Transcript: Trump 250 Crowd Size Claims Collapse in Final Humiliation

As Trump’s disastrous celebration of our 250th ends with a howler, a writer who focuses on MAGA’s weak grip on the culture reflects on what all this says about the country’s desire to move on from MAGA.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 7 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

In the run-up to Donald Trump’s gala celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary, we’ve been arguing here that it was important for it to fail. Trump delivered his speech, and there were some pretty bad highlights, but perhaps most notably it was beset with chaos after Trump overruled officials who recommended calling it off amid storms causing an exodus from the mall. But we’re going to dig deeper into the bigger failures here.

This was the moment when we were supposed to celebrate the American experiment enduring for a quarter of a millennium, and Trump still couldn’t help but make it all about the crowd sizes that were supposedly there for him and all about his pet obsessions. We’re talking about all of it with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, because Alex predicted very early on that Donald Trump would lose the culture, including on this, on the celebration of the 250th. Alex, good to have you back.

Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.

Sargent: So what we now know is that Trump finally delivered his speech after 11 p.m. on July 4, after what The Washington Post called a “chaotic scramble.” This was the result of officials essentially saying this thing should be canceled and then him overruling them. Trump claims 150,000 people were there in the end, while saying that at least twice or three times as many had been there before the evacuation. Alex, you saw the imagery of the empty seats. What’s your take on the claim of 150,000 for the speech?

Shephard: I mean, there have been a lot of ridiculous Trump crowd-size claims, but I think this is one of the more brazen ones. The VIP section of this speech wasn’t even full. It was half full by the middle of the speech. People that love Trump and that need things from Trump weren’t willing to stay the entire time.

The weather was awful, but I think mostly people did not want to sit through what Trump had promised to be a very long speech. It wasn’t actually that long—I think it was like 30, 35 minutes. But it was exactly what you would expect. It was this kind of endless recitation of the familiar grievances, with a few kind of new half-baked insults thrown in.

So it just felt exactly like a perfect encapsulation of where we are with this president right now. Somebody who’s just almost bored, I think, with it, but who has no real argument to make to the American people and is still just kind of falling back on these very, very tired arguments.

Sargent: And of course, crowd sizes were really essential for Trump. Leading up to it, there was reporting saying that he had been in absolute rage about pictures of the crowd sizes during the events leading up to this. They had really set him off quite miserably in many ways.

Shephard: Well, I think going back to that too, there’s this larger failure of the Great American State Fair project, this kind of idea that they were supposed to put on almost like a world’s fair on the National Mall. It increasingly got taken over by Trump people. And between the weather and, I think, the lack of real draws, you were just seeing nobody coming through here.

And I think that again, like, the president can be furious about this as much as he wants, but it’s just another example of him living in this total fantasy world. It’s like when he posts about polls where seventy percent of the people love him. It’s just absurd.

Sargent: It is. Well, let’s check out what Trump said during the speech about the size of his crowd. Listen.

Donald Trump (voiceover): And they estimated they had 375,000 people before everybody had to leave. And they now have 150,000 people. It’s the craziest thing anyone’s ever seen. At least.

Sargent: But then on Truth Social afterwards, he suddenly inflated the number. He said, “The crowd at 7:05 in the evening was 422,000 people.”

Shephard: I mean, I think it also gives it a sort of historic register, right? He wants this to be like the March on Washington. He wants this to be like—I don’t know, when they tried to levitate the Pentagon or something. But I think what you’re seeing is the president trying, like, really, really hard to use his theoretical superpower, which is to just manufacture reality, right?

He’s a disciple of the power of positive thinking. He believes he can just kind of manipulate reality by saying things, and that by the time people correct him, it’ll be too late. But I think what we’ve seen again and again, especially since the start of this year, is that he’s just totally lost that ability, right? He can just say this stuff and people just ignore it. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Sargent: I mean, it’s almost like one final humiliation for him to not only get 150,000 by his own invented........

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