Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer (gift link if needed):
I’d joked with my editors earlier in the week that I might lose my columnist license (not an actual thing, although maybe it should be) if my piece that runs on the weekend of the United States Semiquincentennial wasn’t a Big Think essay on what the American Experiment all means — to the extent that anyone can actually think through the fireworks, traffic jams, and 100-degree temperatures.
That’s when it hit me. That was exactly the column Donald Trump was counting on from me and every other opinion writer in America ahead of Independence Day. The 47th president needed a week when the pundits put on their wide-angle lenses and put away the magnifying glasses, while his “forgotten Americans” headed off to the beach or the fireworks show, or gorged themselves on six hours of World Cup soccer every day, and stopped watching the news.
An international jewel thief needs to create a distraction. Because if you’d been paying attention during the nation’s summer vacation week, you’d have seen that Trump is robbing us blind.
The amount by which Trump is robbing us blind is detailed in a “federally mandated financial disclosure form” released ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, showing that Trump “earned” $2.2 billion in 2025, an astounding amount for anyone, but for a sitting president is criminal—quite literally, I’m certain. It’s shocking but not surprising that Trump has corruptly leveraged the presidency to enrich himself, his family, and his cronies—and is doing so blatantly and in the open. Bunch details the jaw-dropping scope of Trump’s grift, before pivoting to memories of America’s 200th celebration and “a new hopeful yearning.” He ends by asking:
How do we celebrate a 250-year slow-bending of the arc of the moral universe without losing our focus on the ongoing crime scene at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? […]
Don’t let the president hijack the Fourth of July to rob the focus from what matters most, the things we need to write and discuss and march against every week: his unprecedented criminality.