Presiding over America’s 250th anniversary celebrations should have been an easy win for Donald Trump, said David Frum in The Atlantic. “He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas.” But the president’s plans for Washington DC are shaping up to be “a fiasco”. They were set to include a series of concerts on the National Mall; but almost all of the acts scheduled to headline the 4th of July weekend have pulled out, complaining that what they’d been told would be a non-partisan event had turned into something else.An irate Trump said that “instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear”, he’d bring the “Number One Attraction anywhere in the World”: himself.

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