The Anniversary We Couldn’t Have

Let’s be honest: the celebration of America at 250 sucks.

I know I’m supposed to come up with a better word. Maybe a more academic word. Maybe I’m supposed to say it has been “challenging” or “complicated” or “uneven.”

But no. It sucks.

And not because America sucks. Quite the opposite.

America at 250 should feel bigger than this. And yet, as the Fourth gets closer, it feels smaller and smaller.

That’s what bothers me.

This should have been an easy one, at least as these things go. Not easy in the sense that the story is simple. It isn’t. But easy in the sense that the country gave us the material. Two hundred and fifty years since the Declaration of Independence. A country that began with a radical promise it did not live up to, and then spent the next two and a half centuries fighting over whether it meant what it said.

That is a hell of a story.

And yet the celebration has been overwhelmingly disappointing.

Not because America is disappointing. I don’t believe that. I actually believe the opposite. The American experiment is one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of governance. It is hard to govern a large country. It is harder to govern a large, diverse country. And it is really hard to govern a multiethnic democracy where people have the right to disagree with each other, sue each other, organize against each other, vote each other out of power, and still somehow remain part of the same constitutional system.

We should not undersell that.

I know we tend to look first at what we don’t have, or what we could lose, or where the country has failed. I do it too. In politics, that is usually where the action is. But every once in a while it is worth stepping back and saying the obvious thing: what America has built is extraordinary.

It is also much younger than we pretend.

The country is 250 years old. But the multiethnic democracy is not. That version of America is about 60 years old. If we are being honest, the modern version begins with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965. Before that, we had democratic forms, yes. We had elections. We had parties. We had courts. We had all the language of democracy. But for millions of Americans, the promise was not real in any practical sense.

That does not diminish the country.

It tells the truth about how we have made a more perfect union.

And that phrase matters. “More perfect” is not a claim of perfection. It is an admission that the work is never finished. The words were there before the reality was. The ideals were there before the law caught up. The country had to be pushed, forced, embarrassed, shamed, inspired, and sometimes dragged closer to the thing it said it wanted to be.

That is the American story I wish we were telling right now.

Not some cartoon version of 1776. Not a history that is afraid of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, immigration, civil rights, dissent, protest, war, corruption, or all the other uncomfortable chapters. The uncomfortable parts are what make the story interesting. They are what make it ours. America is not remarkable because it was born perfect. It is remarkable because it created enough room, over time, for people to keep fighting to make it better.

That is why the Supreme Court rejecting Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship in this moment matters. A conservative Court refusing to let the president narrow that inheritance is not some side issue. It is part of the story. It is another reminder that the multiethnic democracy we have built is more durable than its enemies want to believe. And it is a reaffirmation that America is an idea, not an ethnicity.

Not indestructible.

But durable.

And the durability of an idea is no small thing.

So this anniversary should have been a moment to think seriously about the country. To celebrate it, yes. But also to understand it. To tell the story of a republic that has been visionary and hypocritical, cruel and generous, exclusionary and expansive, self-satisfied and self-correcting.

That is not anti-American. That is the only kind of patriotism that makes sense to me.

Instead, here we are.

And I don’t think there is any way to avoid the obvious reason this anniversary feels so much smaller than it should: Donald Trump made the country’s birthday about Donald Trump.

That is not the only thing wrong with the moment. It never is. But it is the defining thing. The country had a bipartisan, congressionally created America250 effort. It had state and local events. It had historians and civic groups and schools and museums and cities and towns all capable of telling their own piece of the story. It could have been broad. It could have been a little messy. Frankly, it could have been a little bland, and that would have been fine. Sometimes bland is the point. Sometimes bland is how you make room for everybody.

But Trump could not leave it alone.

He created Freedom 250, his rival version of the celebration. He staged a cage match on the White House lawn, on his birthday. He has treated the July 4th event as a political rally. I don’t even need to add much commentary to that. The image does the work.

A cage on the White House lawn.

A national birthday party turned into a midterm rally.

A celebration of the country made to orbit one man.

This is why people are opting out. And this is the part Trump’s supporters refuse to take responsibility for. They want to say Democrats are being petty, or the left is pouting, or Trump’s critics just refuse to feel patriotic while he is president.

But the beauty of this country is that you get to feel whatever you want.

No law says you have to love America every hour of every day. There is no requirement that we all feel proud at the same moments, or for the same reasons. Some people feel patriotic when they see military power. Some feel it when they see protest. Some feel it on the Fourth of July. Some feel it watching a naturalization ceremony. Some feel it when the country honors the Founders. Some feel it when the country finally tells the truth about the people the Founders excluded.

