President Donald Trump has turned what could have been a rare moment to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary into another display of his own ego, former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett said.
Speaking on The Daily Beast Podcast with host Joanna Coles, Lovett, host of Pod Save America, explained that Congress had created the nonpartisan America 250 to celebrate the occasion, but Trump hijacked it by creating “his own competing group called Freedom 250″ which “politicizes America’s Independence Day.”
He lamented the “Freedom 250” kickoff event, which featured a partisan MAGA speech from Trump, a performance from FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, amateur country music singer Alexis Wilkins, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy using the word “libtard” to describe musicians who declined to perform at the Trumpy event.
“I do think it’s worth taking a moment to say, wow, like, okay, these are all the ways in which Trump has made this about him and made it worse,” Lovett said.
“What about the alarm that’s not going off about how great it could have been to have literally any other president at this moment to have a big, unifying, patriotic event that would have been across the whole country?” he said, adding, “What a great shame it is that we have this kind of depraved person in charge.”
Lovett, a Democrat, explained that he believed if another Republican were president, “some aspects of what they would have done for America’s 250th would have probably annoyed me,” adding that a Democratic administration’s celebrations would have had parts that would have “annoyed Republicans.”
Still, he noted that they would have “taken the responsibility of representing the whole country seriously to understand that this wasn’t just about them or their political prerogatives.”
“It’s a rare moment where you could have actually had a beautiful, like American patriotic celebration. I’ll be cringe and say that I’m sad that we don’t get to have that,” he said. “But instead, we have this ridiculous, incompetent boob.”
Listing off several of the failures of the “Great American State Fair,” Lovett said, “The Ferris wheel isn’t working. The Reflecting Pool is green, the ice cream is melting, nobody’s showing up. States feel like they should cancel and they’re right to do so. Nobody wants to be associated with this guy. And it’s just a big bummer.”
“And I know it’s just a party and we got bigger fish to fry, but I do think it’s okay to take a moment and say, you know what? Like this is a dark moment, and it is a shame that we have fallen so low that this is what it would look like to forever, for how we marked an important milestone in the history of the country,” Lovett said.
“That’s where I’m at,” he said. “And I hope they fix the pool.”
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