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In 2013, McDonald’s generated some ghastly publicity when it came out that the fast-food giant was advising burger flippers to go on food stamps. Why didn’t McDonald’s, a multinational corporation that generates more than $26 billion in annual revenue, simply pay its burger flippers a living wage? The answer in most (but not all) cases was that, appearances to the contrary, most McDonald’s burger flippers don’t work directly for McDonald’s. They work for McDonald’s franchisees—independent, mostly small businesses that contract with McDonald’s Corporation to lease and operate one or more McDonald’s restaurants according to a mind-bogglingly specific set of rules that guarantees every McDonald’s will be indistinguishable from every other McDonald’s. McDonald’s is not an isolated example. Over the past half-century, corporate America has systematically shed low-wage workers, either by offshoring them, contracting out their work, or designating them as independent contractors. Only rarely today will a large corporation employ someone earning less than $30,000. That’s not because corporations have gotten more generous but because they’ve gotten more wary of assuming responsibility for low-wage workers. Off-loading them spares corporations bad publicity, and in effect allows them to delegate routine labor violations to much smaller companies that can easily liquidate and/or rename themselves if they run into serious legal trouble.The contractors don’t try very hard to disguise the nature of the service they provide. In a Pulitzer-winning series on migrant child labor for The New York Times, Hannah Dreier reported that Packers Sanitation Services Inc. pitched itself on its website as being able to “take the liability and risk off your facility’s record.” Packers was as good as its word when the Labor Department in February 2023 fined it $1.5 million for assigning migrant children to overnight shifts in 13 meatpacking plants in eight states. Packers took nearly all the heat, while most of the Fortune 500 companies that owned the plants involved—Tyson, Cargill, etc.—went unpunished. Packers then “rebranded” itself as Fortrex and moved its corporate headquarters from Kieler, Wisconsin, to Atlanta. Problem solved.The Brandeis economist David Weil labeled this phenomenon “the fissured workplace,” in an influential 2014 book of that name whose thesis was that changes in the structure of corporate hiring that are typically thought of as efficiencies are actually a conscious effort to evade union drives and government-guaranteed labor protections, such as child labor prohibitions and payment of minimum wage, overtime, Social Security tax, and unemployment tax. Weil did his best to reverse that trend when he ran the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division under President Barack Obama. But when President Joe Biden renominated Weil for that post, the International Franchise Association, or IFA, a lobby group founded by franchisors and still dominated by them, campaigned against Weil and won sufficient support from the Senate GOP and three Senate Democrats (Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who later became independents, plus Senator Mark Kelly) to defeat Weil.The IFA has had a much easier time during President Donald Trump’s two terms in office, as demonstrated by a proposed Labor Department regulation severely limiting the circumstances under which a corporation can be held accountable for work done on its behalf under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, which governs minimum wage and overtime. (A separate joint-employer standard under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act governs union organizing and other concerted activity, and is enforced by the National Labor Relations Board.) The nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, in a public comment sent last week to the Labor Department, estimates that the proposed rule would affect about 15 million workers in “fissured establishments,” of which about 10 million would be the employees of franchisees, and that the rule would cost these workers almost $1 billion annually.Prior to Trump, the Labor Department followed a guidance document on joint employment drafted in 2015 by Weil. Regarding “vertical joint employment,” wherein an employee works for Company B, which in turn is contracted to Company A, Company A would be designated a joint employer when “the economic realities show that” the worker is “economically dependent on” Company A. This was less an interpretation than a description of what the FLSA actually says. Weil noted that the FLSA defined an employer very broadly as “any person acting directly or indirectly [italics mine] in the interest of an employer in relation to an employee.” (You can look it up.) But after Trump came into office in 2019, his Labor Department tore up Weil’s guidance and issued a regulation that defined an employer as interacting only directly with an employee. If Company A did not hire and fire a worker for Company B, or schedule that worker’s time, or dictate that worker’s specific work conditions, or set that worker’s wages, or maintain that worker’s