President Trump promises “monumental” and “spectacular” celebrations this year to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. For example, on June 14 — his 80th birthday — the White House will host an Ultimate Fighting Championship match.
For this most combative of presidents, nothing honors America like young men punching and kicking the heck out of each other in the Rose Garden.
Despite Trump’s bombastic notions of American greatness — or perhaps because of them — the nation’s deep political fractures cast a pall on its 250th birthday party. Reaching this milestone should be an occasion for reaffirming the nation’s founding precepts and our never-ending struggle to live up to them. Instead, we’re relitigating the most basic question of national identity: What does it mean to be an American?
During the 1976 bicentennial celebration, there wasn’t much controversy about the answer. Both Democrats and Republicans laid claim to the ideals that animated the American Revolution: individual freedom, equality and popular self-rule. Where they differed was in how they interpreted and applied these overarching principles.
But Trump seems to regard them as pious claptrap, a fig leaf for the one thing he does respect: a ruthless will to power. Vice President JD Vance likewise rejects the “creedal” understanding of American identity, which he sees as anchored more firmly in ethnicity, religion and attachment to place than in arid abstractions about liberty and democracy.
