WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Wednesday kicked off what was meant to be a summer celebration of America’s 250th birthday. Instead, he made the festivities all about himself.Just as he has plastered the capital city with giant banners featuring his menacing glower, tried to add his own name to the Kennedy Center, spent millions of tax dollars on a spectacle celebrating his own birthday and is planning to spend millions more on a massive arch memorializing his rule, the president is turning this summer into a weeks-long Trump rally.“You know very well, a short time ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world,” he said on the National Mall, delivering to 1,000 or so of his supporters one of his standard speeches. “We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.”Fifty years after President Gerald Ford marked the country’s bicentennial with a Kennedy Center gala featuring Bob Hope, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Rev. Billy Graham, Trump – unable to find A-list talent that wanted to be associated with him – gave Americans yet another opportunity to listen to him exaggerate or lie about his own accomplishments while insulting his political opponents.“The American dream is alive again. That’s something that nobody thought they’d be saying when you went through that last four years of incompetence,” Trump said. “We inherited a mess.”Wednesday’s event was put on by Freedom 250, a group created by Trump to hijack the celebration that Congress, a decade ago, had intended for the nonpartisan America250 to plan.Neither Trump nor his party made any attempt to portray Wednesday’s event as nonpartisan or even bipartisan. On Wednesday morning, the Republican National Committee even posted an ad on social media calling the gathering on the mall a “Trump rally.”That promise was kept by Trump, who spent his 27 minutes on stage repeating many of the same falsehoods and boasts that populate both his “official” and political speeches.“We are delivering the largest reduction in drug price history, with price differences of 400, 500 and even 600%,” he said, nonsensically. “We got men out of women’s sports. We renamed Gulf of Mexico. After 350 years, they are 100 years older than we are, we named the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and restored the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it belonged.”He finished with his familiar: “We will make America Great Again,” before walking off to a rendition of the Village People’s “YMCA” played by the U.S. Marine Corps band.RelatedDonald Trumpamerica 250Freedom 250