employment records, then Company A was not a joint employer. This departed quite blatantly from the statutory language—so much so that a federal court later threw the Trump rule out.Now the second Trump administration is taking another whack at a Labor Department joint-employment rule, and if any substantive difference exists between Trump’s earlier version and this new one, I can’t see it. Once again, the regulation contradicts the language of the Fair Labor Standards Act by saying that indirect control over employees isn’t good enough to establish that Company A is a joint employer.The best case the business lobby can make in defense of Trump’s proposed rule is that although it contradicts the statute, it captures the federal government’s past reluctance to enforce it, especially with respect to franchising. In what follows, I rely heavily on an excellent new book, Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy, by Brian Callaci, chief economist at the nonprofit Open Markets Institute.When fast-food franchising took off in the 1960s and 1970s, it was often judged in violation of antitrust law, which did not permit collusion between Company A and Company B. The franchisors answered that prohibitions on such “vertical restraint” did not apply because Company A and Company B were essentially the same company. Judges didn’t always buy that, but it was kind of true. Indeed, for a long time the Small Business Administration refused to give loans to Company Bs on the grounds that these weren’t small businesses at all but rather the equivalent of branch offices for Company As.Unfortunately, franchisors simultaneously contested responsibility for labor violations at Company B by arguing, no, actually, these are two separate companies … which was kind of not true. Yes, Company B signed a licensing agreement to run a fast-food joint for Company A on certain (quite extensive) terms. But Company A could later change that contract’s terms without requiring any sign-off from Company B. It was essentially sharecropping (Callaci more politely likens it to tenant farming), wherein Company B, after being sucked dry by Company A, eked out razor-thin profit margins by squeezing employees. Company A didn’t have to care very much about whether Company B was profitable because it took its money off the top.Granted, there have been a few franchisee success stories wherein Company B purchased multiple franchises and scaled up sufficiently to earn a real profit. But most Company Bs are single-restaurant operations that barely get by. Callaci quotes one franchise consultant describing the sort of franchisee Company A was looking for:An entrepreneur makes the worst franchisee. You might think that they would do well, but it is just the opposite. For one thing, they’ll never listen to you.… You don’t want any creative thinkers, either. Again, these people will not follow your system, and instead they’ll look for ways to do their own thing. You want someone who follows the rules.Ouch.Fast-food franchising became the behemoth it is today because of an FTC rule in 1979 that gave Company A a get-out-of-antitrust-jail-free card so long as Company A was fully transparent to Company B up front about what a terrible deal it was agreeing to. Franchising also got a boost from the adoption of the “consumer welfare standard,” which said antitrust violations occurred only if consumers were harmed. If franchisees or burger-flippers were harmed, it didn’t matter.Today the consumer welfare standard is on its way out, but that transition is not happening quickly. Fast-food franchisors used to argue that it didn’t matter how much Company B abused its workers because they were just kids working after-school jobs. But that stopped being true some time ago. Now fast-food employees are mostly grown-ups, often with families, and their best recourse, if they can’t make ends meet, is to go on welfare. Trump’s proposed joint-employer rule will impoverish these workers even more.

In the wake of victories by candidates whom New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed, former Senator Joe Manchin complained, “The extremes are driving the conversation while the majority of Americans are being left behind.” Responding to criticism of an article that the paper ran about one of those winning candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier, The New York Times’ official account said on X, “The Times has been documenting the increasingly extreme viewpoints on both sides of the political spectrum for years.” Centrist Democratic politicians and center-left columnists are urging the country to reject both socialism and MAGA. But the idea that the U.S. now has a far left that is equally dangerous and radical as the far right is entirely wrong, no matter how many powerful people and institutions hint or claim otherwise. America’s extreme right wing is by far the country’s big problem, and it’s hard to address that problem when powerful elites insist that the trouble is with “both sides.”Why is this analogy so far-fetched? First of all and most importantly, the political left in America believes in and practices democracy. Until leftists collectively try to use judicial and then violent means to