Today America turns 250 years old, and instead of a celebration of the republic those 56 men who signed the Declaration risked the hangman’s noose to create, we’re getting a MAGA rally.
Donald Trump has taken the nation’s 250th birthday, the once-in-a-lifetime anniversary that belongs to all of us, and rebranded it as a tribute to himself.
He shoved aside the bipartisan “America 250” commission that Congress created a decade ago, stood up his own White House-controlled operation ironically called “Freedom 250,” and steered our taxpayer money toward his own vanity celebration while the congressional commission was left begging for the funds it was promised.
He staged a violent, brutal UFC cage fight on the White House lawn to satisfy his own bloodlust. He sent a fleet of eighteen-wheelers loaded with white supremacist PragerU’s cartoon versions of American history rolling across the country. And this weekend, on the same National Mall where Americans once gathered to mourn Lincoln and to hear Dr. King, he’s throwing what he actually called, in his own words, “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”
Two hundred and fifty years ago we declared our independence from exactly this. From a man who conflated himself with the country. From a ruler who believed the government, the honor, the lives and sacrifice of generations were his personal property, to be used for his own personal glory and profit.
When our nation’s Founders overthrew a king in 1776, they paid a huge price for it. Altogether, seventeen of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were wiped out by the war they declared.
The signers wrote in the Declaration, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” and it was a simple statement of fact. The day they signed that document, each legally became a traitor and was sentenced to death for treason by the ruler who controlled their lands and their homes.
One the wealthiest of the signers was Thomas Nelson of Virginia, but a year after the signing the British had seized his home and lands. When he and George Washington attacked the British in Nelson’s hometown, he encouraged Washington to attack the Nelson homestead, which British General Cornwallis had taken as his headquarters, with cannons. The house was destroyed, and after the war Nelson, unable to repay loans he’d taken out against it to help finance the Revolution, lost his property; he died in poverty at the age of 50.
The wealthy Philadelphia merchant, Robert Morris, lost 150 ships at sea in the war, wiping out his small fortune; he died destitute. Signer William Ellery of Rhode Island similarly lost everything, as did Virginia’s Carter Braxton and Benjamin Harrison, Pennsylvania’s George Clymer, New York’s Philip Livingston, Georgia’s Lyman Hall, and New Jersey’s Francis Hopkinson.
The British destroyed New York’s Francis Lewis’ property and threw his wife into such a hellhole of a jail that she died two years later. Three of South Carolina’s four signers — Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., and Arthur Middleton — were captured by the British and held in a filthy, unheated prison and brutally tortured for a year before George Washington freed them in a prisoner exchange.
New Jersey farmer John Hart’s wife died shortly after he signed the Declaration, and his thirteen children were scattered among sympathetic families to hide them from the British and conservative loyalists. He never saw them again, dying alone and wracked with grief three years later.
New Jersey State Supreme Court Justice Richard Stockton took his wife and children into hiding after he signed the Declaration, but conservatives loyal to the crown turned them in. He was so badly beaten and starved in the British prison that he died before the war was over. His home was looted, and his wife and children lived the rest of their lives as paupers.
Altogether, nine of the men in that room died and four lost their children as a direct result of putting their names to the Declaration of Independence. Every single one had to flee his home, and, after the war, twelve returned to find only rubble.
They were all willing to fight and die for the idea of democracy in America. Every one of them.
So on our 250th birthday — with draft-dodger “Corporal Bonespurs” and his lickspittle Republicans’ corruption and refutation of democracy so painfully obvious — it’s worth asking the question directly, the one this whole grotesque spectacle forces on us:
Do the Redcoats (at least in philosophy) once again rule America?
Does today’s America reflect the belief that all people “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” as Hegseth purges our military of Black and female officers? As ICE terrorizes anybody whose skin isn’t white with their “Kavanaugh Stops”? As a man gets three decades in prison for hiding anti-fascist literature?
Are we a nation ruled by MAGA-aligned oligarchs or by We, the People?
By overwhelming majorities, Americans want:
— cheaper and more universal healthcare and drugs,
— quality, secular public schools and free higher education available to all,
— the right to unionize and a livable minimum wage,
— protections from discrimination,
— freedom from fear of death by firearms,
— a clean environment and immediate action to mitigate the climate emergency,
— affordable housing,
— an end to corporate monopolies that lock small business out of the marketplace while generating obscene profits for Epstein-class oligarchs,
— a humane end to our twin crises of homelessness and untreated mental illness,
— medical-based (rather than prison-based) programs to help people suffering from addiction,
— morbidly rich individuals and giant corporations to pay their fair share of taxes,
— strengthened Social Security and real Medicare,
— the right to vote without challenge or interference,
— the right to abortion, IVF, and birth control,
— and punishment for leaders who lie us into wars, commit torture and rape, and try to overthrow our republic by deceit and violence.
