Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard writes really well about Trump, MAGA, and cultural politics. So we’re asking him what gives about all this today. Alex, always good to have you on, man.
Sargent: So the organizers of what’s being called the Great American State Fair, which is being produced by the Trump-backed group Freedom 250 to be held on the National Mall, recently announced the slate of celebrities and musical acts who are set to attend. But then people started pulling out—the rapper Young MC, Poison’s Bret Michaels, country music star Martina McBride, the Commodores, all out. Alex, can you recap what happened here?
Sargent: Well, Trump puts out this tirade on Truth Social in which he suddenly says, we don’t really want singers there. He goes on and he says, the “fabulous Lee Greenwood” will introduce me and the singer Christopher Macchio will sing, plus a few musical groups from the armed forces.
Boy, I don’t know, Alex, that doesn’t sound like a must-see, does it?
But still, the idea here was to have some sort of event befitting of the country’s 250th anniversary, birthday, whatever you want to call it. And instead, we’re just going to get another Trump rally on the National Mall.
I mean, Alex, that’s basically, you’re not breaking up with me, I’m breaking up with you. Your thoughts on that?
And it’s even more embarrassing than that that you’re doing a rally with Lee Greenwood, who, by the way—I had to look this up before—is even older than Donald Trump. He is at least three years older than Trump. And this guy who’s like an imitation of Pavarotti. It’s preposterous. But again, I think it does kind of capture where we are, less than two years into the second term.
There was sort of a passing sense—or at the time it didn’t even feel passing, it felt like scary, durable. At that moment it felt like Donald Trump has tapped into something that we didn’t know is there. And that was a scary feeling for a while there. Can you talk about that atmosphere at the time and what people kind of concluded about it?
People have obviously always embraced him, but there’s always been a sense that doing so would have professional, personal, familial, whatever repercussions you can think of. And I think what we saw immediately after—I wrote at the time about where you were just seeing the Trump dance at every NFL game, at U.S. men’s national soccer games. And it was this sense that the culture had just kind of said, this is who we are, this is part of where we’re going.
And now it’s just all gone. None of it’s there. Again, Young MC, Martina McBride—that’s the best that they could do. Morris Day and the Time—that’s the best that they could do to start here. And when we got to the end of the road, it’s not even that.
And that was a weirdly devastating moment. But Trump and MAGA just pissed away the chance that was created for them by this weird confluence of circumstances, I think.
And I think that in a lot of ways, I was certainly alarmist about it, and I probably should have just looked at recent history when I was catastrophizing. Because I think what happened is what always happens. Which is that, one, you realize that this guy is completely incompetent, out of his mind, and he’s completely self-obsessed too.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s another thing about this as well that’s a little bit darker, which is that Donald Trump had this chance to really make these types of inroads, but then they decided to hurt the country instead in every conceivable way that they could. It’s not like all these artists who are pulling out are simply expressing their personal distaste for Trump.
Shephard: Trump, when he came into office, was riding this wave and he loved it. He was finally getting the kind of adulation that he always wanted from the sources that he always wanted—not the dumb hicks that come to his events, but from the actual culture. And he could have continued to get that if he had tried to govern like a normal president. And again, he’s just not capable of it.
Sargent: I think it’s also worth reflecting on the fact that MAGA is alienating the culture because of MAGA’s actual vision for the country. Let’s remember that the culture started to turn on them pretty rapidly after that brief moment they had, in large part because of the ICE raids, which ended up flooding people’s phones for months on end with searing imagery of Trump’s paramilitary armies terrorizing immigrants and Americans and shooting people in the head.
I’m sorry, I’m pissed about it. What can I tell you?
All of this stuff is this sort of desperate legacy-building exercise that is backfiring tremendously. But again, it’s what happens when you have an old man with a broken ego running the country.
Shephard: Well, he is talking about himself. And again, if Colonel Tom Parker had treated Elvis with the respect that his celebrity deserved, maybe he would have played to even larger crowds, but I digress. I think that this is the problem here, right, is that there’s nothing else.
And one, I think that this is more of a risk than he’s considering. As is, I think, his plan to attend game three at Madison Square Garden of the NBA Finals. As is, I think, his probable appearance at least at the World Cup final in July. Because people hate him right now. Even his own supporters are turning away from him.
There was a point at which, in the very early part of this, there was a kind of thrilling, what-will-he-say-or-do attitude here. That was 10 years ago or more now.
“I’m actually pretty pissed at how badly they bungled America 250. First, they tried to invite washed-up geriatric one-hit wonders. Then when that didn’t work out, they decided to convert the event into a Trump rally where Trump will talk about himself for 90 minutes.”
Shephard: Even fellow megalomaniacs can’t take it anymore. I mean, I think that, as with a lot of criticisms of Trump, it sort of begs a question, which is, what was it supposed to be? There is a sober celebration of America’s culture. You can look, for instance, at things like the kinds of concerts that Barack Obama hosted in the White House throughout his presidency that were showcasing a diversity of American music and values, frankly, as well.
And again, we’re a year and a half in and gas costs $5 a gallon everywhere. So who really wants to participate in that anyway? But I think that this is not somebody, or this is not an administration, that is interested in honoring or celebrating American history or culture to begin with. So why would you expect that to even happen at all?
So during his first term, you might remember that anytime he went to a college football game in Alabama or in a red state or something and he’d get enormous cheers, his propagandists would plaster that all over Twitter, trying to show Trump’s penetration as this tribune of the people, as someone who was very deeply in touch with what’s going on, with the American public or the zeitgeist or whatever.
I think this almost speaks to a robustness in the culture, a diversity that they can’t steamroll. Does that make sense?
But people, when they see that politics in action outside of Donald Trump, they recoil. The movement, this MAGA movement, is limited to Donald Trump. It doesn’t have extensions in the culture really beyond a foothold in the UFC. It doesn’t even have extensions in American politics. He will be succeeded probably by Marco Rubio or JD Vance, but they will never have the kind of adulation or cultural resonance that he does.
And again, with this concert, with probably Trump’s appearance in Madison Square Garden on Monday, with probably Trump’s appearance at a U.S. men’s national team game or several World Cup games—there’s going to be a real example of just what the American people think of him, and it’s not going to be pretty.
Shephard: Yeah, thank you.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump 250 turns humiliating as maga ally harshly mocks him was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump 250 Turns Humiliating as MAGA Ally Harshly Mocks Him )
Also on site :
- Nvidia clinches deals with South Korean giants including SK Group to advance AI boom
- Unisound Releases U2: A Native Agentic Large Model Built for Execution, Capable of Autonomously Decomposing and Completing 100+ Steps in Complex Real-World Workflows
- Watch Pink's Incredible Opening Number at the 2026 Tony Awards