Just after 1 pm this afternoon, with Melania Trump standing beside him, clapping and beaming with joy, the President of the United States strained as he used his still bruised hand to twirl a green flag as he officially started the “MAGA FREEDOM 250 GRAND PRIX.” With the capital city transformed into a racetrack for the president’s entertainment, streets across Washington, D.C. were shut down, traffic backed up, and residents were left dealing with the disruption during this very bumpy event.
The spectacle surrounding the race was even more over-the-top. Before it began, Trump and Melania climbed into “the Beast,” the 20,000-pound armored presidential limousine, and took a slow ceremonial lap around the 1.7-mile course that wound past the National Archives, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and the National Gallery of Art. Above them, the gifted Qatar Air Force One flew over the capital escorted by four fighter jets. Then came a B-2 stealth bomber, the same kind of aircraft Trump has repeatedly bragged about using to drop bunker-buster bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities last year. In total, there were seven military flyovers, while the FAA paused flights at Reagan National Airport for three hours.
After taking his victory lap through Washington, Trump eventually settled inside a fortified, bulletproof suite on Pennsylvania Avenue to wave that green flag. And he wasn’t alone. Much of the president’s Cabinet had gathered there with him, including Attorney General Todd Blanche, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
These are some of the most powerful people in the federal government of the United States of America. And on a Sunday afternoon in August, with the country at war, in the middle of a trade crisis with our closest neighbor, and less than three months away from a midterm election, there they all were, sitting together and watching cars go around in circles.
Trump’s son Eric was there too, and was seen talking with Trump’s “human printer,” Natalie Harp. UFC CEO Dana White chatted with Melania. Melania’s father posed for pictures with IndyCar owner Roger Penske, the billionaire Republican donor whose company organized the race made possible by Trump’s special executive order.
While Trump and much of his administration were preparing for an afternoon at the races, one member of his Cabinet had spent the morning giving an interview. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy went on Fox News Sunday from a makeshift set on the racetrack with the Capitol building in the background to talk about the rapidly escalating trade war with Canada. What followed was one of the most shocking and embarrassing interviews from a sitting Cabinet secretary in a very long time.
Asked about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s announcement of dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs in response to Trump’s new 50% U.S. tariffs, Duffy responded with this about Canada, “It’s a country that doesn’t have a military. It’s a country that has a single-payer health care system that’s failing. They have record-high euthanasia rates. And so to think that they’re gonna go to war with Donald Trump and actually win that war with the U.S., I think it’s foolish on their part. I think you’re gonna see Mark Carney come to the table very, very quickly because it’s going to be devastating for his country.”
Except Canada does have a military, and there is no excuse for Duffy not to know that. The Canadian Armed Forces has roughly 70,000 regular force members and another 30,000 reservists. Canada is not some defenseless country hiding behind the United States waiting for us to protect them. They are our NATO ally. Their soldiers have fought beside ours, bled beside ours, and died beside ours. When America was attacked on September 11, Canada didn’t turn away from us or ask what was in it for them. They stood beside us almost immediately, and sent their own sons and daughters to Afghanistan, where 158 Canadian service members were killed. They died in a war Canada entered because we were attacked.
Now a Cabinet secretary in the United States government is sitting on national television pretending those people and their sacrifice never existed because Donald Trump has decided Canada is this week’s enemy. Saying Canada “doesn’t have a military” isn’t even a clever distortion of the truth. It is just gross and embarrassing, which is what makes this so much more disturbing.
They are getting so desperate to stay in power that their propaganda isn’t even tethered to a twisted version of reality anymore. Hitler and Joseph Goebbels understood something fundamental about propaganda: some of the most effective lies begin with something people already recognize, an existing fear, grievance, prejudice, economic hardship, or fragment of truth that can then be distorted and manipulated until people can no longer separate reality from fiction. The Nazis exploited real economic pain, anger, and national humiliation, then redirected those feelings toward manufactured enemies and used that propaganda to justify increasingly horrific cruelty.
But somewhere inside this administration’s propaganda machine, whether it was Stephen Miller or whoever handed Sean Duffy that ridiculous talking point, they forgot one important part: the lie still has to be believable. A skilled propagandist takes something recognizable and twists it just enough that the lie becomes difficult to separate from reality. Duffy didn’t even bother. He looked into a television camera and said Canada doesn’t have a military, something millions of people could disprove almost immediately. And he said it with confidence because he either didn’t know he was wrong or didn’t care whether anyone caught him.
And that tells us something much bigger about this administration. Because the insult wasn’t only directed at Canada or at the Canadian service members who fought and bled beside ours. It was directed at the people listening to him. For this kind of propaganda to work, the person delivering it has to believe the audience either doesn’t know enough to recognize the lie or won’t bother checking once they hear it. And that might be the most revealing part of all. Sean Duffy went on television and told MAGA supporters that the enormous NATO ally sharing our northern border doesn’t even have a military, apparently believing enough of them would simply accept it because someone from the Trump administration told them it was true.
And people noticed. One person responded on social media, “That non-existent military that patrolled your skies on 9/11 and were one of the 1st nations to join you in Afghanistan.” Another was even more direct: “Canada has a military, you absolute moron. Their service men have died in our wars.”
