Transcript: Trump 250 Humiliation Worsens as Fox Balks at Low Turnout

As Fox News goes quiet about the dismal showing at Trump’s first rally celebrating our 250th birthday, a media critic explains how Fox helps Trump cover up his historic unpopularity.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 26 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.

This week, Donald Trump kicked off his celebration of our country’s 250th anniversary on the National Mall. It didn’t go well. Trump’s first event was widely described by the media as sparsely attended, and as one account noted, he actually asked for more people to attend the next rally. What’s amusing about this is that it came after Fox News worked really hard to pump up the event.

Trump and Fox both know that for the sake of their broader MAGA project, it’s absolutely imperative that this gala succeed. And that’s why it’s heartening that it’s doing so poorly. Matt Gertz of Media Matters has a good piece digging into the Trump-Fox dynamic around the 250th anniversary celebration, so we’re going to get into all of it with him now. Matt, good to have you back on.

Matt Gertz: Good to be here.

Sargent: So on Wednesday night, Trump’s so-called Great American State Fair had something like a launching event. NBC News put attendance at more than a thousand—not great. The Post said the crowd “thinly covered an area that’s smaller than some summer outdoor movie screenings.” Really not great. Matt, can you just set the stage here? What was this particular event and why was it so important?

Gertz: This was the kickoff event for what’s called the Great American State Fair. The idea is to create what’s effectively a world’s fair, but for each of the individual states, down on the National Mall.

Originally this was supposed to be a big concert with a bunch of different artists who were scheduled to play. But as it became more and more clear that these Freedom 250 events are extremely partisan, the artists decided to drop out. And eventually Trump kind of threw up his hands and said, instead of having this concert, we’re going to launch the state fair with what he called the greatest rally ever. It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.

Sargent: Certainly not. And Donald Trump himself seems very sensitive to the low turnout that this first event showed. Here’s what he said at the event about that. Listen.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Then on July 4, we will have the greatest show of all on the National Mall. Your favorite president will be speaking. So please show up. Because if we have two empty seats, you know what’s going to happen? The fake news is going to say he didn’t fill out the arena. Now, I’ll be speaking—I’ll be very proudly speaking—as we ring in our 250th year with the largest fireworks display in world history.

Sargent: Matt, you know, he’s not exactly wrong. We damn well will make an issue of this if turnout really is bad, just as we’re doing right now. But there’s actually a reason for that. He tried to turn a celebration of America’s 250th birthday into a Trump rally.

This is like the epitome of personalist rule—turning this into an imperial, dictatorial display of self-glorification. It’s important that Americans reject this and not show up to this. Can you talk about that?

Gertz: I mean, I think what we have here is a president who does not respect any sort of separation between himself and the country at large. And so he views the idea of celebrating the nation’s birthday as one and the same with celebrating himself.

I think there’s no clearer way to see that than how he decided to kick off the festivities with what he personally described as a rally speech—a partisan speech in which he sort of ran down what he claims are his accomplishments and talked about himself, rather than the nation, rather than what brings us together. And that becomes more and more fraught as he becomes more and more unpopular.

Sargent: Yeah. And Fox News is really participating in the personalist side of this, hyping this event as a great thing for Donald Trump, as opposed to a great thing for the United States of America. And Fox is using this event to attack critics of the president. Let’s listen to a few examples. Here’s Kayleigh McEnany.

Kayleigh McEnany........

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