overturn an election that they clearly lost, as MAGA Republicans did in 2020, I don’t want to hear any bullshit false equivalences between leftists and MAGA conservatives. Conducting free and fair elections and respecting their results is fundamental to democracy. MAGA’s leader, Donald Trump, refused to accept the 2020 results, as did dozens of Republican members of Congress and state officials. To this day, Republicans tiptoe around the issue to the point where they can’t even give a straightforward answer to the question, “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?”In contrast, Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists of America, Avila Chevalier, and other powerful people and groups on the left don’t deny Trump was elected in 2024. And it’s not just ignoring election results. The socialist left is trying to win power the democratic way—getting average Americans to vote for their candidates. The MAGA right is trying to gain and expand its power through gerrymandering, voting restrictions, and other undemocratic means. They’ve spent years making up claims of voter fraud. I’m pretty sure the Times and the centrist Democrats who sing the “both sides” song know all that. It’s unfortunate that they choose not to distinguish between pro-democracy people with bold policy views and antidemocracy people with bold policy views. Let’s move to the allegedly “extreme” agenda of the far left. Avila Chevalier, Mamdani, and other socialist politicians are pushing ideas like abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, cutting U.S. funding for Israel’s military, and limiting corporate monopolies. Much of their agenda is extremely popular because it takes on the rich and big corporations, as Americans desperately want. Some of those ideas are more contested. But guess what? None of that is anywhere as radical as giving an unelected billionaire (Elon Musk) the authority to fire federal workers, unilaterally shuttering federal agencies, and using the presidency to enrich yourself and your family. That’s what Trump has done over the last year and half. At least leftist politicians like Mamdani are open and honest about their controversial ideas. Trump and MAGA Republicans implement a radical agenda that they hide from voters during campaigns—just think back to the president’s constant lying about knowing nothing about Project 2025. Yes, some on the left, including Avila Chevalier in the past, advocate abolishing prisons, police, and borders. These are ideas that are truly radical. But ideas seem less outlandish after they have happened. And the right has managed to turn some extreme notions into U.S policy: the right to a “well regulated” militia in the Second Amendment actually means that virtually any restriction on gun ownership is illegal; the right to free speech means billionaires and corporations can spend almost unlimited funds on political campaigns; the constitutional amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War should be interpreted in ways that make it easier to force Black people from Congress. I am not sure that the wildest dreams of the DSA are much more radical than the policies stated in the aforementioned Project 2025 that are being implemented every day. Finally, any equivalence between the socialist left and the MAGA right falls apart when you consider the huge differences in power between the two sides. There are probably two dozen House Democrats, a dozen mayors, five senators, and two Democratic governors who would attend a DSA conference. And most of them would not call themselves socialists. In contrast, MAGA Republicans control the White House, about half of the seats in Congress, half the governorships, and at least two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito). Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, another socialist who won a congressional primary in New York last week, will be something like the 250th and 251st most powerful Democrats in Washington next year. MAGA Republicans are the president, vice president, and top policy adviser to the president (Stephen Miller). MAGA Republicans are the dominant faction in one party; socialist Democrats are a minority bloc in another party. Anyone suggesting that the two blocs are anywhere close to each other in influence is either stupid or dishonest. The centrists annoyed by the left aren’t stupid. They are conflating the socialist left with the MAGA right as a rhetorical tool. The media, traditional Democrats, and swing voters will reject Mamdani and his ilk if they are convinced that socialists will be as destructive to the U.S. as Trumpists. But this misleading centrist rhetoric has real consequences. What the U.S. desperately needs is socialists, traditional liberals, independents, and pro-democracy conservatives to disagree with one another during Democratic primaries but then join together to defeat the MAGA right in general elections. That unity can’t happen if anytime centrist Democrats lose a primary they act as if a socialist candidate winning is as dangerous as a MAGA candidate winning. It’s not. I plead to those on the center left to stop calling people extreme unless they are trying to end democracy in America.

