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Chapter 1: What is the significance of Donald Trump's 80th birthday in the context of America's 250th anniversary?
This is The Guardian.
Today, Donald Trump's big, beautiful distraction. Happy birthday, America. More importantly, perhaps, happy birthday, Mr President. This weekend kicks off an extravaganza of celebrations for the nation, marking its 250 years of independence from Britain. And for Donald Trump, marking 80 years of being, well, him.
We're having a big fight. It's never going to happen again. Never happened before. And it's going to happen right in front of the White House. Here's a picture. I think a lot of people haven't seen this yet.
Presidents gone by would have used a milestone anniversary to promote national unity. Trump is organising a cage fight. He's a deeply unpopular president. He's one of the most unpopular presidents in modern American history at this point in his presidency, if not the most unpopular president. And he is nakedly, brazenly, unashamedly trying to hijack these celebrations.
The president is adamant every decent, flag-waving American will enjoy the festivities or, at the very least, be talking about the party. rather than what he's actually brought to it. There's a very serious assault on the Constitution, on liberal democracy, on the idea of three co-equal branches of government. And we lose track of that with the UFC and the gold and the ballroom.
But this is actually a very, very dangerous moment for American democracy at 250 years. From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, party in the USA. But how much is there to celebrate? Mehdi Hassan, welcome back to Today in Focus.
It is a big week for the US and for Washington DC, you know, the epicentre of the start of the country's 250th birthday celebrations, which start this weekend and keep going, I think, until July the 4th, until Independence Day. I think even beyond, I think they run to July the 10th, which is my birthday. Bookended by two birthdays, of course. There you go, me and Donald Trump with the birthdays.
Even bigger deal than that anniversary is his own birthday, his 80th birthday, which is this week. Mehdi, what can we expect from these two historic milestones? I mean, it's a reminder that he's super old, first of all. We talked a lot about Joe Biden's age and health. Donald Trump is the oldest man elected to the presidency.
He is someone whose health is in clear decline visually to people who look at him and obviously with our ears if you hear him speak. So it's an interesting time to celebrate his age. He recently spoke to a bunch of elderly folks in Florida. He said, you're all seniors. I'm not. You are. Which was very funny because most of those people were younger than him in the crowd.
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Chapter 2: How is Donald Trump using the 250th anniversary celebrations to his advantage?
Imagine being turned down by Milli Vanilli. A bunch of other artists were put on a list of artists performing, and they said, no one check with us. And they said, rightly, that we don't want to be part of a partisan event. And then the White House said, this is not a partisan event. This is a bipartisan event to celebrate America. So we're going to do it with...
A Trump speech. The president now saying that instead he may focus the country's landmark birthday on a campaign style rally, quote, bringing the number one attraction anywhere in the world, Donald J. Trump.
And we all know how bipartisan Trump speeches are. And yeah, he's going to turn this major anniversary for the United States of America into an opportunity to attack the usual suspects, the fake news media, the treasonous Democrats, et cetera, et cetera.
So, Mehdi, we had Munir Chihuahua on today in Focus a few weeks ago, and he's got this quite interesting theory about how Trump may have learned all his showmanship moves from WWE. And now, lo and behold, there is a match of beefy, sweaty men being staged on the White House lawn. It's UFC. Yes. What do we know about why?
Yeah, on the WWE point, it's always worth remembering that Donald Trump doesn't just love WWE. He was in WWE. He fought in WWE. He did a fake fight in WWE. I often have to remind people that President of the United States was in a WWE fight and was in Home Alone 2. That is the person who currently has access to all the nuclear codes.
So this is a situation we're in right now where this person who came out of reality TV, came out of fake fighting, has now in the White House and decides to mark the 250th birthday or maybe his own birthday with a UFC fight on the White House lawn.
The images are insane. New construction is underway for an unprecedented spectacle, a cage fight at the White House, a massive arch taller than the building itself.
This hulking frame of the cage that they are building or have built on the White House lawn. So first he destroyed the East Wing in the White House to start building his ballroom. And now he puts this monstrosity on the White House lawn. And now he's suggesting that he'll keep it there forever.
