Trump to make America's birthday about one hideous thing

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U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump ride an escalator as they arrive to attend the 80th United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, New York, U.S., September 23, 2025. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Donald Trump looked at America’s 250th birthday and neurotically concluded that he’s the main attraction.

A celebration intended to honor the founding of the United States is rapidly being repackaged as a celebration of Trump himself: his movement, his grievances, his white supremacy, his misogyny, and his power.

Every new announcement, from the MAGA rallies to the vanity projects to the carefully choreographed spectacles on the National Mall and White House lawn, reinforces the same message: this is no longer about America turning 250. It’s about Trump making sure America spends its 250th birthday talking about Trump and the power of white men.

And if that sounds familiar, it should. Washington has seen this kind of political pageantry before.

The misogynists, racists, and fascists are taking over Washington, D.C. this summer, and the parallel to the massive Klan rally of August 1925, staged under another Republican president who declined to denounce it is the script.

On that August day a hundred and one summers ago, somewhere between thirty- and forty-thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue twenty-two abreast and fourteen rows deep, ending at the base of the Washington Monument. President Calvin Coolidge refused to condemn them.

Their version of America was defined entirely by exclusion: not Black Americans, not Catholics, not Jews, not immigrants, not organized labor, not anyone outside their narrow tribal vision of who counted. That night they burned crosses in Arlington while the band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “America.”

A century later, the same Mall is being prepared for the same kind of show, and the artists scheduled to perform are figuring it out and getting out as fast as they can.

Within forty-eight hours of the lineup announcement for what Trump’s people are calling the “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall, the Commodores, Martina McBride, Morris Day and the Time, Bret Michaels of Poison, Young MC, and Jodie Rocco of Milli Vanilli all put out statements saying they’d been misled, that nobody told them the event was a Trump-branded MAGA operation.

Young MC told Rolling Stone it was a bait-and-switch. The Commodores said their music has always been their voice and they wouldn’t lend it to a single political party.

Trump’s response was telling. He didn’t try to recruit new acts or apologize for the confusion. He went on his failing Nazi-infested social media site and demanded the whole concert series be scrapped, replaced with what he called “a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250.”

Then he announced he’d personally headline the June 24 opening ceremony himself. The mask came off in about seventy-two hours. The 250th anniversary of American independence has been openly converted into a Trump fascist-fest, and only white MAGA who love to see gladiators beat each other bloody and senseless need apply.

Louise and I lived in Washington during the Obama years, and we visited just about every monument the city has, sometimes more than once. We were invited to the White House, and walking up that long drive past the East Wing (which is now rubble) always felt like walking into something larger than any single president.

The Lincoln Memorial at dusk, when the reflecting pool went dark and the seated figure of Lincoln doubled itself on that still water, was the kind of place where Americans of every stripe stood quietly together and remembered who we were supposed to be.

That reflecting pool, finished in 1923, has held the gravity of Marian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert when she’d been denied the stage at Constitution Hall because she was Black, and the gravity of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, and every quiet sunset visit by every family who came to the Mall to feel something solemn about this country.

Trump has now had that pool painted blue at a cost he claims is around two million dollars, the same shade you’d find at the kid’s pool in a discount motel. He calls it “American flag blue.” Right. He drove his motorcade across the wet coating before it set, climbed out, and held a press conference standing in the middle of the pool with his cabinet secretaries around him, and now we’re paying to repair that damage, too.

He told reporters the old gray stone was “never good.” That dark surface that turned itself into a mirror for Lincoln’s face for over a century, he claimed, was “never good.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation has sued to stop his desecration because the project skipped the federal review process that exists precisely to prevent a president from treating a national memorial like the patio renovation at one of his gaudy golf motels.

The June 24 event will be Trump in front of a crowd at the National Mall, hand-picked artists who didn’t pull out, and a brand of “patriotism” carefully scrubbed of anyone who might complicate the picture.

