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“There are tons of people here,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former TV quack who now runs Medicare and Medicaid, at the Great American State Fair on Monday. He was speaking with Dean Cain, another former TV man—he played Superman on ABC in the 1990s—who has acted as a kind of hype man for the event, ostensibly a celebration of America’s 250th birthday, that is currently taking place on the National Mall. Oz seemed to know he was lying—there were not tons of people there. “This is a huge space and it’s just going to be more and more crowded as the week goes on,” he added. He’s right that it’s a huge space, but videos showed he was speaking to a sparse crowd of maybe 100. Cain later shared a picture from the top of the Ferris wheel where you can literally count the attendees. There are a few hundred. Dr. Oz on stage with Dean Cain talks about how great the crowd is at the Great American State Fair... so @hicharliecotton pans his camera to reveal quite the opposite. https://t.co/vZ3exnGWS3 pic.twitter.com/4e1ugj7AVw— TMZ (@TMZ) June 29, 2026Just as President Trump insists his lackeys dress like him, he also demands they adopt his Norman Vincent Peale–inspired embrace of positive thinking—which is to say, the refusal to acknowledge politically inconvenient truths. But it’s hard to argue with the wealth of video and photographic evidence of the Great American State Fair. It may very well get more crowded, but right now it’s a flop. That’s no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to this administration, which is itself a total failure—a group of losers and buffoons so incompetent they … well, can’t even put on a state fair. If they can’t even manage a corn maze, no wonder they’re losing a war.But the Great American State Fair is also failing because it’s the reflection of a president who has no substantive story to tell about the country he leads. While the U.S. is meant to be celebrating its semiquincentennial, Trump can only tell a story about himself. The centerpiece of the fair, after all, is a cheap scale model of a massive triumphal arch Trump hopes to build near Arlington National Cemetery. What triumph does that arch celebrate? When CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe asked Trump whom the 250-foot-tall structure is for, he pointed at himself and said, “Me.” The same could be said of the fair, the war, and so much else that this administration has done—while the World Cup offers a fitting counterpoint.History, at least in an abstract sense, has always been a part of Trump’s political project. He did not invent the slogan that gave the name to his movement—Ronald Reagan used “Make America Great Again” in his 1980 campaign—but he now owns it. Of course, the genius of those four words for Trump is that they don’t really mean anything. They harken back to an earlier, supposedly rosier period without actually saying what period that is. It’s not hard to extrapolate, given Trump’s long history of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, that he is gesturing at a past when white supremacy went unquestioned. But the statement’s utility as a political slogan is entirely dependent on its vagueness. Trump wants to return America to greatness. When was it great? Let’s not get into specifics. Trump, of course, has no genuine interest in history, not even America’s. Although some observers have floated supposed models for his presidency—Andrew Jackson in Trump’s first term, William McKinley in his second—he has never expounded knowledgeably on Jackson’s populism or McKinley’s protectionism, only gesturing at them half-heartedly in an attempt to explain his own xenophobia and imperial ambitions. No, Trump is only interested in history to the extent that he will feature prominently in it. He wants to be seen as a “great man” who changed the world.This unbridled narcissism is how you get a fiasco like the Great American State Fair and the larger project of which it is a part, Freedom 250—an organization that Trump created despite the fact that Congress had already created an organization, America250, for the purpose of celebrating the country’s anniversary. The primary purpose of Freedom 250, which is not subject to congressional oversight and does not have to disclose its donors, is the elevation of Trump and his political movement. That’s why so many musicians withdrew from performing at the Great American State Fair, and organizers had to turn to Kash Patel’s girlfriend. With just a few days to go before America’s “birthday,” Freedom 250’s most notable event so far was the UFC fight held on the White House lawn on Trump’s actual birthday.  Under a different administration—one helmed by Kamala Harris, say, or even a doddering Joe Biden—it’s not hard to imagine a different, nonpartisan celebration of America’s 250th. The textbook narrative of American history has been increasingly contested on the left, so such a celebration would not have been without minor controversy, whether genuine or manufactured. But it would have actually reckoned with this nation’s history. It also would have featured much better music, and perhaps wouldn’t have attempted to gouge visitors with $25 pretzels.Of course, there is another celebration happening in America at the same time as the debacle that is Freedom 250: a World Cup that’s primarily being hosted by blue cities. That tournament has, like everything else, been marred by the Trump administration’s incompetence and maliciousness. But it has largely been what the Great American State Fair ostensibly wants to be: a mass celebration where people come together in a spirit of unity and togetherness. Of course, the tournament’s attendees—in spite of the Trump administration’s best efforts—aren’t just coming from all over America, but the world too. Still, if you look at stadium audiences or fan fests—or even just videos of fans celebrating in the street after their team wins, as happened with Morocco supporters in Queens last night—you can see a different story about America than Trump is trying to tell. This is not the story of an egomaniacal, fascist president who dreams of an all-white America, but of a country that embraces foreigners with generosity and respect. This July 4, that’s the only story we should be celebrating.

