President Donald Trump didn’t want some sources weather to dampen Saturday’s July 4 event on the National Mall.
That’s why he overruled a recommendation to cancel the event when severe weather loomed.
“The Crowd at 7:05 in the evening was 422,000 people,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“All were forced to leave because of the weather, the event was cancelled, and everyone was gone because of lightning. When I heard that it was cancelled, I immediately overturned that decision, and waited a while for people to come back,” he wrote.
Trump said 150,000 people came back to hear his speech and watch the firework show.
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He added this made for an “even more spectacular evening than it would have been as normalized.”
“It showed work under pressure. Congratulations to the Secret Service and Law Enforcement on being able to get so many people back into the Arena in such rapid fashion,” Trump wrote.
Earlier Saturday , people visited the “Great American State Fair” in high temperatures; 34 participants were hospitalized for heat exhaustion, according to The Washington Post.
The Secret Service tried to shield participants from the heat by pushing back the event’s start time, Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said.
“There’s never an event when you have to move more than 100,000 people on short notice, that it doesn’t cause some type of bump in the road,” he said.
In the early evening, National Guard soldiers helped to prepare for an oncoming storm by flipping over tables and escorting visitors and journalists to nearby museums for shelter.
The president said his address would go on. One official said he pledged to speak as late as 2 a.m. EDT.
Trump was scheduled to do a “Salute to America” address at 9:45 p.m. EDT, but severe weather and thunderstorms pushed the start time back to 11 p.m. EDT.
A large-scale Fireworks coincided with lightning strikes after.
“It was an amazing evening made even more spectacular by the fact that, immediately after the Great Fireworks ended, the rains came down, full blast,” Trump wrote.