You know, we're building something in front of the White House that's quite attractive to a lot of people. It's going to have the big UFC fight on June 14th. And I'm looking at it and maybe we'll never, ever take it down.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Trump's popularity during his presidency?
Well, I did. It's going to be one of the greatest. I would say it will be the greatest facility of its kind ever built.
He went to China. When he left China, the Chinese government put out a statement about what they spoke about, trade, globalization. He put out a statement saying they have a ballroom, we should too. On the one hand, I talk about this stuff and we laugh and we say, how ridiculous, how absurd. It is $400 million worth of ballroom going on right there. More than that.
So on one hand, it's kind of tacky, weird, you know, cheap, self-aggrandizing. On the other hand, it is very serious. This is the executive branch of the United States government, which is taking over the other two branches, has taken over Congress and has declared war basically on the judiciary.
And therefore, in a country which is supposed to be built on checks and balances on three co-equal branches of government, you have a president who's doing everything he can right now, politicizing his DOJ, his Department of Justice, to go after his political opponents and doing things like enriching himself in office.
but also giving himself powers that the founders never thought a president should have. The founding fathers left the UK to get away from a mad king, not to recreate a mad king. The VDEM, which is a group of political scientists out of Sweden, last year downgraded the United States from being a liberal democracy for the first time since records began. But that is where we are today.
Well, tell me a bit more about that assault on democracy and about some of the powers that you say that he has abused and basically just renegotiated for himself as president. So if you just look at some of the amendments to the Constitution, which make up the Bill of Rights of the United States, First Amendment, free speech, Donald Trump has declared war on the First Amendment.
One judge recently said his detention of students just for their speech, just for writing articles, was, quote, a full-throated assault on the Constitution. And that was a Reagan-appointed judge who said that, not someone. Marxist liberal judges, they like to dismiss all judges as. He's arrested Don Lemon. He's raided the home of a Washington Post reporter.
He's tried to ban flag burning in violation of the Supreme Court. He's tried to defund NPR and PBS. Again, a judge had to step in. He's detained and prosecuted and tried to deport foreign students for their speech. That's just the First Amendment. There's the Fourth Amendment that says you can't break into people's houses without warrants, what ICE does all the time.
Fifth Amendment says you need due process. He throws people out of the country without a court hearing. Go through the list. Sixth Amendment, right to a fair trial. He's targeted law firms and judges have said this is assault on the Sixth Amendment. You keep going down the line. Tenth Amendment, which says the state should have their own rights.
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Chapter 4: How does Trump's presidency reflect on American democracy and its current state?
We're now, what, three months into this war. So it's failing on every front. Shock, horror, Donald Trump is an incompetent president, as if we didn't already know that from the first term. The adults in the room that he had around him in term one, nonexistent in this term. You know, he's got Tulsi Gabbard, who just quit as a director of national intelligence. So it's a car crash of a presidency.
As I say, he's more unpopular now than any president at this point in the presidency.
But look at where he is now. Woo! Down there, underwater, underneath the cornfields. He's now 14 points underwater. That's an over 30-point switcheroo against the President of the United States.
Some polls suggest he's more unpopular now than he was the morning after January the 6th, which tells you just how unpopular he is. But the polls are really showing that, the American public. Every poll. In as much as... Every poll. And Trump knows this and it's killing him. Because if there's one thing he's always craved, it is public approval. And he's never got it.
He's ran for president three times. He's never won a majority of the popular vote. Even last time round, he won 49.8%. He didn't quite get to 50. But he's obsessed with this idea that they are expressions of the public will. And he's not. The public are very much against him.
Mehdi, how much of this bombast, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the ballrooms, the birthdays, how much of it is a distraction from the mess the US has made abroad?
And is it working in the sense that, you know, are people talking about Iran or are they excited about the prospect of the God bless America guy, Lee Greenwood, you know, pumping out his patriotic anthems at Trump's big rally?
God bless the USA.
Ladies and gentlemen, President Donald J. Trump.
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Chapter 5: What does Mehdi Hasan reveal about Trump's historical impact on the U.S.?