The United States is bracing for another heat wave. More than 180 million people across the Plains, Midwest, and Southeast were under “major” or “extreme” heat warnings as of Tuesday morning. Temperatures are expected to peak above 100 degrees on the East Coast over the holiday weekend as a high pressure “heat dome” traps hot, humid air in place. The heat index, which takes humidity into account, is predicted to hit as high as 115 degrees in some places.The elephant in the room here—the force making record-breaking heat a more common occurrence—is climate change. Last week’s deadly European heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without the greenhouse effect of fossil fuel emissions, concluded a group of researchers from Europe and the U.S. But coverage of that heat wave in U.S. media barely mentioned climate change, referring only vaguely to the fact that the European continent is “warming faster than any other,” per CBS’s evening broadcast. The media watchdog FAIR noted that NBC, CBS, and ABC news reports all “failed to mention climate change even in passing.” This is not just a media failure. Fearing backlash from swing voters and Republicans, Democrats have largely stopped mentioning climate change too. A recent analysis by the nonprofit newsroom Inside Climate News found that mentions of climate change in congressional Democrats’ press releases started to taper off in 2022, following the by now received wisdom among party pollsters and pundits that talking about rising temperatures is a political death wish certain to turn off would-be Democratic voters. As I’ve written before, this approach is somewhat baffling considering that Democrats talked a lot about climate change in an election they won, in 2020, then lost an election four years later where they mostly avoided the subject.Climate-fueled heat waves, storms, fires, droughts, and floods are becoming an unavoidable reality for tens of millions across the United States. Refusing to talk about climate change in that context means refusing to engage with the world as it is. If left-of-center politicians and ostensibly fact-based news organizations aren’t willing to accurately interpret our climate-changed reality, however, the right will be more than happy to do it for them. Over the last few years, GOP politicians have chalked up deadly wildfires to Democratic mismanagement and Jewish space lasers. After flash flooding in Valencia, Spain, killed 229 people in 2024, the far-right party Vox capitalized on widespread frustration with the “political class” to pin the disaster on the country’s center-left governing coalition in Madrid. Much of the blame, meanwhile, lay with Valencia’s regional government, where Vox had just recently served as part of a governing coalition that undermined disaster response and emergency planning. During the recent European heat wave, when an estimated 1,300 people died from heat-related causes, right-wingers rushed—without evidence—to blame “degrowth” and climate concerns for the continent’s lack of air conditioning. Degrowth is, notably, not the law of the land in Europe, where air conditioning is not illegal and where the European Commission has recently dismantled several of its modest climate policy commitments.People are baking to death in Europe for the same reason that whole towns are being zapped off the map by wildfires in California, and that home insurance is becoming a luxury in places now being regularly inundated by floods that should only happen every thousand years: Our societies are navigating a climate-changed world with last century’s infrastructure. That’s not the result of some surplus of climate policies but of a profound lack of them. A few years ago, it wasn’t impossible to imagine a more climate-conscious European Union embarking on a bloc-wide mobilization to create millions of jobs installing reversible air-to-air heat pumps, which cool homes efficiently too; readying the grid to meet increased summer electricity demand with as little imported oil and gas as possible; and retrofitting old housing stock built primarily to retain heat in the winter. That never happened because European politicians, like their counterparts in the U.S., decided that preparing for and mitigating the climate crisis just wasn’t worth the the hassle.Widespread air conditioning will thankfully help the U.S. withstand this week’s brutal temperatures. But our country is no closer than Europe to having a plan for how to live with the climate crisis. Blasting the A.C. won’t keep roads and tarmacs from melting, droughts from lowering crop yields, coastal Louisiana from becoming uninhabitable, or Malibu from burning. Because the right has no intention of protecting most people from climate-fueled destruction, it’ll blame these things—like all things—on Democrats and leftist conspiracies. As they did during last week’s European heat wave, right-wingers will even go so far as to blame climate policy itself for climate-induced deaths. There’s good evidence to suggest that mentioning climate change won’t kneecap Democrats politically. And as warming continues to destabilize our world, it certainly isn’t in anyone’s interest to let Republicans control the narrative. That way lies more inaction, and more deaths.