If we were truly a democratic republic — the imagined goal of the Declaration and Constitution — we would have already joined every other developed democracy in the world in having these things.
Instead, we are the developed world’s outlier.
How is this possible in a nation that has, for over two centuries, proclaimed itself a republic where — within the bounds of the protected rights of minorities — the will of the majority is supposed to be enacted into law?
With a Republican-controlled House, and a filibuster enforced by Republicans in the Senate (who represent 41 million fewer Americans than their Democratic Senate peers), and six Republican toadies to billionaires on the Supreme Court, can we honestly say — as Jefferson proclaimed — “that to secure these rights” of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” our state and federal governments are today “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”?
Tomorrow we celebrate the legal and formal declaration of a war — the second-bloodiest in American history — that we fought to separate ourselves from a brutal warlord, the King of England, and the morbidly rich oligarchs who propped him up.
We’ve never fully acted out the ideals the Founders and Framers borrowed from the Huron and Iroquois — as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy — but throughout our history we have been moving forward in fits and starts for over two centuries.
At least we were moving forward until the Reagan Revolution, when a small group of billionaires and industrialists put together a plan, authored in 1971 by Lewis Powell (who Richard Nixon put on the Supreme Court in 1972), that billionaires and Republicans on the Court and in Congress have been following like a blueprint ever since.
And the consequences have been devastating, a naked repudiation of the ideals of July 4, 1776.
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s — as unions flourished and Eisenhower and Kennedy used a top 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich to build freeways, airports, and tens of thousands of gleaming new schools and hospitals across the land — Americans had a lot of trust in our government. Around 80 percent of Americans told pollsters they trusted our government, a number similar to that of the citizens of virtually all the western European countries.
Today, the Pew Research Center says, only 17 percent of Americans say they trust our government. Fewer than half of us even know today that we’re celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
How did this happen?
For the morbidly rich and big corporations back in the 1970s, this average American’s trust in a government that was then maintaining high tax rates and — through the newly-created EPA, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act — holding corporations accountable for their pollution and poisonous products, was, they believed, an existential threat to their wealth and power.
Thus, in response to the growing environmental and consumer movements kicked off by Rachel Carson’s 1961 book Silent Spring and Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, giant corporations and the morbidly rich people they created set out to destroy Americans’ faith in our tax-and-regulate form of government.
As Lewis Powell wrote in his infamous 1971 Memo arguing that businesses and very wealthy individuals needed to mobilize to stop this “assault” on American business:
“Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader who — thanks largely to the media — has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”
Powell then quoted a May 1971 article profiling Nader (who wrote the foreword to my book The Hidden History of Monopolies) in Fortune magazine:
“The passion that rules in him — and he is a passionate man — is aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate power. He thinks, and says quite bluntly, that a great many corporate executives belong in prison — for defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer. He emphasizes that be is not talking just about ‘fly-by-night hucksters’ but the top management of blue-chip business.”
This was no less, Powell declared in his next paragraph, than:
“A frontal assault … on our government, our system of justice, and the free enterprise system…”
His solution, as history shows, was for big corporations and the morbidly rich to create a network of think tanks to alter public opinion, to build a filtering organization to help pack the courts, to create rightwing media empires — particularly in the realms of television, social media, and talk radio — to replace trust in government with cynicism, and to insert “business-friendly” rightwing teachers and professors in schools and colleges while purging woke “liberals.”
After Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and five corrupt Republicans overturned Teddy Roosevelt’s Tillman Act and legalized corporate campaign donations in a decision Powell himself authored (Bellotti), corporations began sponsoring politicians willing to put deregulation and tax cuts at the top of their agenda in exchange for large campaign contributions and other forms of support like cushy jobs after leaving office.
Clarence Thomas, after taking millions in “gifts,” then cast the 2010 deciding vote in Citizens United to destroy the few remaining remnants of law preventing naked bribery of public officials; in 2024 he and his Republican colleagues tripled down on corrupting our form of government in Snyder by declaring that bribes paid out after politicians and judges do the bidding of rich people or corporations are mere “gratuities.”
The key to making the entire project work was destroying citizens’ faith in the government our ancestors (I’m a member of SAR) fought to create in 1776, because Powell and the tobacco and fossil fuel oligarchs who owned him believed government was taking too much of their taxes (at that time the top income tax bracket was 74% and corporate income taxes could max out at nearly 50%), and regulations to protect consumers, workers, and the environment were cutting into profits.
