I think I’ve made my opinion known about Donald Trump’s grotesque jingoistic ego-gratifying July 4th “Salute to America.”

I won’t be watching this obscenely militaristic July 4th travesty in Washington DC. Fuck the GOP and fuck this shit. Donald Trump has turned America into a goddamned banana republic.

— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) July 2, 2019

And here’s a good piece by Greg Sargent, arguing that Trump’s hijacking of the Fourth of July just got a lot uglier.

As many critics have pointed out, by politicizing the Fourth of July so nakedly, Trump has inevitably transformed the celebration into a campaign event. It remains to be seen whether he will do so explicitly in his speech, but either way, that conversion has already been implicitly accomplished.

It’s the melding of that fact with the particular display Trump is putting on that makes this so ugly. The showcasing of military might, Trump’s association of himself with it, and the unabashed conversion of a paean to the nation’s founding into a reelection event — what it all amounts to is larger than the sum of its parts.