Storm-Delayed Trump Rally Closes America’s 250th at Midnight
President Trump’s rally on the National Mall finally began around 11pm local time after thunderstorms forced an evacuation of the site and Washington recorded its hottest 4 July on record. “We will wait it out, I don’t care if it’s 2:00 O’Clock in the morning,” he posted as crowds sheltered. The speech blended the anniversary — “one of the most joyous and glorious” milestones in American history — with campaign politics, declaring: “Nobody can be like us.”
The semiquincentennial ended as it began: a national commemoration organised around one man’s political project, from Friday’s “communist menace” speech at Mount Rushmore to a midnight rally on the Mall. The staging troubles — record heat, storms, an evacuated crowd — made for a fitting metaphor that his critics will use and his supporters will wear as defiance; polling around the anniversary put his approval at 38%. He flies to Ankara within forty-eight hours carrying that domestic standing into the alliance’s most delicate summit in years. Watch how the anniversary tone translates when the audience is thirty-one other leaders rather than his base.