Russia pounds Kyiv.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Masked White Nationalists Marched Through Washington on the Fourth of July
If you were anywhere near social media this weekend, it came across your feed. A Reuters shot from the Washington Metro. A Black woman sitting alone in a train car, and every seat around her, every inch of standing room, filled with masked men in matching khaki uniforms. She’s riding through the capital of her own country on the Fourth of July, surrounded.
Those men are Patriot Front, a white nationalist group whose stated goal is a white ethnostate. On Saturday, hundreds of them marched through Washington with Confederate flags and upside-down American flags, chanting “Reclaim America.”
Sunday morning, Dana Bash asked Interior Secretary Doug Burgum a simple question. Do you condemn this group and what they stand for?
I know exactly what Burgum was trying to do there. I watched my colleagues dance around these sorts of questions for years. You say you personally disagree. You salute the First Amendment. You bring up some protesters on the other side. You say everything except the one word that might cost you with a slice of the base. And to be fair to him, he did say what they stand for is nothing he could agree with. That’s more than some would offer.
But this is how it goes now. Nobody in this administration endorses these guys, at least publicly. But they just can’t quite condemn them either. The men in the khakis notice, and it keeps them coming back.
2. Trump Overruled Safety Officials, Then Fell Asleep at His Own Fireworks
In Washington, temperatures hit 102 degrees, the hottest Fourth on record in the city. The State Fair on the Mall had already shut down a day earlier over the heat, and parades across the region were canceled.
Then storms came in. As the Salute to America event was set to begin, thunderstorms forced an evacuation. Hundreds of thousands of people who had waited for hours in triple-digit heat were told to leave the Mall and shelter in nearby buildings.
Officials recommended calling it off. On Sunday, Trump said he was able to personally overrule them.
So the show went on. The fireworks didn’t start until nearly eleven at night. Every musical act was canceled because it ran so late. Trump took the stage just after eleven.
And then, after overruling the people who wanted the crowd kept safe, the President appeared to fall asleep during his own fireworks. Videos going around show his eyes closed for legitimately eleven seconds. Take a look at those painstakingly long eleven seconds:
There had to be an explanation for all of these things that went wrong though. It was suspicious, right? Well, a Freedom 250 organizer, Kylie Kremer, claimed online that someone with quote “an extreme case of Trump Derangement Syndrome had geoengineered the storms over Washington.”
What are we doing here folks? It’s hard to tell if she’s being serious, but regardless, these are the people running the country. This is how they think, speak and act. MAGA is a poison in our politics that generates terms like Trump derangement syndrome to make them feel like they’re not the crazy ones. But they are. And they have MAGA derangement syndrome.
3. Trump's Communism Crusade Has an Intel Problem
All weekend, and in that Fourth of July speech, Trump kept returning to one totally patriotic and appropriate word for Independence Day. Communism. He said it so often that we were able to make a little supercut, take a look:
Set aside for a second that democratic socialism and communism are obviously very different things. This is a President who had the federal government take a ten percent ownership stake in Intel, one of America’s biggest chipmakers. Washington now owns a piece of a private company, and Trump has even bragged about it.
Hmmm, the government owns a slice of private industry. I wonder if there’s a good word for that.
Here’s a quote from Republican Congressman Thomas Massie: “Imagine if Biden or Obama had bragged about shaking down a private company for 10% public ownership. Where are the supposed stalwarts of free markets?”
Massie’s question hangs there because there’s no answer to it. The administration isn’t against government owning private industry. It’s against the other side doing it. Because if they did it, it would be communism.
4. The President Put His Thumb on the World Cup
In last week’s World Cup match, American star Folarin Balogun picked up a controversial red card. Under FIFA rules, that carries an automatic one-game suspension which cannot be appealed. He was set to miss tonight’s match against Belgium.
That is, until Trump stepped in. He personally called FIFA’s president—you know, the same guy who gave Trump an imaginary “peace prize”—and asked him to review it. And this weekend, FIFA overturned the suspension without any explanation.
This is corruption, plain and simple, and it follows Trump’s familiar playbook: trading favors with the rich and powerful while the rules bend around him. We’ve seen him steer foreign policy towards countries his businesses are dealing with, let Elon Musk bankroll his campaign and then gut agencies investigating SpaceX and Tesla, and cash in on crypto while writing the rules for the industry. He wasn’t particularly shy today about that last one:
So none of this is new. He just brought that same corruption to a much different stage.
And let’s not forget: Balogun can only play for us because he was born here, in Brooklyn, to a mother who wasn’t allowed to fly home to London. He’s a birthright citizen, the exact kind of American that Trump tried and failed to erase. But Balogun still wears the stars and stripes with pride, as our top scorer in a tournament run that no one expected.
Look, I’m rooting for America to beat the odds and win it all, because that’s exactly the kind of underdog story this country was built on. But if they pull it off, it won’t be remembered for what our team earned on the field. It will be remembered for one phone call, and a President who couldn’t resist putting his thumb on the scale once again.
5. Putin Is Cornered, and Trump Is Fighting the Wrong People
Overnight, Russia launched another massive assault on Kyiv. At least a dozen people were killed and more wounded, with entire families pulled from the rubble of apartment blocks. This follows last week’s attack, one of the deadliest of the entire war.
But ahead of tomorrow’s NATO summit in Turkey, Ukraine is not the only worry. On Friday, the US warned that Russia may also be planning military action on Polish soil, a move meant to rattle the alliance and prove NATO won’t defend its own.
All of this points to Putin growing desperate. His economy is buckling, his army is bleeding, and he has reportedly grown so afraid of a coup or assassination that he has walled himself off, tightening security and vanishing from public view. He is cornered, and lashing out to maintain his control.
With a rival so unstable, you would hope that America’s leaders would be laser-focused on holding NATO together. A united front is what this moment demands. Instead, our President decided to pick another fight with our allies.
Over the weekend, Trump posted this photo of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni looking up at him, captioned “Restraining Order Needed.”
He reignited a feud that began over the Iran war, when Meloni refused to fall in line behind him. It got personal when Meloni, who leads the nation that hosts the Vatican, called Trump’s attacks on the Pope “unacceptable.”
Remember, this is the same Meloni who used to be Trump’s closest ally on the continent. She is a fellow right-wing populist, and was the only European leader at his inauguration. But the moment she pushed back, she went from friend to target.
With Kyiv under fire and the alliance on edge, this President would rather nurse a grudge against someone who hurt his ego than do the hard work in front of him. And the only man who benefits is sitting in the Kremlin.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
On Saturday, the Fourth of July, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a 162-page report accusing the Smithsonian of abandoning history for, in its words, “extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.” It singles out the National Museum of American History, claiming its leadership has been captured by a radical ideology that refuses to tell the nation’s noble story. The report grew out of an executive order Trump signed in March called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and it hints the administration may install its own people on the Smithsonian’s board. The Smithsonian pushed back, saying that for more than 180 years it has served the public with nonpartisan, independent scholarship.
Federal agencies are quietly walking away from civil rights cases, and reporting out this weekend lays out just how far it has gone. At the President’s direction, agencies from the EEOC to HUD are shelving investigations and tearing up anti-discrimination rules that go back decades. The trigger is an executive order Trump signed last year ordering the government to stop enforcing “disparate impact” liability, the long-standing idea that a policy can be illegal if it locks out women or minorities, even when nobody wrote discrimination into the text. The administration frames this as ending reverse discrimination and getting back to pure merit.
