Greg Sargent on Trump’s putsch:

The authoritarian nationalist leader typically rewrites the story of the nation in his own image. Our own homegrown authoritarian nationalist has proved particularly devoted to this fusion of national mythmaking and self-hagiography, often delivered in his own unique language of crass, gaudy spectacle.

The historians tell us that this is what authoritarian nationalists do. As Harvard’s Jill Lepore puts it, they replace history with tried-and-true fictions – false tales of national decline at the hands of invented threats, melded to fictitious stories of renewed national greatness, engineered by the leader himself, who is both author of the fiction and its mythic hero.

The authoritarian nationalists of the past didn’t have Twitter though. How Hitler would have loved Twitter. Hitler Twitler; they were made for each other. Trump announces on Twitter every day that all things have become wonderful since he was miraculously elected our Savior.

This is what we will be seeing in one form or another on the Fourth of July, no matter what President Donald Trump says in his planned Independence Day speech from the Lincoln Memorial. The very act of taking over the proceedings in the manner he has cooked up itself accomplishes this feat.

And that’s what makes it so sickening (along with everything else about it). His tweets today are enough to make you want to move to a Pacific atoll.

….and advanced aircraft anywhere in the World. Perhaps even Air Force One will do a low & loud sprint over the crowd. That will start at 6:00P.M., but be there early. Then, at 9:00 P.M., a great (to put it mildly) fireworks display. I will speak on behalf of our great Country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 4, 2019

Ooooooh airplanes oooh hardware oooh my personal plane because I am so important oooh look at me.

As many critics have pointed out, by politicizing the Fourth of July so nakedly, Trump has inevitably transformed the celebration into a campaign event. It remains to be seen whether he will do so explicitly in his speech, but either way, that conversion has already been implicitly accomplished.

It’s the melding of that fact with the particular display Trump is putting on that makes this so ugly. The showcasing of military might, Trump’s association of himself with it, and the unabashed conversion of a paean to the nation’s founding into a re-election event – what it all amounts to is larger than the sum of its parts.