Trump's Republican rivals spend July 4 pitching themselves in Iowa, New Hampshire
The New York Times has two reports on how the Republican presidential contenders spent their July 4, and you will win no prizes for correctly guessing that the states of Iowa and New Hampshire were inundated with would-be presidents to the point where residents had to swat them off like flies, while leading seditionist Donald Trump sat at home firing off yet more angry messages about take-your-pick.
It's not quite clear how the tradition began, but evidently if you're a presidential candidate the absolutely best way to celebrate the Fourth of July is to appear in a New Hampshire or Iowa parade, letting the general public get a taste of the very best thing America has to offer: yourself. Usually there is at least a bit of organization involved in putting on a parade, and if you're going to march in one then organizers will want to know whether you're the kind of marchers with trumpets or the kind with horses or the kind that putter around in incongruously tiny cars, but if you say you're a presidential candidate you can just show up and they'll slot you in.
So Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hustled himself into two New Hampshire parades on July 4, marching in jeans with his wife and a child that may or may not be his own and with a group of The Whitest People You Know. Apparently the DeSantis campaign wants to really shove it in our faces that the candidate's technicians were able to get his lower-body hydraulics working again, even after so many of us opined that there was no way to do that that didn't risk a catastrophic failure that would spray hot oil all over the assembled crowd; fine, point taken. DeSantis did not explode.
It did, however, rain on Ron DeSantis' parade—in a literal sense. The Times reports that he and back-of-the-pack competitor Sen. Tim Scott got "soaked" before making it to the end of parade route No. 2.
The Times produced two separate articles on how the Republican candidates spent their holiday. Reporters Jazmine Ulloa and Jonathan Weisman teamed up to write both.