The White House’s access reporters at Axios report that Donald Trump “lashed out” at Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu over Israeli strikes in Lebanon yesterday, saying that Netanyahu is “fucking crazy,” would be “in prison if it weren’t for me,” and that “everybody hates Israel because of this.”

Not so, respond Netanyahu’s access reporters at Israel’s N12 News: “Trump did not make personal remarks about jail or claim Netanyahu is hated globally.”

And hawks in the American media are beside themselves over the whole thing: “THE LEAK IN AXIOS WAS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW AND PROVIDED SUPPORT TO THE IRANIAN REGIME AND ITS HEZBOLLAH PROXY,” conservative radio host Marc Levin fumed.

So negotiations to end the war seem to be going great, is the point. Happy Tuesday.

Join Bill and Andrew for Morning Shots Live today at 10 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

Not His Holiday

by William Kristol

I wrote last week that it’s increasingly and painfully obvious that Donald Trump’s attempted hijacking of our 250th birthday celebration has become a national embarrassment. But Trump’s celebration of the 250th anniversary will be his embarrassment. We need not allow it to be ours.

Embarrassment is an emotion unknown to Trump, and so he’s forging right ahead. Construction is proceeding apace in turning the White House South Lawn into a vulgar venue for Trump’s gladiatorial circus scheduled for June 14, his eightieth birthday. Active-duty military are being pressured to attend, in uniform, to act as props for the birthday boy whose painful bone spurs precluded his own military service.

Then, ten days later, on June 24, to make up for all the performing artists who’ve pulled out of his “Great American State Fair,” Trump plans to take over the National Mall for a speech. And God only knows how much Trump will go out of his way to make himself the center of the festivities on Independence Day itself.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to agitate, in honor of our 250th, for the issuance of a $250 bill with his face on it and for the construction of a 250-foot high imperial arch that only he wants that would loom over our national cemetery.

So here in Washington, D.C., Trump is trying to make America 250 all about Trump all of the time. As David Frum lamented,

a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. . . . Trump has made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment.

It can all be a bit dispiriting. One’s natural reaction can be to look away from this year, and look beyond towards a brighter future. That was my reaction last week, that “we can reasonably hope that one day soon, after this unfortunate interlude, we will once again have elected leaders who will celebrate our national birthday in a way fitting and proper for this great nation.”

But we can do better than merely hope for a brighter future. We can refuse to allow Trump’s desecration of our 250th to be our desecration.

And this doesn’t actually require that we do anything that special. All we have to do is to go ahead and celebrate the Fourth of July as we usually do. After all, the Fourth has never been about one big spectacle anchored by the president in Washington, D.C. It’s always been about family and local and community events across the nation, about family cookouts and community parades and fireworks at local high school football fields. It’s never been about looking up to something given to us by Washington. It’s always been about our gathering to commemorate our anniversary.

These events around the nation aren’t and shouldn’t be particularly solemn. They typically don’t and needn’t feature conspicuously deep reflection about The Meaning of America. They should be fun. John Adams was hardly the most fun-loving of the Founders, but it was he who wrote in 1776 that he hoped to see the anniversary of our independence marked by “Shews, Games, Sport, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.”

Dispersed, local, fun events are what we’ve done to mark July Fourth over the years. That’s what we can do and will do again this year.

But this year, our normal July Fourth celebrations can make a kind of statement. They’ll be making a statement that July Fourth is