This week’s Supreme Court ruling giving President Donald Trump a free hand in firing government regulators is less about Trump than it is about President Woodrow Wilson. In the text of Trump v. Slaughter and its various concurrences and dissents, I count 15 Trump mentions compared to 23 for Wilson. Partly that’s because no brief to enlarge presidential power will benefit from too close a look at the crazy bastard slumped in the Oval Office today. But mostly it’s because the high court wants to repudiate a set of good-government principles associated with the Progressive era and articulated in some detail by the twenty-eighth president. In the right’s political typology, Wilson is the snake in the garden of limited government who proffered the shiny red apple of the administrative state. Trump v. Slaughter is meant to drive a stake through Wilson’s undead heart.These days, liberals aren’t too crazy about Woodrow Wilson, either, because of his appalling white supremacist views and his 1913 directive to segregate Black and white employees in the federal workforce, which led to wholesale firings and demotions of Black employees and was a catastrophe for Washington’s fledgling Black middle class. Princeton took Wilson’s name off its School of Public and International Affairs in 2020, and in 2022 the District of Columbia took Wilson’s name off a high school built atop the ruins of Reno City, a Black neighborhood that federal authorities wiped off the map in the 1930s. I can’t quarrel with either decision. But life is complicated, and Wilson also helped bequeath a valuable legacy of government policy that drew on expertise and dispassionate analysis. Liberals take that legacy for granted, but conservatives have lately made that hard to do.Liberal distaste for Wilson pales in comparison to conservatism’s loathing of the man. Wilson “ushered in a new view of government,” Charlie Kirk said in a February 2025 podcast. “That we’re gonna have these in-de-pen-dent agencies that exist regardless of political pressure.… He wanted to have these agencies be permanent. A tech-no-cratic class untouchable by the sovereign, untouchable by we the people.” The right’s Wilson-hating cult is about 20 years old and was first popularized by the former Fox News commentator Glenn Beck. “I have to tell you,” Beck said at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, “I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me.… He gives us the Fed.” (True.) “He gives us the income tax.” (That was really more President William Howard Taft, a Republican.) “Prohibition. So, he took away the alcohol.” (False. Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, and then Congress overrode him.) Wilson did much less to invent the administrative state than his enemies profess. Only two major agencies were created on his watch. By contrast, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, created the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Corporations (forerunner to the Federal Trade Commission), the Food and Drug Administration, the Labor Department, and the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. In truth, the administrative state evolved, starting in the nineteenth century, alongside the growing power of industry, as a necessary check on that power. What makes Wilson a favored target is that, as a political scientist, he wrote favorably about such developments. In his 1886 essay “The Study of Administration,” Wilson observed that democratic governance “does not consist in having a hand in everything, any more than housekeeping necessarily consists in cooking dinner with one’s own hands.” (Before you call this aristo presumption, recall that Wilson was writing at a time when middle-class families frequently employed full-time cooks.) “The cook must be trusted with a large discretion as to the management of the fires and the ovens.” In much the same way, civil servants with expertise in various technical matters should be given leeway to make regulatory decisions, with political appointees and the public, of course, looking over their shoulders.Trump v. Slaughter repudiates that notion as antidemocratic. Previously, a subset of regulatory agencies called independent agencies, acting in quasi-judicial fashion and with top presidential appointees (typically a five-person panel) affiliated with both political parties, was protected from excessive partisan interference by legislative language stipulating that the president could remove these top officials only for cause. Nobody, including the high court, thought these independent agencies acted independent of politics. Because a majority of top slots were reserved for the president’s party, a Democratic Federal Trade Commission or National Labor Relations Board or Merit Systems Protection Board ruled differently than a Republican one. But the differences were somewhat muted and these independent agencies operated within an atmosphere of comparative professionalism; outright partisan hackery was frowned upon. And because the members had fixed (usually five-year) terms, there were no opportunities for empire building along the lines of J. Edgar Hoover’s half-century reign at the FBI.That world is now gone, because under Trump v. Slaughter the president can fire any of these officials if he opposes