Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
July 5, 2026 (Sunday)
Going into the weekend during which Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of the day on which the Second Continental Congress accepted the Declaration of Independence, President Donald J. Trump was facing a whole lot of bad news.
There was the war on Iran. On Thursday, after U.S. Central Command said regional leaders in the Middle East were committed to the “free flow of commerce” in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s military command said that any ships trying to cross the strait on unapproved routes would be met with a “forceful response.” The U.S. has been urging ships to use a route close to Oman, but Iran’s warning caused ships to turn around.
Iran was part of the story of the economy. The choking off of the roughly 20% of the world’s oil that flowed through the Strait of Hormuz until Trump launched an attack on Iran has caused inflation to spike in the U.S. On Wednesday, July 1, Trump’s new hand-picked chair of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, told the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking that “prices are too high.” With inflation over 4%, Warsh also reiterated that the Fed would continue to hold its goal of no more than 2% inflation, suggesting that the interest rate cuts Trump wants so badly are not going to happen any time soon. Currently there is talk of raising interest rates later this year.
In addition to concerns about stringency in the oil markets, Joe Hernandez of NPR reported on Friday that the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz also affected transport of about one third of the world’s fertilizer transported by sea. Shortages hurt farmers around the world, including in the U.S., where farmers were hit with skyrocketing fertilizer prices during planting season. An April survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation reported that 70% of respondents said they couldn’t afford all the fertilizer they needed for the season.
Hernandez reports that higher fertilizer prices are just one of the reasons that consumers will see higher food prices this fall.
And then there were the stories about corruption. On Tuesday, new financial disclosures showed that Trump has made an eye-popping $1.4 billion in his family’s cryptocurrency ventures since he took office. On Thursday, Trump appeared to feel the need to defend those profits, telling CNBC: “There’s nothing illegal. There’s nothing wrong with it I could know.” Julia Manchester of The Hill noted that Trump went on to say that the nature of the presidency means that his children “have inside information” about almost any business decision they make. He said: “Almost anything they do, if they want to buy a truck, if they buy an energy efficient truck, they have inside information.”
There are specific legal prohibitions against using insider information for benefit in stock trades and financial transactions.
And Trump appears to have fleeced his own followers. On Saturday, Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany of the New York Times reported that as of the end of June, nearly a million people who bought Trump’s memecoin lost a total of $3.81 billion while Trump walked away with $636 million. Trump took transaction fees up front, so he made money no matter what happened with the coin. For his followers, though, his advice that “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” and to “Join my very special Trump community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW!” cost them dearly as the coin slid from trading at $75.35 to trading at $1.76, a drop of 97%.
On Thursday, Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources released a report accusing Trump of cheating the American people at large by diverting donations that donors intended to make to the nonpartisan America250 program to his own Freedom 250 organization. After failing to take over America250 entirely, the report charges, Trump’s people created Freedom 250 within the National Park Foundation. By using a known and popular public charity as cover, Freedom 250 could attract donations while operating outside the transparency and accountability rules Congress required for America250.
The report suggests that Trump officials gave donors intending to donate to the bipartisan America250 routing and account numbers for Trump’s Freedom 250. They also took most of the money Congress appropriated for the America 250 project; in June a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told Michael Scherer of The Atlantic: “Spending taxpayer money on frivolous, poorly attended events and D.C. consultants who are trying to get rich off America’s 250th is the exact opposite of what was intended. This administration will not light taxpayer money on fire. Full stop.”
But Trump officials routed that money to favored contractors, including the firm that helped to organize Trump’s rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, before attendees stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, told reporters: “I’m a lawyer, and I know better than to pronounce that a crime has been committed. But I do know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s Freedom 250 focused on promoting his 250-foot-tall triumphal arch at his Great American State Fair on the National Mall. Recurring problems with Trump’s renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool marred that celebration as the pool turned green with algae and then pieces of the pool’s new coating began to break loose. Administration officials accused vandals of causing the damage. They put fencing around the pool and had National Guard troops patrol it.
The Great American State Fair opened on June 25 after a number of musical acts backed out, saying they had been misled into thinking the event was backed by the bipartisan America 250. Once open, the fair was plagued with electrical issues, sparse exhibits, and heat. A model of the proposed triumphal arch looked cheap and quickly began to come apart. Visitors were few and far between, and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported that aerial images of the empty mall so enraged Trump that White House officials deleted them from official and personal social media accounts.