If they could get the American people to reject government and instead embrace corporations “sponsoring” public goods like research centers, hospitals, and civic centers; privatize Medicare (through George W. Bush’s Medicare “Advantage” scam); privatize public education through vouchers, the Ten Commandments, and charter schools; and have public parks, stadiums, museums, and other institutions turn to billionaires for charity instead of depending on tax dollars, then they could eventually get their taxes lowered and those pesky regulations crushed (as the corrupt Republicans on the Court did in 2024 by blowing up the Chevron deference).
The Powell Memo brought into being a plethora of rightwing think tanks, radio and “news” networks, and advocacy organizations that today litter the top hits on any search of government-mediated topics from free trade to tax policy to “right to work for less” assaults on organized labor.
Their efforts show up regularly in news stories, college textbooks and courses, and thousands of opinion pieces published across the internet, in major national publications, and on social media every day. Rightwing talk radio — with some individual hosts getting over a million dollars a year in subsidies — has provided a steady drumbeat of “government can’t do anything right” for almost forty years.
The result of this corrosive social and political poison has been that Powell and his billionaire acolytes were successful in turning average Americans against their government and its leaders. So successful that, as one 2022 poll famously showed, “62% of Republicans say Putin is a ‘stronger leader’ than Biden.”
Powell’s work also set the stage for the 1981 Reagan presidency, which lowered income taxes so much that today’s average billionaire pays around 3.4 percent, radically cut the corporate tax rate while de-funding the IRS, and slashed regulations, particularly on the fossil fuel and chemical industries.
Reagan famously said, in 1986, that “The nine most frightening words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
In other words, don’t trust the government we proclaimed, fought for, and many of our ancestors died to create on this day in 1776: instead, appeal to your friendly local corporation or billionaire for help.
Reagan also kicked off the modern neoliberal era by negotiating the GATT (leading to the WTO) and his VP, George HW Bush, negotiated the NAFTA agreement that began the process of moving over 60,000 mostly-unionized factories and over 15-20 million good-paying union jobs out of the US and into low-wage countries.
While destroying faith in government has worked out well for transnational corporations and the morbidly rich, its main side-effect has been to empower demagogues and enemies of democracy like Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the prime-time lineup at Fox “News.” Half of Republican voters now say they’re ready to reject democracy altogether.
The Trump v US presidential immunity decision by six on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court in 2024 that set the stage for “Führer Trump” raises an urgent question on this 250th Fourth of July:
“Can we even recover our republican democracy, the one generations of Americans have fought and died for?”
Republicans (state and federal) have passed hundreds of new laws, all with the approval of five or six (depending on the year) corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, designed to make it more difficult for American citizens to participate in the process of selecting their representatives, the core function of a democratic republic.
They’ve also proposed or passed numerous laws so severely criminalizing voter registration drives that the League of Women Voters has abandoned their efforts in multiple Red States.
Republicans have criminalized protest and dissent, primary American values written into the First Amendment, and even — outrageously — given a “get out of jail free” card in numerous Red states to people who intentionally kill protesters like Heather Heyer. As just one example, a headline at Truthout bluntly states:
“DeSantis Signs Bill Ending Vehicle Driver Liability For Hitting Protesters.”
In Idaho, a local Republican Party followed other Red states in running a fundraiser called “Trigger Time with Kyle” where enthusiastic MAGA donors could fire assault weapons at black human-like targets alongside the man who was acquitted — after bizarre jury instructions by a rightwing judge — of murdering two nonviolent people protesting George Floyd’s murder.
The head of the Heritage Foundation even proclaimed the Republican Party’s possible willingness to slaughter Americans who oppose their Project 2025 agenda.
Today’s Republican Party no longer believes in democracy or the core ideals on which this nation was founded: they reject “equality before the law” of all human beings, and the concept that our government derives its power and legitimacy from “the consent of the governed.”
Instead, like the Loyalists and Tories during the Revolutionary era, and the traitor Confederates in the 1860s, they’ve sworn their allegiance and fealty to the rich and powerful; to would-be monarchs and dictators like Trump and Vance; to armed militias and bullies seeking to whitewash American history, intimidate voters, and control our schools and public institutions.
And now six Republicans on the Supreme Court have given Trump and future presidents craven enough to use them king-like powers over the very agencies Congress created to protect the rest of us and our environment.
If it seems like America is re-fighting the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, it’s because there’s a sizeable group of right-wing Americans who will proudly tell you (and have even proclaimed to judges in January 6th trials) that’s exactly what they believe they’re doing.
In both of those two past wars, one group of Americans believed in the ideal of a pluralistic democracy and a republic deriving its authority from the will and consent of its people.
On the other side were people who believed that democracy was a dangerous experiment and a grave mistake; that the rich and powerful should rule and only white male landowners should vote or hold political office.