That is not a defect in America.

That is a feature of America.

A president who understood the country would understand that. He would understand that his job in a moment like this is not to force everybody into his version of patriotism. His job is to make enough room for other people’s patriotism too.

Trump cannot do that. He can’t even fake it.

He always thinks everyone else should accommodate him. He never thinks he should accommodate anyone else. And that is a real problem when the job is to lead a country where half the people did not vote for you, do not support you, and are no less American because of it.

This is the thing that gets lost in a lot of the coverage of him. Character is not some side issue. It is not just about whether someone is personally admirable. Character matters because there are moments when the country needs a president to rise above himself. Not forever. Maybe not even for very long. Just long enough to let the country have its own moment.

Trump cannot do it.

He turns participation into endorsement. He turns a handshake into a trophy. He turns a national ritual into a branding opportunity. And then everyone is supposed to pretend the people who stay away are the ones being divisive.

No. That is backwards.

If you make every shared space feel like your personal property, you should not be surprised when people stop showing up. The state fair on the Mall could have been great. Instead, it became another example of the problem: sparse crowds at the start, performers and states keeping their distance, and a patriotic showcase nobody could quite separate from the man who had seized it.

What makes this especially frustrating is that our big anniversaries rarely arrive at calm moments. Maybe that is the lesson. Maybe anniversaries are less like celebrations and more like mirrors.

At 100, the country was about to abandon Reconstruction. We were on the edge of one of the worst retreats from equality in American history.

At 150, the country was still living with the stench of Teapot Dome and the corruption of the Harding era.

At 200, the country was still coming out of Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon, and a profound loss of trust in government.

And now, at 250, we have this.

Maybe that is not an accident. Maybe the big round numbers force us to look at ourselves, and sometimes we do not like what we see.

I do not like what I see right now.

I do not like that we had a chance to celebrate the country seriously and are instead watching the president cheapen it. I do not like that younger Americans are being taught that this is normal, that national rituals are just campaign events with better fireworks. I do not like that a country with this much to celebrate has a leader who cannot share the stage with the country he leads.

And I should be clear about something. I am not mad at the voters. Voters make choices for all kinds of reasons. Some are wise. Some are not. That is democracy. I am mad at the leader. I am mad that someone handed this responsibility keeps showing he does not understand the story he is supposed to be helping the country tell.

Trump does not see himself as one president in a long constitutional chain. He sees himself as an exception to the chain. He treats his presidency as if it begins a new book, instead of being one chapter in a very old, very messy, very consequential one.

That is not patriotism.

At least not to me.

Patriotism is not being afraid of history. It is not pretending the country was perfect in 1776. It is not acting as if the only way to love America is to sand off every rough edge and call the result pride.

I love the American story because it is complicated. I love it because the country keeps producing people who force it to become better than it was. I love it because the Constitution gives us a way to argue, and repair, and restrain power, and expand liberty, and keep going when we get it wrong.

And we have gotten it wrong a lot.

That is part of the story too.

I remain an optimist about America. I really do. I think it is possible that someday we will look back on the Trump era and be grateful for some of what it exposed. Not grateful for the damage, cruelty, or corruption. But grateful for the clarity.

He has shown us what needs fixing. He has shown us how fragile norms are. He has shown us how much depends on restraint, memory, institutions, and character. He has shown us what happens when a president does not see the country as something larger than himself.

Maybe that is the lesson of America at 250.

Not the celebration we deserved. Not the one we could have had. But a mirror.

And the mirror is telling us something.

The country is bigger than Donald Trump. It is bigger than any president. It is bigger than any party. It is bigger than any one definition of patriotism. But it still needs leaders who understand that. It still needs citizens who insist on that. It still needs people willing to say that the national story belongs to all of us, not just to whoever happens to hold power at the moment.

America at 250 may be a lost opportunity.

America at 275 does not have to be.

Maybe by then we will want to make up for what we missed. Maybe by then we will remember how to celebrate the country without making the celebration feel like an endorsement of one man or political movement. Maybe by then we will have learned, again, that the American story is most powerful when it is told honestly.

That story is still the most important story to me.

For some people, the central text is religious. I respect that. For me, the Constitution has always carried that kind of weight. Not because it is perfect. Because it gives us a way to keep going. It gives us a structure for disagreement. It gives us a repair method. It gives us the possibility of becoming better without pretending we were always good.

That is why this moment makes me angry.

Not because I love the country less.

Because I love the idea of America enough to resent seeing it cheapened.

America deserved better at 250.

And someday, I believe, it will get better.