In late April, Virginia voters narrowly approved an aggressive gerrymander that would have given Democrats a largely unbeatable advantage in 10 of the commonwealth’s 11 U.S. House seats, counteracting GOP power plays in Ohio, Missouri, and North Carolina. Democrats exulted. “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” a triumphant House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared. Data nerds proclaimed that Democrats had fought the mid-decade redistricting wars to a draw, and maybe even won. The Bluesky brigades rejoiced that their side had strapped on boxing gloves for a change.The good feelings didn’t even last until May. Eight days after the Virginia vote, the U.S. Supreme Court completed its war on the Voting Rights Act with Louisiana v. Callais, unleashing lawmakers across the South to shatter districts that ensured Black representation across the old Confederacy and carve them into safe seats for Republicans. Florida, anticipating the court’s decision, moved first. Alabama, and Tennessee quickly followed. So did Louisiana, which canceled its congressional primaries after thousands of votes had already been cast.Then, Virginia’s conservative-leaning state Supreme Court delivered the final insult, finding a technicality that allowed it to invalidate the referendum and the new 10–1 map.There are lessons to be learned here, and if Democrats are serious about maximal warfare, or interested in rescuing government by and for the people, they must digest those lessons and stiffen their spines. They will need to fight back and enact big reforms, both locally and nationally, that reinvigorate and strengthen American democracy, all with the same speed and relentless determination that Southern lawmakers bring to ripping apart Black districts.We might have one chance. It’s not now, although what we do now is important. It’s in the first 100 days of a 2029 trifecta, when for once electoral wins, electoral reforms, and political will may all align. But even if Democrats win that 2029 trifecta, they can’t lull themselves into declaring a premature victory. The project of saving American democracy will require a massive lift: redistricting, court expansion, and additional states, at once. Hard as it may be, however, we have no choice. Because if you think the redistricting power play this year is bad, just wait. The road to controlling the U.S. House and the White House after that gets decidedly more difficult.There is a looming time bomb for Democrats hidden in the reapportionment that will follow the 2030 census. Defusing that—overcoming the census, the Supreme Court, and the filibuster with a package that ensures competitive elections and majority rule, just in the nick of time—will require the kind of coordinated, decisive action not seen since Die Hard or Speed.Here’s the problem: Everything that the Democrats do in 2028 to level the redistricting playing field could be negated post-census. They could win or hold the House thanks to new maps in New York, California, and Illinois, then hand all those seats over to Texas and Florida anyway.Winning a trifecta and then enacting redistricting reform through the minoritarian Senate, and protecting it from a court that has spent more than a decade tilting maps and electoral rules toward the GOP, are not merely options. They are existential.Just do the math. Imagine that Democrats in 2028 claim four more seats in California, three in New York, and one apiece in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Then consider the consequences if Democrats hand each of these seats—along with one in Rhode Island—over to Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Utah, and Idaho after the 2030 census. Because if current population projections hold, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.William H. Frey, the legendary Brookings Institution demographer, has developed three different models for what the 2030 census could look like, depending on how population patterns and immigration politics work out over the next five years. They range only in the magnitude of bleakness: Will California lose three or four seats? Will Texas gain four or just three? Will New York lose two, or just one? Will Florida gain three, or just two?Frey cautioned in an interview that much remains unknown, particularly the state-by-state consequences of the Trump administration’s immigration policy that have thrown an historic kill switch on population growth nationwide. But what’s clear is that migration out of New York, California, and the industrial Midwest, coupled with low-to-zero immigration growth, come with what could be a historic migration of political power, almost all of it heading South.“It should be on people’s minds more,” said Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson. “That’s why we need to run up our margins as much as we possibly can in every election, because this is exactly what happened to us in 2010. We had these two great cycles in 2006 and 2008, and then we just got our asses handed to us in 2010 ... and all the power we won, it evaporated.”Somewhere between 12 and 14 seats will move away from states where Democrats are likely to draw the lines. The South, currently mapped almost entirely by the GOP, would have its largest number of House seats ever, some 40 percent of the entire body. The Northeast and industrial Midwest, meanwhile, would reach historic lows, abandoned for warmer climates and cheaper housing.The House math gets more difficult when you add that dozen to the 19 that the GOP could pick up via Callais, which only highlights the urgency of reform. Yet the problem runs deeper than the House. When those seats move toward the Sun Belt and GOP-dominated Western states, presidential electors relocate with them—a shift that will transform the Electoral College map.The brutal math of House apportionment combined with gerrymandering. A Senate weighted toward whiter, rural states, when 70 percent of the nation will soon live in 15 states. Twenty-five states that voted for Donald Trump three times, with 50 GOP senators: Right now, a majority means winning everyplace else, then expanding the map. A conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court will be with us into at least the 2050s, if Republican justices strategically retire and allow Trump and a GOP Senate to name replacements.There is no easy way out of this structural mess that Democrats find themselves