Mehdi Hasan on Donald Trump’s big, beautiful birthday

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0:08Today, Donald Trump's big, beautiful distraction.

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1:24Happy 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 organizing a cage fight.

2:11He'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.

2:47But this is actually a very, very dangerous moment for American democracy at 250 years.

2:58From The Guardian, I'm Noshin Iqbal. Today in Focus, party in the USA. But how much is there to celebrate?

3:13Mehdi 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. 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.

3:49We 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 and 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. But, you know, he's in denial about his age and his health. He keeps bragging about acing a dementia test, which is a weird thing to do.

4:17Anybody running for president or vice president should take a cognitive test. And no president has ever taken one except me. I've taken three of them and I've aced each one. So his birthday is very big for him and his supporters. It is a very cultish movement, the MAGA movements. Of course, they have to celebrate him. They want to do a lot of stuff. They want to build an arch, an arc to Trump. all of this kind of nonsense. It's very, very kind of Roman Empire in decline moment here for the United States with this weird president. America loves patriotic displays of flag waving in a way that many European countries don't.

4:53But I'm not seeing that right now. I'm in Washington, D.C. in the belly of the beast. I'm not seeing people getting excited. More people are excited about the World Cup and even the World Cup is going to be a disaster because Donald Trump's fingertips are all over it. Take me back. Tell me a little bit more about the so-called nonsense. What kind of events, what kind of like, you know, big sort of staging moments are we expected to see? Well, they couldn't pull off any big moments because most celebrities, musicians, film stars, famous folks don't like Donald Trump. You'll be shocked to hear. So it's very hard.

5:18The Republican Party has always had this weird love-hate relationship with Hollywood where they kind of they scream and say those Hollywood elites. And then they desperately try and find derate celebrities to come out and back them whenever they can. Martina McBride saying she was initially told it would be a nonpartisan event, but that turned out to be misleading. She, along with Poison's Bret Michaels, rapper Young MC and Milli Vanilli, backed out. He asked Milli Vanilli. He did, and Milli Vanilli turned him down. 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.

5:49And 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, etc., etc.

6:24So, Mehdi, we had Mnye 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. 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.

6:58Oh, my God! The hostile takeover of Donald Trump on Vince McMahon! I often have to remind people that the 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, is 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.

7:35This hulking frame of the cage that they are building or have built on the White House lawn. So first he destroyed the East Wing of 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. And he loves this because his base is the only thing he has left. Swing voters have ditched him.

8:08Hispanic voters and young people who came over for the election have ditched him. So he's going back to the base. And some people have described UFC as the sporting wing of MAGA. I think we'd be 10 years behind if it wasn't for you. And so thank you for that. Dana says it better than anybody can say it. They couldn't get any arenas because it was so violent. that they couldn't get it in as I was able to give them, I guess, the first four or five fights. Saying it out loud makes me feel like I'm in some weird dream. Dana White, who runs UFC, has turned it into a billion and a half dollar business.

8:38It's an old friend. I say friend loosely. Trump doesn't have friends. Old acquaintance and business partner of Donald Trump. He pretends to be apolitical, but he's spoken at every Republican national convention since 2016. And look, this is very much about where they decide to put their energies and resources. This is where they think the male, young, white base is at UFC. This is where Trump thinks he can get cheered. Most people will boo Trump wherever he is. So he needs to retreat to safe spaces and safe spaces, a UFC fight, and even safer spaces, a UFC fight on the White House lawn.

9:16As far as I understand it, there are two separate committees working on this sort of celebratory extravaganza. There's America 250, which was established by Congress 10 years ago, and Freedom 250, which was set up by Trump as a public-private partnership. Slash grift machine. Well, it's giving quite King Trump vibes. How are we supposed to read what it says about his presidency and about his vision for America? So a couple of things. It's always very hard to talk about Trump's dictatorial tendencies because on the one hand, they're so tacky. Right. This is a guy who puts gold in the White House, fawns all over.

9:52Kim Jong Un says we sent each other love letters. I wish my people saluted me like his people salute him. The guy's in the middle of a war he's losing in the Middle East. And all he talks about is a ballroom. This will be the entrance into the ballroom. The ballroom will be right here. This is a glass, beautiful glass tunnel. Beautiful tunnel that goes right into the ballroom. Ballroom's right there. Pretty good, right? You've had so much fun, I feel like, designing this. 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.

10:21When 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. I think there's$400 million worth of ballroom going on right there. More than that. So on one hand, it's kind of tacky, weird, 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.

10:52And 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 the records began.

11:22But 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 some Marxist liberal judge, as they like to dismiss all judges as.

11:54He'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.

