On Independence Day eve, a sinister echo from a summer ago came rushing through the pulsing heat in Iowa. At the Des Moines State Fairgrounds on Thursday evening, Donald Trump was warming his way into a riff as he reviewed a week of stunning success. Hours earlier, after days and nights of tortuous delays and debating, Republican senators and congressmen had delivered the budget Bill their president demanded they pass. It would be on his desk for Friday, July 4th, just as he had wished.
“There could be no better birthday for America than the one big, beautiful Bill,” Trump told the Iowans who had been lining up since midmorning for his summer return. The Hawkeye state has been a touchstone for Trump during the snow and ice of the Republican primaries, and Iowa voted for him in the past three presidential elections. So, he decided to officially open the year-long America250 celebrations with a rally at the state fair. But not long into his speech, a sharp crack interrupted Trump’s flow of words.
“Don’t worry. It’s only fireworks – I hope,” he said quickly, in case the crowd were getting jittery. There are bulletproof panes present when Trump makes outside appearances now. “Famous last words,” he continued, parodying the worst thoughts.
“Trump said: ‘Don’t worry, it’s only fireworks.’ I didn’t like the sound of that either.”
RM Block
For once, Trump didn’t spell out the darkness behind the humour. But everyone at the fair, and the millions watching on television, must have been transported to July of last year, and the gunshots in Butler, Pennsylvania, on a similarly idyllic summer evening. So much has happened since then that it seems further than a year ago. But the constant note is that just as Trump looked and evidently was unassailable that day, he would seem to be even more so now, with his key piece of mammoth legislation, a 1,000-page Bill, safely through Congress.
In the end, the Republican lawmakers, in the Senate and in the House, caved and passed a Bill of which several had declared grave reservations. Just two Republicans, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, voted no. The Democrats could do nothing except respond through a record eight-hour speech from House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, which majority House speaker Mike Johnson lightly mocked as he took his victory lap.
Other bright news for the administration: the monthly employment report came in: 154,000 jobs created, better than expected. The stock market soaring again. The fragile Iran-Israel ceasefire holding, giving Trump the chance to make fun of the meek Iranian retaliation to the US stealth bomber raid.
“Sir, is one o’clock okay. It’s fine. We can make it later? They were a little nervous about doing [it] I can tell ya. Can you imagine? This is Iran.”
Elsewhere, Paramount, the parent company to CBS, quietly announced that it would settle the libel case Trump had taken against the flagship Sixty Minutes show for $16 million.
“This has been a great two weeks,” Trump told Iowa.
“Has anybody ever had a better two weeks?”
Trump detractors and the late-night satirists make easy fun out of the length and the boasting and the 2020 election lies he repeats at his rallies. But these performances are a mainline to his heartland and every image he paints into those blue Midwestern skies is designed to deepen and confirm his place in the Republican consciousness as their protector, their saviour. Now, he returned to the corn fields to tell them that the election promises are coming true. The southern border has been secured. The tax cuts are coming.
Democrat – and moderate Republican – objections to this Bill frame it as a scandalous tax cut for the millionaire class that will add, over the next decade, at least $3 trillion to the US national debt while stripping at least 11 million Americans of Medicaid and vital food aid programmes such as Snap.
“People will die,” Jeffries had warned during his mammoth speech early on Thursday.
“Tens of thousands, perhaps year after year after year, as a result of the Republican assault on the healthcare of the American people. I’m sad. I never thought I would be on the House floor saying: this is a crime scene.”
The Republican response is that the Big Beautiful Act will prevent what would have been the biggest tax hike in history and will merely strip Medicaid from the slackers and the stoners. As Texas congressman Brandon Gill put it: “If you are a 32-year-old guy you cannot sit on your couch and smoke weed all day and expect taxpayers to foot your Medicaid bills. That’s wrong. We are also saying that if you are an illegal alien and you shouldn’t be in this country to begin with, you should be deported, you shouldn’t be getting taxpayer-subsidised Medicaid.”
And now, in Des Moines, Trump reassured the farming communities who have started to complain that migrant workers they personally know, many long-term employees, have been swept up in the new immigration purge.
“Some of the farmers ... they literally cry when the see this happen,” Trump reported before addressing his homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.
“If the farmers can vouch for these people, we are gonna do something about it, right Kristi? We are working on legislation right now. Farmers know better – they work with ‘em for years. And people who have hotels and leisure properties too, we are going to work with them too. And then if the farmers don’t do a good job, we’ll throw them the hell out of the country. We’ll let the illegals stay and throw them out! The fake news will write that. Donald Trump wants all farmers thrown out of the country. You can’t be sarcastic.”
For nearly a decade, since his infamous American Carnage speech on Inauguration Day 2017, Trump’s public speeches have been framed around the idea of rescuing a fallen America. Here, he hinted that the sun is at last about to rise on the new golden age. He forecast the treats to come over his second term. The Olympics! The World Cup! A UFC fight to be staged on the grounds of the White House!
With perfect timing Trump is scheduled to sign the Big Beautiful Bill at 5pm on Independence Day. The moment will be marked by a White House flyover. Then, the traditional picnic on the lawn and a weekend at Bedminster golf club.
The Trump theatre is non-stop, polished and effective. Six months in and the Democrats seem more bewildered than ever as to how to respond to his tightening grip on power.
What became clear, as Trump boogied on stage to the anthemic Young Man, is that the battle for soul of America of which Joe Biden ineffectually warned looks like a massacre right now.
Among the warm-up acts in Des Moines was Chuck Grassley, the formidable 91-year-old who has been a senator for Iowa since 1981.
“You know, people of the left get irritated when we take out the United States being an exceptional nation,” Grassley told the crowd.
“It doesn’t mean we are better than any people any places else but we are an exceptional nation for the fact we get our rights from God. We don’t get our rights from the government, And we are the only nation in 6,000 years of humankind to have that relationship between the government and the American people, and what we are honouring for the next year is that declaration.”
Grassley was born in 1933, the year of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Now, in the searing heat, he listened as Trump echoed his words.
“In everything we do we are once again defending the values, traditions and beliefs that made every generation before us so very proud to be American. You know that better than anybody in Iowa. And here in Iowa and across this land we believe that America is an exceptional nation, blessed by God. We believe in the wisdom of our fathers that our rights do not come from bureaucrats in Washington, our rights come from our creator in heaven. That’s where our rights come from.”
Across the Republican counties and farmhouses of Iowa this was the equivalent of hearing America sing. But last November, 700,000 Iowans voted for Kamala Harris. To those people, and to tens of millions of others, president Trump’s speech in Des Moines was the sound of their worst fears of accelerating.
So together Americans will gather to celebrate the Fourth of July, in all its earnest glory and its storied 249 years, and they’ve seldom been further apart.