in. First, it requires winning elections and taking advantage of a weakened president and unpopular GOP in 2026. Then, it’s adding to those majorities in 2028 while building a mandate for change that restores fairness everywhere, beginning with redistricting and the House. As Democrats learned in 2021, 50 senators and the White House will in no way be enough for the heavy reform lift that will follow. “You’re going to need votes to spare on big-ticket agenda items and structural reforms, like the filibuster itself, or making D.C. a state,” says Jentleson.The good news is that much of what is broken and unrepresentative can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it. The good news is that much of what is broken can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it. Two Democrats who have introduced far-reaching, visionary reform packages believe that the moment might be now.Moreover, there appears to be significant energy in the party for the project. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said that he’s never seen this much interest in proportional representation from his colleagues. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, along with Raskin and a handful of other legislators, have co-sponsored the Fair Representation Act for almost a decade now. It’s the most complete national solution to end gerrymandering and would create a more proportional House with larger, multimember districts and ranked-choice voting. According to their vision, every district nationwide becomes a swing district, and every delegation would more closely represent the politics and racial demographics of every state. Members who have never wanted to talk about it in the past are now asking Raskin how it works.After years of experiencing a radical restructuring of our constitutional order by way of presidential usurpation and a runaway court, Raskin said, Americans are ready for a pro-democracy restructuring that makes institutions accountable and elections matter. A proportional House is just a matter of passing a law, no constitutional amendment required. The program would protect the right to vote everywhere; add Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as new states; and maybe even include Supreme Court reform. “Ultimately, we need to get to independent nonpartisan commissions with multimember districts and ranked-choice voting all over the country,” Raskin said. “Those are some of the things we need to put on the table along with the national popular vote for president.”Illinois Representative Sean Casten sees all of this as a long overdue corrective that would actually make Congress functional and more representative. “The Founders didn’t actually create a representative democracy,” he pointed out. “They created one representative chamber, another nonrepresentative chamber, a Supreme Court that’s not representative at all, and refused to allow most Americans to vote. The Americans they did allow to vote, they didn’t trust to vote for senators or presidents. We’ve not fixed all that stuff yet.”Under his plan, only 12 additional senators, elected by a national popular vote, would require a constitutional amendment. Everything else is just fixing a statute. Tweak the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, and suddenly the size of the House can be adjusted to the population again, as it was every decade before its passage. It’s effectively undoing the Apportionment Act, he said, and the larger House also negates any GOP reapportionment advantage in the Electoral College. Amend the Judges Act of 1925, and it’s easy to change the mix of cases that the U.S. Supreme Court is allowed to hear. The shadow docket, all of it, gone.For Raskin, the key is to figure out the proper sequencing for all these “powerful and provocative ideas.” But all of them are linked. Everything happens or nothing happens. And if nothing moves through both chambers in the first 100 days of a Democratic trifecta, the likelihood of the reapportionment time bomb detonating—and the GOP’s adding hefty advantages in the House and Electoral College to its control of the Supreme Court and its demographic edge in the Senate—only deepens.The most pressing change may be to abolish the filibuster. As Jentleson suggested, although nothing moves through the Senate without first addressing the filibuster, none of these structural reforms will stick without shifting the balance of the judiciary. “You need to not just win power, but you are going to need to hold those majorities for at least a few years beyond if you are really serious about the structural reforms that are necessary,” he said. Thankfully, the appetite and scope of what even centrist members will consider have been expanded, he pointed out, by the Callais decision and the behavior of the court. It’s now impossible not to see that “if you pass ambitious structural reforms, but the Supreme Court is still six to three, it’s just going to be a matter of time until they undo those reforms.”There seems to be political will for big structural reform. Raskin points to D.C. statehood, the For the People Act, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act winning near-unanimous majorities among House Democrats as proof that it exists. Those reforms met their end due to the filibuster. “We had a very similar national conversation after the first Trump election, and we had a very similar mass mobilization of people saying, ‘This is unacceptable,’” Casten observed. “We then signed almost none of that into law, because the Senate said it was more important to protect the rights of 40 senators than to protect the rights of 330 million Americans.”There’s one other hardball play, should the Senate block reform again, or if Democrats fail to win the Senate back. What would happen if the president refused to report the census apportionment to the House? If Congress rewrote the statute governing the transmission of the numbers? Or if the clerk of the House simply declined to certify it? These have been ceremonial tasks in the past. But as Republicans have taught us, they need not be. Which is to say: The choice is clear. It is either big, structural reform or a constitutional, existential crisis.  

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Just 7% of Ukrainians said they approve of US leadership, according to a Gallup poll taken in April.

Questions continue to swirl about the organization’s work in Gaza.

