Trump’s 250th birthday celebration is a fiasco

“You talk too much, and it talks too much about you.”

This quote from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump made on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

One would think that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He’s a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gift, a chance for a now unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as a leader of all the American people. The only thing he had to do was – for once in his life – not act like a crazy egomaniac.

He couldn’t do it.

As things evolve, we will remember the history of America’s greatest commemorations as follows:

Hundredth: a giant industrial exhibition in Philadelphia. Two hundredth: a tall ship regatta in New York harbor. Two hundred and fiftieth: a failure of Trump in Washington, DC

Trump knows he botched this anniversary. He says it himself. Last night he published the following indictment against his own program on his Truth Social platform:

We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for $250, instead of having overpriced singers that no one wants to hear, whose music is boring and yet all they do is complain. Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement in the failure and danger of being at the Kennedy Center, because a very conflicted and crooked federal judge said I should not be allowed to spend my time and money to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN, in fact, much bigger than it ever was! It would also have been good to see a Republican/Democratic union bring it back to life. The Kennedy Center is crumbling, unsafe and in disrepair, and has been for many years! Judge Cooper also said that the Center’s highly prestigious board of directors was not authorized to add the name “TRUMP,” despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money would be required for its successful reincarnation. So now the Kennedy Center is going to collapse, both structurally and financially. Judge Cooper and his wife, Amy Jeffress (someone obfuscating the facts?), should be ashamed of themselves. Judge Cooper, like many other crooked judges in my cases, should be removed. LET’S GIVE AMERICA BACK THE GREAT NEWS! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Translated into plain English, the president was complaining that seven of the nine artists scheduled to headline the July 4 weekend music lineup were canceled within 48 hours of each other because they realized the event was degenerating into a hyperpartisan salute to Trump personally. His proposed solution? Replace canceled acts with a Trump rally speech! A speech that will focus on Trump’s outrage that a judge stopped him from naming the Kennedy Center after himself!

On July 4, 1776, Congress declared not only the severance of political ties between 13 British colonies and their former homeland, but also the end of monarchical government in the United States. For 150 years before 1776, the American colonies were ruled by a succession of queens and kings. The names of these monarchs were written on the American map: Virginia, Jamestown, Charleston, Annapolis, Georgia, and on countless King and Queen streets. Then, on parchment, the new nation repudiated its political origins and declared that “all men are created equal.” Whatever the meaning of these words, whatever the hypocrisy of the slave owners, they promised a republican future for the people of the country.

The man who took responsibility for organizing the 250th commemoration of those words decided instead to make the day a royalist celebration of himself: seeking to emblazon his face on currency and coinage, displaying his image on banners in downtown Washington, and scheduling the celebration’s central event—a televised cage fight—for his own birthday, June 14. A cage fight may seem to some a barbaric way to honor Thomas Jefferson’s great manifesto. But many Americans will enjoy it, and on an occasion like this, there’s room for a wide range of activities. There is, however, no room to elevate the presidency created by the 1776 revolution to the level of a garish cult of personality. Trump’s desire to turn July 4, 2026, into a colossal National Trump Day has instead sparked a rebellious update of the “Spirit of ’76.”

Americans living in 1776 shared and read “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine. This pamphlet denounced, 250 years before the event, the pretensions of the Trump version of America 250: government by kings, Paine writes, “was the most successful invention that the Devil ever contrived to promote idolatry. The pagans paid divine honors to their dead kings, and the Christian world improved this plan by doing the same with their living kings.”

Trump’s efforts to rename the half-fiftieth anniversary as Trump Day have left no time, budget, or effort available for the true purpose of this anniversary. As its own self-celebration has waned, a gap has opened between the list of planned events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will not be marked by any act of remembrance worthy of the nation. The reflecting pool will be repainted too blue by an overpaid contractor without competitive bidding. The memorial bridge statues will be gilded too brightly by another overpaid contractor without competitive bidding. There is a plan to erect an Albert Speer-style triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac. But Trump has failed to achieve the victories that the ark could have commemorated – and with the war in Iran stalemated, plans for the ark have stalled. Most symbolic of all, the White House is flanked by a stop-start construction site, where the East Wing once stood. Trump shook down government favor seekers to get enough money to start work on a presidential ballroom, but he didn’t shake down enough to finish it. The taxpayer is now asked to pay the balance. A federal judge ordered a stay of work pending a vote in Congress, and Trump has reduced his majorities in the House and Senate to the point where he apparently cannot pass a funding bill. If he loses control of either house in November, construction is unlikely to resume. Instead of a Trump Ballroom, the most notable feature of the Trump White House in 2026 is a gaping Trump Hole.

The greatest of all Fourth of July speeches was delivered in 1852, on the 76th anniversary of American independence, by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York. In the opening passages of this speech, Douglass ominously observed: “The eye of the reformer is met with flashes of anger, foretelling disastrous times.” ” Yet even as Douglass foresaw the coming civil war and lamented the nation’s faults, he still expressed hope that “high lessons of wisdom, justice, and truth will yet give direction to its destiny.” Trump made a miserable disaster of what should have been a glorious moment. But the nation honored by this glorious moment still retains the power of recovery and renewal praised by Douglass. As we contemplate the farce of Trump Day, we can turn our imaginations to what America might still be like 300 years from now.

As individuals, we may or may not live to see it, but we can still believe it. We can believe in it all the more fervently because we are living through a chapter in American history that so blatantly betrays the hopes of the Founders and so harshly tests the legacy of the Founders.

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