Growing up in Ithaca, a college town in New York’s Finger Lakes region, I had a very different idea of the Fourth of July.
Independence Day was a community ritual. Families gathered before the parade, children buzzed with anticipation, veterans and local officials passed by, fire trucks and marching bands rolled through downtown, neighbors greeted one another by name, and best of all, fireworks lit up the night sky. The celebration was modest, local, and imperfect in the way all genuine civic life is imperfect. It fostered a sense of belonging.
People could disagree about taxes, presidents, wars, schools, and everything else, yet for a few hours, they could share the same public space without being sorted into enemy camps.
That memory may sound nostalgic, but romanticizing the past is not the point. Civic rituals matter because they create a space where citizenship can rise above partisanship, reminding us that we share a political community even when we disagree about nearly everything else. Such rituals do not erase conflict, injustice, or the many ways America has fallen short of its ideals. But at their best, they affirm that the republic is older, larger, and more enduring than any faction, party, or president.
That is why President Trump’s announcement that the July 4 celebration on the National Mall marking America’s 250th anniversary will double as the “most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all” is so jarring. It erases the distinction between a national commemoration and a personal political spectacle.
A national commemoration should elevate the republic above the person temporarily entrusted with leading it. Trump’s instinct is the reverse. He takes the broadest civic stage available and scrawls his own name across it.
The National Mall is the symbolic heart of American civic life. It is where the country gathers to mourn, protest, celebrate, and remember. The Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the vast public space between them belong to the people.
Turning that space into a Trump rally is a kind of democratic sacrilege. It repurposes a civic space for the glorification of one individual, erasing a fundamental distinction. The president is not the nation. He is an officer of the constitutional order, temporarily empowered and constitutionally constrained. When national rituals become extensions of his personal brand, the office begins to swallow the republic it is meant to serve.
Guy Debord’s phrase “the society of the spectacle” helps explain why this matters. In spectacle politics, public life is transformed into images to be consumed. Citizens become spectators. Power presents itself through symbols, performances, and carefully managed scenes. Trump did not create this condition, but he has pushed it further. For him, spectacle is not an ornament attached to governing. It is the substance.
That is what makes Trump’s announcement so revealing. The 250th anniversary of American independence should be a moment of civic memory. It should ask citizens to think about the republic: its promises, betrayals, achievements, and unfinished obligations. Instead, Trump’s own language turns the event into a spectacle of personal branding. The nation does not gather to see itself; It gathers to see him.
The result is civic displacement. The people are no longer participants in a shared act of commemoration. They are an audience. The National Mall becomes a stage set. The flyover becomes a prop. The fireworks become lighting. The rally playlist becomes the soundtrack. And the president becomes the main character in a narrative that is supposed to belong to the country.
This matters because democracies need citizens, not merely audiences. A republic depends on people who deliberate, organize, vote, serve, protest, volunteer, and hold leaders accountable. Spectacle moves in the opposite direction. It asks people to watch, cheer, identify, and repeat. It turns politics into a drama of loyalty and domination. In that drama, the leader does not serve the nation. The nation becomes the backdrop for the leader.
Defenders will say the criticism is overheated. Presidents have always used patriotic symbols, appeared before flags, spoken at national ceremonies, and connected themselves to the country’s story. That is true. The presidency is, by design, both an administrative office and a symbolic one. But there is a difference between representing the nation and replacing it.
That distinction is not academic. If the nation and the leader are fused, criticism of the leader can be treated as criticism of the country. Opposition becomes treason, protest becomes domestic terrorism, and accountability becomes betrayal. That is how democratic culture erodes, not always through coups or decrees, but through the steady personalization of public life. Institutions lose their independent meaning, public spaces become partisan arenas, national symbols become props, and citizens are reduced to fans or enemies.
The semiquincentennial should call Americans to something better: a reminder that the United States has always been larger than its leaders. The Declaration was a rejection of rule by one man, and the Constitution did not create an elected monarch. It created a system of divided power, public accountability, and limits on ambition. That is the irony of Trump’s July 4 spectacle: a holiday born in resistance to personalized power becomes a MAGA rally.
The country deserves a birthday celebration worthy of its history, its contradictions, its achievements, and its unfinished promise.
The best way to honor the Fourth of July, then, is not to join Trump’s shameless spectacle, but to turn away from it. Americans should celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday in the older and better way: gathering in communities, reading the Declaration aloud, marching in local parades, watching fireworks with neighbors, and reflecting seriously on the ideals that the document still places before us. The Declaration asserts that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed, that rights do not flow from rulers, and that people have the authority to resist domination. That is the Fourth worth celebrating. Not a celebration for presidential vanity. A republic, still unfinished, still contested, and still ours.
Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.
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.