Then, in the very same interview, Duffy pivoted to the race and the updated location. “I think this is better, the view of the Capitol behind us,” he said. “They can sell beer. By the way, this is the first time they’re going to sell beer on the mall of the Capitol.” When we remember who Sean Duffy actually is, this type of ridiculous comment makes much more sense. Because on Wednesday, the Transportation Department released the first episode of Duffy’s new reality series, “The Great American Road Trip,” starring the Transportation Secretary, his wife, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children traveling the country while he supposedly balances family life with overseeing America’s roads, railways, and air travel. In the first episode, their 18-year-old daughter Paloma tours Harvard and tells her father she would want to attend if she got in. Duffy reminds her that he and her mother can “say no,” explaining that Harvard has “professionalized” figuring out how to take “good young girls” like her and “corrupt their minds.” His wife agreed, saying Harvard “hates us.” But Paloma pushed back, reminding them that she grew up in an “extremely conservative family,” attended a conservative high school, and thought she might actually benefit from hearing different perspectives.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called the show “brutally out of touch,” pointing out that while American families are struggling with rising gas prices, the sitting Transportation Secretary is starring in his own reality series. And just days later, that same man, who discouraged his daughter from pursuing an education that might expose her to things he didn’t want her to learn, went on national television and confidently told Americans that Canada doesn’t have a military. Ironically, an education might have saved him from embarrassing himself on television.
And somehow, the more you learn about Sean Duffy, the more all of this starts to make sense. His reality show was funded by a nonprofit whose sponsors include Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Lyft, United Airlines, Chase Travel, and Enterprise Rent-a-Car, several of which are regulated by or do business before the Transportation Department. The Transportation Department has declined to disclose the cost of the production. And the claim to fame for the man at the center of all of this is a former cast member of MTV’s The Real World: Boston.
None of this is an accident, and Sean Duffy is not some isolated embarrassment. This is what a government looks like when loyalty to the leader becomes more important than competence in the job. Duffy will go on television and say whatever this administration needs him to say, whether it is true or not. It’s the culture of the government they have built.
Senator Adam Schiff responded to the day’s events with a post that got to the heart of everything that was wrong with this event. “While you struggle with the cost of gas, Trump offers you the spectacle of an IndyCar race hoping you will not notice. More taxpayer money spent on his self-aggrandizing distractions. And you get higher taxes and higher costs.”
This is just another gross abuse of power by the Trump administration that should not be normalized. We also can’t lose sight of what the places Trump keeps cheapening mean to our country. The National Mall is not an entertainment venue. It isn’t some stage the president gets to use whenever he wants to put on a show. This is where some of the most important moments in our country’s history have taken place. Presidents have taken the oath of office at the Capitol, overlooking it. The March on Washington happened there. The AIDS Quilt was laid out there. Families walk those grounds every day to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and the World War II Memorial, and there is something about standing there that reminds us of what this country has been through and what generations of Americans sacrificed for it. First, this administration put a UFC cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House. Now they have turned the National Mall into a racetrack for an event created by executive order.
And here’s the part that makes this even worse. The race wasn’t originally supposed to be on the Mall. It was planned to run around Capitol Hill, and IndyCar president Bud Denker reportedly made roughly 80 trips to Congress trying to get that route approved. They couldn’t get the congressional approval the original route required, so Sean Duffy called Denker and suggested another way: move the route and use an executive order to make it happen without congressional approval. Denker later described just how quickly it happened: “Within 24 hours of this idea changing onto the city streets, we had an executive order in my inbox to review, and then four days later, I was in the president’s office here to sign it.” When they couldn’t get the votes in Congress, they found a way around it through executive action instead. And that is the part we cannot normalize, because it is the same pattern we have watched over and over again. When an institution tells them no, they don’t respect the boundary. They look for a way to exploit the rules, and they go around it.
The race itself became a metaphor for the administration that created it. The course was so rough that crews worked overnight trying to grind down the bumps, and it still wasn’t enough. Cars slammed into concrete barriers throughout the afternoon, five drivers failed to finish the race entirely, and only 13 of the 25 starters were still on the lead lap when it was over, with one crash ending with what commentators called a “thunderous impact into the concrete barrier.” After weeks of disruption leading up to the race, Washington faces weeks more as crews remove 1,800 cement barriers, welded-down manhole covers, and grandstands from the city. And most of the people who attended weren’t even from Washington. Organizers said 60% of the tickets went to people from out of town. The residents whose streets were closed, landmarks blocked, and flights paused were basically an afterthought in their own city.
I spent some time reading through comments from people online. Overwhelmingly, people were against this event. Nearly every single person said some version of the same thing: “We just want healthcare and affordable groceries.” And that really is the simplest way to explain the disconnect between the government we have and the country most of us are actually living in. While families are worried about their futures, the people running our government are shutting down the nation’s capital to watch race cars and military flyovers. Who is running this country? Right now, the honest answer is that it is not clear anyone actually is.
In 72 days, we will have the next chance to answer that question ourselves because we are the ones who decide who runs this country. Not the Cabinet full of yes-men and women. When we vote in November, we are telling them what comes next. The midterms are not a wish. They are a mechanism, and that mechanism belongs to us, and no amount of green flags and beer on the National Mall changes that. They can turn the Mall into a racetrack. They can fly the Qatar jet over the Smithsonian. But they cannot executive-order away our right to walk into a voting booth and tell them that their time is up. Seventy-two days. That is all that stands between this and something better. We are closer than we think. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: One benefit of writing late into the night is getting to see some of our more reclusive neighbors. This little friend is very cute, but I think I’ll keep my distance.
Sources used in the writing of this post:
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/23/politics/live-news/trump-administration-freedom-250-race
It's almost as if his cabinet is full of blithering idiots, and crooks.
Oh, wait...
Spectacle! Didn't Roman emperors offer their people the same as their own people struggled?