Trump’s disastrous July 4th speech walloped as ‘middle-school story time from hell’ in brutal takedown
Rain speech -- screenshot

President Donald Trump sounded more like his eldest daughter than his namesake son in his Fourth of July address -- but the speech still landed flat, according to writer Molly Jong-Fast.


In her column for The Daily Beast, Jong-Fast gave the president meager credit for sticking to the speech he saw on his Teleprompter, but she said those words were dully written and dutifully read.

"It was a speech that had all the excitement of an excerpt from one of Bill O’Reilly’s YA history books," Jong-Fast wrote. "It was middle-school story time from hell."

The president lacks the oratorial skills to deliver a "not-so-insane" speech, Jong-Fast wrote, and she said Trump's glancing look at American values only served to highlight all the norms he's crushed.

"It was a relief that the president stuck to the script, delivering a drone-like Ivanka-esque speech and not a scary Don Jr.-style speech," Jong-Fast wrote, "that he didn’t make the event more political than it already was; that he didn’t, you know, start a war."

"It was one of Trump’s least bonkers speeches," she wrote. "It didn’t encourage violence! He didn’t lead chants of 'CNN sucks.' He didn’t talk about how much he loves Robert E. Lee. There were some gaffes — like his mention of airports during the war of 1812 — but maybe that was just to let us know we weren’t in some alternate reality."