Trump's Great American State Fair opened to sparse crowds as empty exhibits and a mocked Trumpian Arch dominated early attention. On the National Mall last week, the President of the United States stood before a half-empty field and did something future historians will study as a portrait of decline. He asked America to show up for its own birthday party. Please come, he begged viewers. If there were two empty seats, he warned, the “fake news” would say he couldn’t fill the event. He was a man reading his own nightmare aloud. Donald Trump wasn’t wrong about the empty seats. But there were vastly more than two. And like other recent debacles, the dismal turnout for America’s 250th birthday celebrations has become symbolic of the President’s second term. The festivities have been so sparsely attended that Fox News (which had hyped it for days) suddenly found other stories to cover. Entire US states decided not to send delegations and left their booths empty, like place settings for guests who’d sent their regrets. It has been, in a word, embarrassing. None of it should surprise us. Every humiliation of this administration, however small or large, is the result of one thing: Trump unfiltered. The institutional strainer that once stood between one man’s festering foolishness and the entire apparatus of the American government has been removed. How did we get here? Let’s travel back a few years. When I served in Trump’s first administration, the system worked more or less the way it was supposed to. Was it perfect? No. But many despicable inputs — like a proposed worldwide “Muslim ban” and schemes for torturing migrants — were tamed by law, process and propriety. The system worked like a water purification system with a series of filters, each designed to catch a different toxin from the relentless stream of idiocy and proud illegality emanating from the Oval Office. On any given day, Trump might be sitting in the anteroom to the Oval Office, watching flattering coverage of himself on Fox News and shouting ideas for tweets to his social-media gopher – perhaps a schoolyard barb about the physical appearance of an opponent. Meanwhile, upstairs in the White House Counsel’s office, lawyers might be meeting to prepare a briefing for the President on why it would not be legal for him to unilaterally declare a “rebellion” in the United States, as he told them he planned to do that night, in order to send troops into American cities to enforce his immigration edicts. In the Situation Room, officials from the Pentagon and National Security Council might be in tense discussions about an early-morning presidential directive sent out via Twitter — on which he’d consulted no one — that had plunged US forces overseas into mortal danger. In the White House mess, a US senator might be lunching with senior administration officials, warning that if Trump kept trying to spend money he didn’t have on a priority Congress hadn’t approved, he’d be breaking the law and risking impeachment. Over on West Executive Drive, a Cabinet secretary might be stepping out of an armoured car, having conceded the President was too dim to follow a briefing, carrying a stack of pictures to re-explain an issue for the fourth time. His first term was flooded with noise and nonsense, overseen by a president who didn’t understand what his staff did and didn’t much care. But the filters caught the worst of it, though it didn’t feel like that to most Americans, who heard the President declare power grabs and shocking offences before the bad ideas were quietly ironed out or sent into the document shredder. That system has since been dismantled. Russell Vought, who helps Trump oversee trillions of dollars in federal spending, reportedly laid out his second-term plans in a private 2024 speech: “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.” He left no mystery to what would come next. Strip out every guardrail. Remove every person who might say no. Build a government in which the only voice in the room is that of a man who cannot think in complexity and will not tolerate being questioned. So it is in term two. In place of “adults” sit people like Natalie Harp — the aide known as Trump’s “human printer,” who follows him with a portable printer because he won’t read off a screen, funnels him a stream of laudatory coverage, and according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book, tucks adoring notes into his personal spaces. One reportedly read: “You are all that matters to me.” That’s who is in the room now. Instead of people trying to prevent disaster, he’s encircled by people assuring him none could befall a man who turns all he touches to gold (if only because he orders everything to be repainted that colour). Trump has spent his life terrified of being seen as a loser. I once wrote a memo to explain why he shouldn’t pull out of Afghanistan too fast, and it only seemed to work because I wrote that the terrorists might tease and mock him as “a loser” if he backed away during his first year in office. In reality, we were worried what would happen if he withdrew US forces suddenly, failed to negotiate a lasting security agreement and created a power vacuum that could be filled by the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Allow me to impart a final message to students capable of understanding reality a layer or two deeper than “winners” and “losers”. When you build a filtration system, whether in constitutional republic or a water treatment plant, you do it to protect something. To keep it functioning, uncorrupted, clean. It is not an enemy because it stands in between you and the real thing; it might be the only reason the real thing won’t kill you. If you tear it out, you’d better be prepared to drink what’s left. Trump’s tacky party reflects the needy man I knew. All Americans share his shame