This is what the Republican party now represents: Oligarchy.
— Rule by the rich, ignoring “the consent of the governed.”
— The suppression of dissent, the oppression of minorities, and replacing the ballot box with the iron fist of a police state run of, by, and for the wealthy few.
And they’re pushing us there hard and fast:
— A political network run by a group of right-wing billionaires has a larger budget and more employees than the entire Republican Party.
— A family of billionaire oligarchs from Australia crank democracy-hating propaganda into the American political bloodstream nearly every day on cable television and in print.
— Voices openly denigrating democracy and promoting hate and intolerance — the hallmarks of brutal fascism — are on local radio and television in every American city, every single day, and similarly dominate the secret algorithms of Social Media.
— The single largest source of threats of violence and murders by terrorists in America today are committed by white-supremacists aligned with the GOP who hate and fear the idea of a pluralistic, democratic society.
Tragically, for the third time in our nation’s history, patriots who believe in the ideals of July 4, 1776 must defend America against those who don’t.
Several of these hard-right groups have openly declared their intention to start a second American Civil War. Tim McVeigh is their hero. They celebrate the anniversaries of Waco and McVeigh’s bombing. They honor Hitler’s birthday. They have their “fourteen words” which show up in one after another mass shooter’s manifestos.
They say they want to see Americans killing each other in the name of white supremacy and rule by the rich, and have slaughtered Hispanics (El Paso), Jews (Tree of Life), and Blacks (Mother Emmanuel). They terrorize Asian American, queer, and Native American communities for sport. They applaud ICE.
They declare their loyalty to a white-supremacist real estate oligarch from New York, get their news from Australian and Russian oligarchs, and have embraced an ideology championed by Germans in the 1930s. At a Republican rally last year they were openly waving swastika flags and, when asked to denounce them, Florida’s governor instead claimed the reporter asking the question was trying to “smear me as if I had something to do with it.”
We had our third chance in 2024, and we let it slip. Trump won, and he came back not chastened but emboldened, surrounded by the same billionaires who bankrolled his rise and are now getting their return on investment in spades.
Everything the Loyalists and the Confederates and the Redcoats ever wanted — rule by the rich, contempt for the ballot, a leader who answers to no one — is being assembled in front of us in real time.
But here’s what the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots always forget: the people who signed that Declaration were, at first, losing too.
They were outgunned, outspent, and written off. But they won anyway, because enough of them decided a republic was worth more than their own comfort. We get to make that same decision now, peacefully in the streets, in the 2026 midterms, and in every town council and school board and courthouse where these people are trying to plant their MAGA flag.
When “moderate” voices within their ranks, like Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger, and even (for God’s sake!) Bill Kristol, dare pop their heads up, the majority of the Republican Party viciously attacks them.
Dissent — like in the colonies before 1776 or the Old South leading up to the Civil War — is no longer allowed in the GOP. Authoritarianism like that celebrated by King George III and his then-Colonial-toadies now prevails. Oligarchy has completely seized the Party.
These are, as Thomas Paine (a fervent believer in democracy) said, “the times that try men’s souls.”
Seven months before the Declaration of Independence was signed, General George Washington had lost New York to the British, was encamped at McKonkey’s Ferry on the Delaware River opposite Trenton, New Jersey, and 11,000 men had just deserted his army and fled back to their homes. A brutal winter was upon him and the brave men who stayed with him including one of my ancestors.
In response, Thomas Paine, knowing the consequences of losing the war, wrote a pamphlet titled The American Crisis that Washington ordered read to all American troops across every field of battle. It said, in part:
“The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered…”
We must not let the right-wing billionaires, politicians, and their masked terrorists prevail.
These oligarchs and their lickspittles are daily working to destroy our public schools, end freedom from religious domination, and eliminate our right to vote or trust that our politicians and judges are working for us instead of billionaires and giant corporations.
When Rhode Island’s Stephen Hopkins signed the Declaration of Independence, he remarked to his friend William Ellery that, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.” But Virginia’s Benjamin Harrison, who weighed nearly 300 pounds, commented to Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry, a short, thin man, “With me it [the hanging] will all be over in a minute, but you will be dancing on air an hour after I am gone.”
Will any Republican in today’s House or Senate — the bodies those men created — find even a fraction of the courage of those who founded this nation? Will Democratic candidates repudiate big, dark, and foreign money and embrace the ideals of the New Deal and Great Society, the ideals that Paine wrote about in Agrarian Justice and The Crisis?
This July 4th let us all remember, as Paine wrote in words that inspired a new nation and ultimately changed the course of history:
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
Tag, we’re it.
