Zaidane is the president and CEO of the Millennial Action Project.
This holiday weekend Americans will celebrate with hot dogs, poolside parties and firework displays. What they’ll be celebrating is an open question among young Americans like me.
Scroll through TikTok, the town square for Generation Z, and you’ll find over 20 billion views on videos labeled #politics. The vast majority of this viral content directs ire toward the state of our democratic experiment. Celebrations of the star-spangled holiday are tempered with a sobering reality: Only 19.5 percent of young people view the word “patriotism” in a positive light.
It’s not hard to put a finger on why: increasingly slim opportunities for economic mobility, the steady drumbeat of hard-won rights overturned by unelected courts or gerrymandered legislatures, unfilled pledges from the 2020 summer of racial reckoning, recent testimony from the Jan. 6 committee hearings, and widespread bad faith arguments throughout the political spectrum. The lack of patriotism among millennials and Gen Z should be seen for what it is — a rebellion against the complacent promises of America. That doesn’t mean young people hate this country, it means we love it enough to want change. It means we believe that we can do better. And that’s something worth celebrating.
Independence Day is a time when we commemorate the aspirational and unique founding of our nation. This wasn’t the work of one generation and certainly not the work of a small set of delegates from 13 colonies. In fact, some of America’s greatest founders, who brought to life the aspirations we celebrate this weekend, would have never been permitted in Independence Hall in 1776.
When we reflect on America’s founders this holiday, we ought to think of people like Harriet Tubman, who is just as influential to who America is as Thomas Jefferson. Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. built upon the American dream and fought for civil rights, Harvey Milk and Marsha P. Johnson led early movements of LGBTQ activism, and Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Jeannette Rankin advocated for women’s suffrage based on the vision that America could be a fully representative democracy. These American Refounders lived in a country where the systems did not work for them, and yet they forced the nation to live up to its founding ideals and built a better future for all.
Millennial and Gen Z attitudes toward patriotism seem to be coming from this same place. It’s not a rejection of our country or national identity, but rather a stirring conviction for what America can and should be. The good news is that young people have not given up on this country. From 2018 to 2020, there was a 266 percent increase in millennials running for Congress. In 2020, the Millennial Action Project tracked 703 millennial candidates for Congress throughout the cycle, compared to just 264 in 2018. An MTV/AP-NORC poll reported that two-thirds of Gen Z feel that their generation is motivated to make positive change in the country. Most notably, each day, here at MAP, we see young people who not only stepped up and won local office, but who are using their platform to work across the aisle and bridge partisan divides.
Thomas Edison once said, “Vision without execution is just hallucination.” Each generation, we improve on the execution of the vision of America. And I’ve been inspired by how millennials and Gen Z are stepping up to the plate.
So what can we celebrate this Independence Day, when the work of our founding is far from complete? We can celebrate that since the founding of our nation, America is always being refounded, and with a generation of millennials and Gen Z overwhelmingly committed to improvement we have a lot of founders on the job.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.