TV News LIES

Plans for President Donald Trump's speech and what he has described as a record-breaking fireworks show are still on after severe thunderstorms wreaked havoc on Fourth of July celebrations in the Eastern United States.

From Washington, D.C., to Boston, Independence Day events are back on after brief delays due to inclement weather as the country marks its 250th anniversary. Trump’s “Salute to America” event was postponed until 11 p.m. due to “approaching severe weather.” In New York, organizers opted to launch fireworks early to beat weather concerns.

Festivities in Western and Central states, meanwhile, are chugging along as planned, with star-studded concert lineups taking the stage in Nashville and Los Angeles.

"Storms bring luck to whatever the occasion," Trump said in a Truth Social post. "They also make events a little bit more exciting! We will wait it out, I don’t care if it’s 2:00 O’Clock in the morning, or in one hour from now. Looks like it is going to pass, they always do. I will be there no matter what, but the “what” usually turns out to be a good thing."

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To call this Saturday the nation’s 250th birthday is to indulge a comfortable fiction. 1776 was a declaration, not a birth certificate – and the founders wrote its claims of human equality while this nation enslaved human beings. A truer account of American freedom runs through 1619 and Juneteenth, when Americans forced the country, at last, to begin making its promises answerable to reality.

So I’m not in the mood to celebrate “America 250”, and I’m not alone. The affection is thin this summer: the Pew Research Center found that 69% of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s direction early this year. That is not ingratitude. Sometimes a sour mood is simply clear vision.

In the final days before 4 July, the US supreme court gave the country a diagnosis of itself. It preserved one of the country’s greatest repairs – birthright citizenship under the 14th amendment – while loosening a guardrail against corruption and weakening another promise of equal protection.

Nearly 250 years later, the US is not a finished monument, but a structure still under repair, still contested – and in places being quietly stripped for parts.

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) called on Americans to confront the nation’s flaws rather than ignore them on the eve of the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, framing “righteous dissent” as core to the country’s founding ideals.

“This will be no ordinary day of celebration,” he said. “Two hundred fifty years presents a rare opportunity for more than 340 million people to turn together, both toward one another and toward ourselves, to take measure of who we are as a nation.”

Speaking from former President George Washington’s desk at New York City Hall, the first-term mayor reflected on the resilience of American revolutionaries who sought to free themselves from the British “yoke of oppression” in pursuit of a “grand experiment in self-governance.”

He recounted New York City’s role as the symbolic gateway to the nation, tracing the struggles and triumphs of enslaved Africans through the generations of immigrants who came in search of greater opportunity.

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Louisiana’s Republican attorney general was indicted on Thursday on criminal charges by a grand jury in New Orleans, accused of trying to intimidate local officials who fought a law enacted by GOP legislators to overhaul the local courts.

Liz Murrill, the attorney general, told eight New Orleans officials, including Helena Moreno, the mayor, and Jason Williams, the district attorney, that they could face removal from their jobs because of their opposition to the law.

It eliminated the position of Orleans parish criminal court clerk after Calvin Duncan, a man who spent decades in prison for a wrongful conviction, was elected to the post with 68% of the vote.

Legislators approved the law at the urging of the Republican governor, Jeff Landry, just days before Duncan was to take office in May. Duncan’s supporters saw it as a move by a majority-white conservative legislature to thwart the will of voters in a predominantly Black Democratic hub in a red state.

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'He’s quite ill - and getting worse daily', Rosie O'Donnell tells the Guardian after Trump posts AI video attacking her

Before he left for the day, our colleague Shrai Popat reached out to Rosie O’Donnell to ask if she had any response to Donald Trump including a deepfake AI rendering of her supposedly confessing to suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in his latest attack on her on social media.

Shrai passes along this reply from O’Donnell, the comedian and former talk show host Trump has obsessively criticized in crude terms for two decades now:

He’s quite ill – and getting worse daily. The 25th amendment exists for exactly this reason. Remove. Impeach. Convict.

The post, which was shared by an official White House account, depicts testimonials from AI renderings of O’Donnell and five other Hollywood critics of the president – John Leguizamo, Whoopi Goldberg, Ed Norton, Robert De Niro and Julia Roberts - in which they praise an AI rendering of Trump, depicted as a doctor in a white lab coat (not red robes), for treating them.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called protesters "ingrates" on Thursday, July 2, as he and other top members of the Trump administration praised the National Guard's work during a D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force event.

“This background noise this morning is perfect; it’s the sound of ingrates, of ingratitude, of people who are so blinded by ideology they can’t see law and order and common sense in front of them,” Hegseth said. “There’s nothing ideological about this group. There’s nothing political about this exercise.”

Apart from Hegseth, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche were also heckled by “Free DC” protesters during an event.

The protesters blew whistles and horns while Trump administration officials touted the National Guard, who have been patrolling Washington, DC, since the president deployed the military branch following a public safety emergency declaration last year, according to reporting from The Hill.

“Thank you for being here, for backing us up along the way. To the entire team, to the soldiers here, thank you for everything you’re doing. Thank you for waiting out here in the sun,” Hegseth said.

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