12:23He'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. He's violated that by sending the National Guard into California, into Oregon, into Illinois. Trump judges have had to say you can't do this people he appointed are saying whoa you've gone too far so you go down the list birthright citizenship 14th amendment he's saying no just by fiat I'm going to get rid of the idea that if you're born in America you're a citizen and he's made his contempt for the judiciary very clear so it is a very dangerous moment when you have a man who believes he's not bound by forget conventions or norms which he clearly isn't but by basic amendments of the constitution

13:12Mehdi, birthdays, I guess, are supposed to be a great time to sort of take stock. And I'm sure the president has meditated on his last year. Oh, I'm sure, yeah. He's recently been so busy trying to make peace in the Middle East in recent weeks, following a war, of course, that he started. He even missed his son, Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding because, as you said, Iran. It's an incredibly unpopular war with much of the MAGA base. But how is Trump faring by and large with the American public? I mean, his presidency is a disaster right now on every front, foreign policy, domestic policy. There was a running gag that he invaded Iran.

13:48He attacked Iran and bombed Iran and tried to do regime change in Iran to distract from the Epstein affair, which was the biggest story prior to Iran. And then you may remember a couple of weeks ago, Melania Trump did a random press conference where she said, I had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein out of nowhere. The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today. Now, when I asked her and she just came out and said this, and then the gag was, well, Iran is going so badly, they're bringing up Epstein to distract from Iran. Right. So that's how bad it is at home and abroad.

14:16The economy is tanking. Inflation is higher than it was when he came to office. He said he was going to end inflation on day one. I will end inflation, he said, on day one. He's going to end the Ukraine war on day one. On day one also. That's not ended. You'll be shocked to hear. And the Iran war, he said, we'll be over in a few days. 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, non-existent in this term.

14:42You 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.

15:11In 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?

15:38And 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. It gets hard debating how much of what Trump does is a distraction from other things that Trump does. Because there is this idea that he's playing 4D or 3D or whatever the analogy chess. And he's always like, it's very, very smart. And Steve Bannon once said it's like flooding the zone with shit. You just kind of distract the media with one story and scandal after another.

16:21And sometimes I feel like that's happening. Sometimes I just think they're just incompetent and they're not getting anything right. So it feels like they're distracting from one thing to another, but maybe they're just bad at everything they do. clearly he would like people to see him in this light of leader, god, king, emperor, whatever he wants to call it. I mean, King Charles had to go to the US recently, had to come from the UK to the US and tell Congress, had to remind them that you need to restrain executive power, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.

17:00Imagine the king of England has to remind Democratic America about the need to constrain an executive. No irony there. The founders are rolling in their graves. But it is partly distraction, but I don't think we should oversell the distraction. I think we just deal with the fact that this is who Trump is. For so many years, people have tried to psychoanalyze him and say, well, it's really this. It's really that. He's really doing this. No, this what you see is what you get. He is an incompetent, empty vessel of a man who cares about nothing but his own ego, has no vision for anything he does. He said recently when the Iran war started, he said people are going to say, I'll get bored of this.

17:31I don't get bored. And then on Sunday, he said, I'm bored.

17:46You say he cares only about his ego. No, he does also care about money. And, you know, while there are genuine worries for the Republicans that Trump will tank in the midterms because of this war, the war has been good for business. You know, from the... His business, not American business. Well, how much money is it estimated that Trump has made from being in power? And how much has he pushed the boundaries and broken the rules of what a president can and can't do? So last year, Forbes magazine said it was his, quote, most lucrative year ever. The irony of Donald Trump is that he always claimed to be a billionaire when he wasn't.

18:20He was a fake billionaire. And by becoming a politician, he actually became a real billionaire. By getting into crypto in particular. In the middle of the election campaign in 2024, he and his family and the Wyckoff set up this World Liberty Financial, which is a crypto company. In the middle of an election campaign, the Trump family sets up this crypto business. Before, foreign governments couldn't just give money, like in a briefcase, to a presidential candidate or to a sitting president. Now you can just put money straight into his crypto company. It's what the Pakistani government have done.

18:42It's what the Emiratis, on the eve of his inauguration, January 2024. Emirati Prince, a national security advisor for the Emirati government, took a half a billion dollar, 49 % stake in World Liberty Financial. $187 million of that 500 million went straight into Trump family bank accounts. This is a day before Trump becomes president. Months later, coincidentally, completely coincidentally, the Trump administration lifted a restriction on selling AI chips to the Emiratis. It is not allowed to answer your question. A president and any official in government cannot take a gift, cannot take a public office or title from a foreign government.

19:19Donald Trump took half a billion dollars from the Emiratis. He took a$400 million plane from the Qataris. He hosts the Saudi-sponsored Live Golf Tournament at his golf courses. And so where are the consequences? None. He just ignores court rulings, which no president has done before. And Congress, which is supposed to hold him to account, basically rubber stamps everything he does. Congress is run by Speaker Mike Johnson, who is Speaker in name only. Donald Trump jokes in private that I am both President and Speaker, and he's not lying. He basically runs Congress. Congress is supposed to be a check on the presidency.

19:46It'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 dollars from his Ukrainian Chinese business dealings.

20:18These 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 health care 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.