And on June 25, in response to a lawsuit by journalist Katie Phang, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered acting attorney general Todd Blanche to produce key documents from the Epstein files by July 2 or show cause why the Department of Justice is refusing. On July 2 it refused to produce the material, saying its redactions and omissions were within the scope of the requirements of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
On July 3, Fifty Plus One, which tracks Trump’s job approval rating, reported that 59.1% of Americans disapprove of his performance while only 37.5% approve.
And so, on Friday night, the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Trump flew to South Dakota to deliver a speech at Mt. Rushmore in which he claimed he and his supporters are at war against an enemy here at home: communists.
Before his trip to the state, Trump posted a video showing his own likeness on a golden sculpture of Mt. Rushmore, alongside the images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, with the voiceover saying: “I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come.” The video opens with the text “Art of the vision” spelled out over an American flag, an encapsulation—although perhaps an unintentional one—of how Trump has maintained political power by selling a false image to his followers.
Trump began his speech with a series of feel-good platitudes: “These are very, very special times. And this is a very special place. You live in a very special place. Congratulations, everybody…. We are a nation of dreamers and believers, warriors and explorers, doers and fighters…. There has never been anything like us anywhere on earth.” And then he tied together MAGA’s white nationalism with the claim that Trump’s political opponents want to destroy the economy.
Trump clearly thinks there is political gain in convincing his followers that his political opponents are communists, although this is a lie made up out of whole cloth after the victory of Democratic Socialists in Democratic primaries and the popularity of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Communists call for the end of private ownership of the means of production, giving the state control of private enterprises. In today’s America, it is actually Trump, himself, who is taking government stakes in private enterprises.
Democratic Socialists are not communists or socialists, who want to see the end of private property. Democratic Socialists call for a robust system of private enterprise, alongside government control of the aspects of society required for people to participate in the economy on a level playing field. While Democratic Socialists embrace a wide range of policies, they generally don’t think schools, or medical care, or roads, should be profit-making industries.
In that, they echo Americans from the 1860s, when the Republicans established public colleges, or the 1900s, when Theodore Roosevelt called for public health insurance. Indeed, what today’s Democratic Socialists call for is much more limited than what the Republicans under President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted in 1956, when the top income tax bracket in the United States was 91%.
Nonetheless, on Friday Trump tried to convince Americans that “there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.” “These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations,” he said. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.”
He went on to say: “They don’t want good. They don’t love God and they don’t want God. They don’t love religion and they don’t want religion and they won’t have it.… They have no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition, or your God-given rights. It’s an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder…. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
His false vision of the U.S. is aimed at the midterm elections. “America will never be a communist country,” he said. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise.” He went on to demand that the Senate end the filibuster and Congress pass the voter-suppression SAVE America Act. If they do, he said, “we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”
On July 4, hundreds of masked white supremacists in khakis and blue shirts, carrying Confederate flags and flags with the logo of the neofascist white supremacist group Patriot Front, marched in Washington, D.C., chanting “Reclaim America.” The White House did not respond to a query from Gloria Oladipo of The Guardian about whether Trump condemns the march.
Trump continued his attacks on “communists” in a late-night speech on the National Mall after thunderstorms temporarily shut down his planned rally. “[A]ll these talks from the communists, they haven’t got a chance,” he told the drenched audience members, “not even a chance. We don’t want communists in our country.”
Trump’s drop into an anticommunism that exaggerates even the excesses of the McCarthy era seems to indicate panic rather than confidence. Today, July 5, he began posting on social media at 1:21 AM and over the course of the day posted more than 100 times, attacking Democrats and boasting extravagantly of what he says are his own successes while demanding Congress pass the SAVE Act or lose the presidency forever.
Trump’s people appear to be trying to push Trump’s vision, but it doesn’t seem to be sticking.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows today, insisting that the problems with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool were the work of vandals who have gashed its surface in multiple cuts that equal the 350 feet Trump claims and that there is video evidence, although the administration, which is famous for spinning everything to its own advantage, is choosing not to show it.
When CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether they actually had photographs of people cutting a gash in the liner, Burgum danced away from the question after commenting, “I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question whether or not…”
And so the 251st year of American democracy begins with reality reasserting itself.
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