Donald Trump lost three big cases at the Supreme Court on Monday. His appeal of E. Jean Carroll’s verdict failed. He was blocked from firing a Federal Reserve official. And most important, the court upheld the counting of late-arriving mail ballots. He ranted wildly over these losses. On the last one, he exploded in a long and angry tirade, seething over the “powerful Communist Movement taking place in our Country” and demanding again that Republicans pass onerous voter suppression. It’s clear why: This deals a major blow to Trump-GOP hopes of stealing the midterms by invalidating untold numbers of votes. Yet Trump won big at the court too, securing the power to fire independent regulators at will. We talked to Lisa Graves, a former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel who writes about the Supreme Court. We discuss what the ruling on mail-balloting does, why it will thwart a major piece of the Trump-GOP election-rigging scheme, how Trump and the Supreme Court are teaming up to empower themselves at the expense of Congress, and how a future Democratic Congress can fight back. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

In his latest Freedom 250 triumph, Pres. Fragile Snowflake launched a Great American State Fair in D.C, which is not a state, boasting tens of attendees, no shade or seats, melted ice cream, busted Ferris wheel, $25 pretzels, teenage performers, sorry-ass pavilions often sporting a mere chair, a masturbating MAGA podcaster, and a Spinal-Tap-like mini-Arc-de-Pedo that began disintegrating its first day. No wonder headliner Trump - right again! - giddily proclaimed, "This is the beginning of the golden age of America."Fresh from miraculously transforming the iconic "reflecting lakes" into a fetid debacle, Trump launched "the most unforgettable birthday party any country has ever had," though maybe not in the way he envisioned. Many observers noted "his own Potemkin Village," billed as "a world-class exposition," sadly "sputtered out of the gate," bathed in the same "stench of kitsch and failure" as everything he touches. The “sparsely attended and shockingly boring” result was variously likened to "comedy gold," "horror movie vibes," "theater of the absurd," and a Butlins - low-rent British package resorts - "for fascists with heatstroke." It did not have to be this way. A viral Reddit post by a former worker at the Smithsonian recalled the "millions in private philanthropy" raised years ago for a landmark 250th anniversary of what's been called "the greatest sentence ever written" declaring "all men (sic) are created equal." Planned was a month-long folk festival, "The Festival of Festivals," featuring a blend of the likes of Burning Man, Farm Aid, Grand Ole Oprey and local festivals highlighting the best of American arts, redolent of the famed Christmas Truce of World War One when "people put down their weapons and got together" in a hopeful, unifying cause.That was before Trump "stole America's 250th birthday and threw it for himself," refusing to issue permits for the Smithsonian's version and swiftly turning what could have been a joyful historic civic celebration into a bleak, gaudy reality-TV pageant, an alleged state fair (which clearly neither he nor his minions have ever seen) without the requisite rides, games, farm animals, cotton candy, fried dough, fresh lemonade or "fun," which could be why reports surfaced of a muggy and miserable scene where bored kids were loudly complaining and at least one took to rolling in the steamy grass screaming, "I. WANT. TO. GO. HOME!!!”Because grifters gonna grift, it also became an egregious “$100-million laundering operation" with a small Ferris wheel. Added to $80 million in our money he stole from the bipartisan, real 250 commission, he lured corporate sponsors seeking favors or contracts - Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, Oracle, ExxonMobil, United Airlines - with obscene "deals": $500,000 for “V.I.P access and seating" at all events, $1 million for a “private thank you reception” and “historic photo opportunity,” $2.5 million to be handed the mike for "a speaking role" at a July 4 event," up to $10 million for God knows what further abuse of power. Thus did his latest round of corrupt bombastic patriotism, trailing "a sense of dread" and blaring Creed's Higher, kick off Wednesday night to a military flyover, a National Anthem badly sung by Kash Patel's girlfriend, and a speech behind bulletproof glass to a mostly empty National Mall. "I am thrilled to declare that America is back,” he said, going on to reassure himself on the greatest terror of his life. "We were a joke two years ago, but nobody's laughing at us anymore" - this, from a purported US president forced to fill in for Milli Vanilli. Then he did his cringey robot "dance" while a Marine band played YMCA. Oof. Despite a relatively, mercifully brief speech, a viral video showed people streaming out as he droned on. Later he posted the rally was "packed to the brim with 45,000 happy people. Everybody stayed right until the end of my speech - they loved hearing about a truly successful America." Uh huh. "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears": Most