America’s Throwing a Birthday Party. But For Trump, Not All Americans Should be Invited
America’s 200th birthday, in 1976, was an awesome year-long celebration. An estimated 90% of Americans engaged in some form of local or state activity.
On the Fourth of July that year I was in New York City watching as 200 ships from 30 nations sailed up the East River. Six million people crowded into New York City that day to experience the spectacle. That night, fireworks were choreographed from six separate locations around Manhattan. Amazing. Inspiring.
Seventy foreign ambassadors were there to celebrate America’s founding. Many were from countries whose emigres first sight of America was our Statue of Liberty.
America’s 250th Anniversary Events and Planning Challenges
This year is the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. If you go to the official celebration website, you will see events scheduled in every state. Some of those events have been in the planning stage since Congress authorized a bipartisan commission in 2016.
But like most other things Trump touches, the 2026 party is not going well. Bipartisanship isn’t Trump’s thing, so he’s created a competing commission populated with his handmaidens that appears to be siphoning much of the money appropriated for the congressionally-authorized group.
According to media reports, many state and local planning groups aren’t receiving promised funding. Massachusetts, for example, the birthplace of the Revolution, lost a funding package, a loss that, among other things complicates travel to major historic events, such as the Revolution’s first battle sites of Concord and Lexington.
Deepening Political Divisions in America
No surprise that unlike 1976, this year’s celebration will probably fall short of that year’s 90% participation. Not when the president of the United States is governing to please his most loyal supporters while disparaging opponents as “the enemy within,” “more dangerous to the U.S. than China or Russia,” “lunatics,” “deranged,” “the party of hate, evil and Satan.”
And it’s not just words. He’s financially discriminating against those in “blue” states, withholding congressional grants for childcare, transportation and health care. Even disaster relief. Trump’s White House has approved only 23% of disaster relief funding requests from blue states compared with 89% for Republican led states.
Another major difference between this year’s events and those of 1976 is the divide over immigration. Not just illegal immigration, but all those with “bad genes” who would “poison the blood” of real Americans.
Since Trump’s acolytes insist on having just about everything the federal government does “align” with Trump’s views, it’s probably just a matter of time until the Statue of Liberty and its welcoming words are closed for alignment “renovation.”
The theme of the 1976 celebration, incidentally, was “A Nation of Immigrants.”
Protecting Democracy and Rights in America Amid Division
We’re well into this anniversary year with polls showing a public unhappy with both its president and its Congress, and questioning whether democracy itself will endure. But the fact is that our system is designed for times like these. We’re not locked in by a leader’s heredity or force of arms. The wisdom of our numbers can make a difference, and has when under assault in the past.
In the same poll taken earlier this year by the group Independent Center Voice where 64% consider American democracy “unhealthy,” about the same percentage would support a hypothetical leader of either party who would work across the aisle to get things done. The concern is warranted. So is the hope.
That’s not a heavy lift in a country like ours where the guarantees of the Constitution still matter: a free press, free speech, the right to assemble, free and fair voting.
More than any individual 250th birthday party planned event, the protection of these rights from assault this year will merit the biggest celebration of all. That’s an event for which all Americans are invited to participate.
Once those rights have been successfully defended, then it’s just a matter of putting a name and a face to that hypothetical bipartisan leader we hope will emerge.
That’s for next year’s party.
Comments? Criticism? Contact Joe Rothstein at jrothstein@rothstein.net
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