It's now become an extension of the presidency as long as the Republicans are in charge. Now, if the Democrats win in November in the midterms. and take back control of the House, at least, if not the Senate, then yes, they can hold some hearings. They can impeach him for corruption. Not that it will get convicted in the Senate because they don't have a two-thirds majority.
But at least something can be done to draw attention to this insane level of corruption where the president and his family are making tons of money. And they all complained about Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden made max $10 to $20 million from his Ukrainian-Chinese business dealings. These guys are in the billions right now, the Trump family.
So you've got the personal enrichment of the president and his family on one side, but what about the sort of wealth inequality in the US under his presidency? What does life look like for the average American right now? So Donald Trump passed a big, beautiful act last year. There's another set of tax cuts for the rich, paid for by cuts to healthcare and to social services.
And income inequality, wealth inequality has been widening in America. There was a brief period after the pandemic because of all the pandemic measures, that actually cut inequality. The United States of America, in Biden's first term in office, cut child poverty in half. Unheard of. 50% cut.
And then they couldn't replicate that in year two because all of those benefits expired and a couple of Democratic senators joined with Republicans to just end it all.
I mean, it's too early to say now, but by the end of his term, I have no doubt in my mind that income and wealth inequality levels will balloon out of control again because he's so intent on giving tax cuts to the richest, to the 0.1%. He's very open about rewarding his donors.
ABC News goes to the great American birthday party.
Mehdi, the country's last big anniversary was back in 1976 for the bicentennial or the 200th anniversary where President Gerald Ford delivered this quite optimistic speech for America's future.
Liberty is a living flame to be fed, not dead ashes to be revered, even in a bicentennial year. It is fitting that we ask ourselves hard questions, even on a glorious day like today.
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Chapter 6: How are Trump's actions perceived in relation to the Constitution?
Lucky me. Lucky you indeed. How much does it feel like the country, democracy even, how much does it feel it's changed in that time? And what worries you now that didn't when you first moved? Oh, so much. So much worries me and so much has changed. I arrived in the last year of the Obama administration.
Ironically, in Barack Obama's last year in office, he actually did some very powerful things on the foreign policy stage. I was a critic of much of his foreign policy, especially his drone strikes. But in his last year in office, he did the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. He did the lifting of some of the blockade on Cuba and they're trying to have some kind of rapprochement with Cuba.
Look where we are today. We're at war with Iran or we might be about to be at war with Cuba. So just on the foreign policy stage, a massive difference from the moment I arrived in the US to the moment we're in right now. And then, of course, as we've talked earlier, Donald Trump's assault on the Constitution, American government, how we see politics, all of its change. I often think of my kids.
I think of anyone who is kind of, you know, under the age of 18. 18, 19, 20. It's very hard to explain to him that there was a time when Donald Trump was just a reality TV star. We didn't have to take him seriously. You might be able to come back and fix some of the damage to the Constitution. But you can't undo the cultural damage to America. You can't undo the psychological damage.
You can't undo the shattering of norms, certain things that are now out of the bottle that you can't put back into the bottle. And that's what really worries me, the long-term damage. Donald Trump could disappear tomorrow, but the damage that he's done will be with us for decades to come, especially in terms of the American public.
It's a much more bitter country, divided country, angry country, violent country, hate-filled country, unfortunately. Look at the hate crimes against synagogues, against mosques. That's what worries me most, obviously, as a Muslim immigrant is safety. You know, we live in a world where people are being assaulted, assassinated.
You have Republicans who say they can't vote against Donald Trump because they're worried about the security and safety of their own families. That's the kind of thing you used to hear in, quote unquote, banana republics. You now hear that in the United States of America on its 250th birthday. I wonder how you think the Trump presidency will be viewed by history today.
Well, first of all, if democracy doesn't survive, it doesn't really matter what history writes because, you know, to the winner goes the spoilers, including writing the history. They're already trying to rewrite American history.
We haven't talked about how on this 250th anniversary, they've gone out of their way to censor at museums, to rewrite at national parks, to go after, you know, books in government facilities. But in terms of going forward, if we are able to get through this dark period, yeah, historians will look back on two terms of Trump as kind of neo-fascism, as authoritarianism of a very American kind.
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