their politics or suspects them of disloyalty. The same groveling demonstrations of loyalty to Trump that we see Cabinet secretaries put on nauseating display in photo ops will now be required of agencies tasked with protecting consumers, workers, investors, voters, and so on.What has this got to do with Woodrow Wilson? Justice Neil Gorsuch—the biggest Wilson-hater on the high court—explains in his concurring opinion to Slaughter that Wilson belonged to a group of scholars who, inspired by what Gorsuch sneeringly describes as “the perceived competence of the Prussian bureaucracy,” called for bringing to American government “the utmost possible efficiency.” Central to this project was the hiring of scientific and technical experts and shielding them from excessive political control. But “those in charge of these new agencies often became very difficult to dislodge.” No, they didn’t. They served fixed terms, and whenever a president of the opposite party came in, they lost majority status. Gorsuch’s real beef with independent agencies isn’t that they operate beyond presidential control but that they exist at all:Independent agencies today hold tremendous sway over the Nation’s affairs. They regulate our businesses, and our financial markets. They set the rules for the internet and airwaves. They decide how we light our homes, how we run our elections, and the manner of our employment. They determine what toys our children will play with and how we interact with each other at work.… Often, these agencies do all this with hardly any statutory guidance, based on broad grants of legislative authority.Translation: Repeal the Progressive era!The majority opinion in Trump v. Slaughter, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, mentions Wilson by name only to acknowledge Wilson’s firing of a Portland, Oregon, postmaster, which occasioned the Supreme Court’s decision in Myers v. United States (1926), which voided a statutory requirement that Wilson had to secure Senate approval for such dismissals, which the high court argues should have prevented independent agencies from enjoying the job protection the Supreme Court now invalidates. But Wilson and the Progressive movement are doubtless what Roberts has in mind when he writes, “Placing the power to administer laws in officers who enjoy ‘freedom from Presidential oversight (and protection)’ does not deliver us to a promised land of technocratic governance [italics mine].” The high court wants you to know that no such techno-paradise exists. It’s uniquely galling to be lectured on the phoniness of expertise by a legal expert whom the president cannot fire.But it would be untrue to say the high court rejects Wilson’s vision of technocratic governance in every nonjudicial context. On the same day it handed down Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court also handed down Trump v. Cook, which says the president can’t fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook because … I still can’t understand why not. I draw some comfort from the fact that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissenting opinion to Trump v. Slaughter (joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson), can’t understand it, either:For most agencies, the majority here says, removal protections like the FTC’s make the President’s job “impossible” and so are unlawful. For [the Fed], however, the Court recognizes that the Founders were acutely aware “of the calamities that could arise from even the ‘suspicion’ of political manipulation of monetary policy” and that they therefore “guaranteed [such agencies] independence from Presidential control.” … What is unclear is why these principles should be limited only to agencies, like the Federal Reserve, that in some respects influence “monetary policy.”Justice Amy Coney Barrett, coming from the opposite ideological direction, writes in her dissent to Trump v. Cook that she too can’t figure out this inconsistency:The Court’s holding is in serious tension with Trump v. Slaughter, which we also decide today. Slaughter announces a categorical rule: Whenever “an agency ‘executes’ a congressional mandate against private parties, it exercises executive power” and must be subject to plenary executive control—“no ifs, ands, or quasis about it.” Yet here, the Court claims a special exception “sanctioned by history” and based on the Federal Reserve’s role in setting monetary policy. How can history support both a categorical rule and a carveout?Answer: It can’t. As is so often the case, it falls to the women to call bullshit on the men. But Wilson gets the last laugh because, as Glenn Beck rightly pointed out, Wilson signed into law the legislation that created the Federal Reserve. When it comes to protecting your 401(k), we’re all Wilsonians.

ScheerPost Newswire A major upset in Colorado’s Democratic primary is adding to a growing string of victories for progressive candidates across the country. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old attorney and doctoral student, defeated longtime Democratic Representative Diana DeGette, ending the nearly three-decade congressional career of one of Colorado’s best-known Democrats. With Colorado’s 1st Congressional District considered […]

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