The “State Fair” will run sixteen days. Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida are still on the bill. Behind it all, Trump is preparing to host a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, the actual anniversary, with up to twenty-five thousand spectators watching men beat each other senseless in a cage on the same grounds where Lincoln walked. Dana White is producing. Ivanka is helping organize.

The Roman emperors understood the deal they were making with the public: bread and circuses, panem et circenses, the cheap grain and the gladiator games delivered together, because if you fed them and entertained them they wouldn’t ask awkward questions about the empire. Trump has inverted the formula. He’s keeping the circus and taking away the bread.

On July 4, 2025 — exactly one year before this 250th celebration he’s calling a birthday party — Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will cut at the end of this year federal Medicaid spending by roughly $911 billion, along with $186 billion in cuts to SNAP, to fund their tax cuts.

— The American Medical Association estimates that 11.8 million people will directly lose health coverage.
— The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that up to 14.9 million people could be put at risk by the byzantine work requirements alone.
— The Joint Economic Committee found that under the proposed cuts, 10 million children could lose their health insurance, one in eight kids in this country.
— At least two million children are estimated to lose food assistance under the SNAP changes.

All to pay for another massive tax cut for Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet.

Set those numbers against what Trump’s spending on the spectacle. The ballroom built atop the rubble of the East Wing has now climbed to $300 to $400 million and Republicans in Congress are trying to appropriate a billion dollars for it, presumably so Trump can keep all those “donations.”

The “Independence Arch” — what Washington has already nicknamed the “Arc de Trump,” planted at Memorial Bridge to block the view of the Arlington National Cemetery where American soldiers are buried — is projected at around $100 million, with $15 million of that already pulled from a taxpayer-funded endowment through the Office of Management and Budget.

The pool job is at least $2 million. The UFC fight on the South Lawn is whatever it costs to host twenty-five thousand people for a brutal cage match at the President’s residence.

We’re talking, conservatively, half a billion dollars or more in personal vanity projects from a president who just stripped a trillion dollars from the medical care of poor Americans and a couple hundred billion more from their food. All to glorify himself.

— At the end of this year, a single father in Ohio is going to watch his SNAP benefits drop by an average of $146 a month so Trump can paint a memorial pool the color of a Mar-a-Lago hot tub.
— A grandmother in Kentucky will lose Medicaid coverage so Trump can build a French-style triumphal arch with his name nicknamed onto it.
— A kid in Louisiana — one of the states hardest hit by the Medicaid cuts — will lose her health insurance so Dana White can promote a cage fight on the White House lawn.

Panem et circenses without the panem. Just the circus, paid for by the bread he ripped out of their hands.

The Founders fought a war to be done with this sort of obscenity. They fought to be done with kings who put their names on buildings, with sovereigns who treated national wealth as personal decoration, with rulers who staged spectacles to glorify themselves while the poor lined up at almshouses.

The whole point of the experiment that began 250 years ago this summer was that we wouldn’t have a man who lived in a palace and stamped his initials on the country.

The arch wasn’t supposed to happen. The ballroom wasn’t supposed to happen. The triumphal procession down a repainted Mall, with the music acts replaced by the leader himself in front of a hand-picked crowd, wasn’t supposed to happen.

The 1925 Klan marchers thought they’d reclaimed the country for the Confederacy. They had a Republican president who looked the other way, a sympathetic press in many regions, governors in their pocket from Florida to Oregon, and a self-image as the only “real Americans.”

Their movement collapsed within a couple of years because Grand Dragon David Stephenson was convicted of rape and murder and the scandal pulled the curtain back on what they really were. Epstein files, anybody?

The lesson wasn’t that fascist movements collapse on their own; it was that ordinary Americans, when they finally saw clearly what was being done in their name, refused to keep going along with it.

Call your representatives at the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121, and tell them you want the Medicaid and SNAP cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reversed before the scam “work requirements” hit on December 31.

Support the food banks in your community: they’re about to be overwhelmed when the SNAP cuts take effect this winter. And if you live anywhere near Washington this June, you can decide for yourself whether to be on the Mall while Trump turns the 250th anniversary of American independence into a MAGA pep rally with a cage fight chaser.

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