reports put the crowd at about 1,000. Sleepy Joe last week: "Whoa. What a loser." Online, people cracked about "almost dozens of people," said they'd seen bigger crowds at school fairs, family reunions, Walmart, and suggested, "They were all at Mamdani's pool party."Grimly smiling Fox News hosts, though, toughed it out. Before a vast vista of grass dotted with maybe 14 people, they posted AI slopaganda and happily exclaimed "How great is this?" "We've got thousands celebrating!" "People are still coming!" and, "The feeling of patriotism is all in the air!" After C-listers all bailed and Vanilla Ice cancelled due to non-existent "inclement weather," performers came down to a 14-year-old singer from Arkansas and a local artist who painted an American flag live on stage; steadfast Fox chirped "so many cool people" watched him. They didn't mention, per one sage, that more people have been sexually assaulted by Epstein et al than attended this week's Fair. Meanwhile, generator issues caused the Ferris wheel to periodically shut down and the ice cream to melt; inexplicably, a butter sculpture of Trump and mascot cow named Melania didn't. Food vendors were few and airport-pricey: $5 water bottles, $23 turkey legs, $25 stuffed pretzels, a $27 dry burger with "limp, slimy lettuce on top.” Replicas of Trump passports, bewilderingly reading, "Welcome but be good," were gifted; invited whiteboard messages included, "A felon and predator resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave!!”; police arrested a MAGA podcaster dressed as Uncle Sam for masturbating to a performance by women acrobats.Lining the Mall were slapdash, flimsy state pavilions looking like empty doctors' waiting rooms or "like something Wile E. Coyote would run into while chasing the Road Runner." Over 20% of states declined to partake in the regime's ideological project to rewrite American history into a white, male Christian saga; some sent a minimal token - state name or symbol, (welcome) chair or two. Maine is a bare room whose walls list lobster facts; Oregon, "the Beaver State," has a chair, Vermont was empty until a woman drove down with maple syrup pamphlets; Alabama has a tub of peanuts; Kansas, cut-outs of Wizard of Oz characters.North Carolina flew a Confederate flag, later taken down. In "a small act of cultural sabotage," Florida honors anti-Trump Tom Petty and Jimmy Buffett among its famous residents. A mostly empty Faith and Family pavilion adorned with an Israeli flag hosted an evangelical pastor and drew two customers to "plunder hell and populate heaven”; other evangelicals reportedly wander the empty grounds, offering exorcisms. An empty War Department (sic) booth exhibits a cardboard cutout of George Washington, a montage of Hegseth's noble "war-fighters," and camo vests for kids to try on, get hyped and emulate them.Overseeing it all stands a stubby, shabby plywood and vinyl mock-up of Trump’s $100 million “Arc de Trump,” aka "Arc de Mentia," "Epstein Memorial Arch," "L' Arc de Dômbfuqué," his "Triumph of the Will" vision of "democracy if it had a midlife crisis and bought a white tracksuit." Many liken it to McDonald's arches, Spinal Tap's mini-Stonehenge, or Derek Zoolander's Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too," but the arch quickly began buckling and melting in D.C.'s humidity. Some fair-goers in search of rare shade have still sought it out. Others argue it'd get more traffic as a urinal. - YouTube www.youtube.com On Monday, the Fair was devoted to RFK's so-called MAHA, Make America Healthy Again program, or what has now morphed into Make America Hurl Again after organizers inexplicably decided the best way to promote better eating habits was to hold a contest in muggy-90-something-degree temps where people stuff their faces with as many pancakes as possible while gagging and trying not to throw up. Eat till you puke: Fun for the whole family! Up next, some speculate: "They will swim in some sewage and stare into an eclipse." Or mebbe snort heroin off a toilet seat? Stay classy, fascists. Trump was right: Too much winning.America's 250th marks the signing by 56 brave men of "a flawed but aspirational document" declaring a nation's independence and asserting, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Facts owe. Most of the Founding Fathers - slaveholders, misogynists, oppressors of Native Americans - "did not live up to those words," notes one historian. "The country they created was incomplete, and the work of completing it has been the work of every generation since."Since its inception, America has been "wrestling with the contradictions of its original sin," says Eddie Glaude, a professor of African- American studies. "This divided soul in which America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic (is) a kind of madness at the heart of the country. That madness evidences itself in cycles, and we happen to be in one right now." Still, every bailed musical act, court victory, voice raised in truth tells Trump, "We see you," writes Dean Blundell. "The country is not him. It has never been him. The country is the people who showed up across 250 years and did the work." And for now, it remains.