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Kids and families celebrate the US Bicentennial near the New York Harbor in Lower Manhattan. Taken on July 4, 1976 in New York City, New York.
(Photo by David Attie/Getty Images.)
July 4th and the American Faith We’ve Watched Slip Away
Jun 20, 2026
I was a girl in Philadelphia in the summer when America turned 200. The birthplace of America was electric in a way I've never forgotten — crowds stretching from the art museum steps down to the Delaware River, each city block corded off for parades, cookouts, celebrations, and the kind of noise that felt like belonging.
It was also, I know now, a particular kind of American moment — one that required something beyond good weather and a long weekend. It required a belief that the country and its highest office still belonged to all of us.
Back in 1976, we were not, by any measure, a country at ease. Unemployment hovered near 7.5 percent. Inflation had only recently retreated from double digits. The man who'd held the presidency before Gerald Ford had resigned in disgrace two years earlier.
We had every reason to feel hollowed out. And yet. There was something unbroken in that crowd. Whatever people thought of their government, and plenty thought very little of it, they believed the country was still theirs.
That feeling had a name. It was civic trust, the quiet, background assumption that whatever failures or corruptions touched the men in office, the office itself still pointed toward something larger than any one man's ambition.
On the eve of this Fourth of July, I find myself back in that memory, and I cannot shake the distance between then and now.
The surface numbers are, in some ways, better than in 1976. Unemployment currently sits at around 4.2 percent. Inflation, while persistent, is nowhere near the double-digit nightmare of the late seventies.
But numbers have never been the whole story, and this year the story underneath is one I don't know how to celebrate around.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump's personal wealth has grown by at least $1.4 billion. He accepted a Boeing 747 worth roughly $400 million from the Qatari government. He launched a cryptocurrency venture that, according to a House Judiciary Committee report, generated as much as $11.6 billion in holdings — while his administration was quietly dismantling federal oversight of the industry.
And then, last month, he did something that may be without precedent in the history of American self-dealing. Trump sued his own Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the unauthorized release of his tax returns — and then, before the case could even be heard on the merits, his Justice Department settled it on his behalf.
The price of settlement: a Department of Justice (DOJ) addendum declaring the federal government “forever barred and precluded” from auditing any tax return filed by Trump, his sons, his family, or more than 500 affiliated business entities before May 18, 2026.
An ongoing IRS audit that could have resulted in a $100 million penalty against the Trump Organization simply vanished. Legal experts called it unprecedented. Senate Democrats called it a potential violation of federal law.
When asked about his family's financial entanglements, Trump told the New York Times: “I found out nobody cared, and I'm allowed to.”
In 1976, that sentence would have ended a presidency. It ended one —in fact, just two years before—though the crime was different.
What Richard Nixon understood, to his ruin, was that there were still lines. That the office did not belong to the man who held it. Gerald Ford, whatever his failures, knew this. Jimmy Carter, who would take the oath six months after that Philadelphia summer, put his peanut farm in a blind trust.
The question of self-dealing was essentially rhetorical, because the expectation that a president served the country — not himself — was foundational.
What's been taken from us isn't a policy position. It's not something the next election can simply restore, though elections still matter enormously.
What's been taken is the assumption of good faith — the idea, however naïve it may now seem, that the person holding the most powerful office on earth was pointed, even imperfectly, toward the public good rather than his own balance sheet.
The fireworks will still go up on the 250th birthday. Family, friends, and neighbors will gather. There will be plenty of flags flying.
But I keep thinking about that girl in Philadelphia, pressed into a crowd of strangers who all felt, despite everything, like they were celebrating something they shared.
I'm not sure I know what we share now, except, perhaps, the grief of knowing what we've lost, and the long work of getting it back.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
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An american flag waving in the wind
Photo by Danny Burke on Unsplash
America's Heartbreak
Jun 20, 2026
As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.
America,
I love you, but you’ve broken my heart.
I have watched your promises bend under the weight of power, your ideals stretched thin by policies that forget the people they were meant to serve. I have watched democracy become something people invoke more often than they protect. Too many voices are silenced by systems designed to exhaust them. Too many people are told survival is the same thing as freedom.
And still, I cannot let you go.
Because I know democracy is more than elections and speeches and flags waving in the summer heat. To me, democracy is the belief that every person deserves dignity, safety, and the ability to shape the future they live in. It is the radical idea that no one should be disposable. Democracy is listening. It is accountability. It is protecting each other even when it is inconvenient. It is believed that the country belongs not only to the powerful, but to all of us.
I wish older generations understood that my generation did not inherit stability; we inherited crisis after crisis and were asked to call it normal. We came of age during political division, climate anxiety, school shootings, economic instability, and the constant fear that rights we thought were guaranteed could disappear overnight. We are often called cynical, but the truth is we learned early that institutions can fail. And yet we still organize, still care, still fight for each other. There is hope in that persistence.
I see that hope in communities across this country. I see it in people building mutual aid networks when systems fail them. I see it in young people refusing to stay silent about injustice. I see it in LGBTQ+ people creating joy and safety for one another, even while being debated like abstractions instead of human beings. I see it in neighbors feeding each other, protecting each other, mourning together, and rebuilding together. These are the stories the country should hear, not only stories of division, but stories of ordinary people choosing compassion anyway.
And despite everything, there is still so much I love about you.
I love the passion of your people, the way they continue to dream loudly even in difficult times. I love your mountains and deserts and coastlines, your forests older than memory and skies that seem to stretch forever. I love that somewhere between your crowded cities and quiet rural roads, every kind of person is trying, in their own way, to build a life filled with meaning.
What should America become in the next 250 years?
I hope you become softer where you have been cruel. More honest where you have hidden from your own history. I hope you become a country where democracy is measured not by mythology, but by how well people are actually cared for. A country where freedom is not reserved for the privileged, and where no child grows up believing they are less worthy of safety, dignity, or love.
I hope you become brave enough to change.
Not because you are perfect, but because you are unfinished.
I am still here. Still heartbroken. Still hopeful. Still believing that your greatest strength has never been your power, but your people and their endless ability to imagine something better.
With both grief and love,
Riley Reed, 26, Washington, DC
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United States Marine Corps Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II STOVL stealth multirole fighters belonging to the VMFA-121 "Green Knights" taxiing at the MCAS Iwakuni in Yamaguchi, Japan, on March 23, 2017.
(viper-zero / Getty Images)
How Red and Blue America Can Stay Together by Pulling Apart
Jun 20, 2026
In earlier essays, I argued that America’s political division has grown so deep that a peaceful “American Union” of two sovereign nations — one broadly red, one broadly blue — is worth considering. I also argued that relocation fears are overstated, that cooperation could increase economic prosperity, and that separation could help heal the lingering wounds of the Civil War.
But how would this all actually work? What happens to the national debt? Who gets the military bases, federal lands, and nuclear weapons? Will Social Security be protected? Could two nations share the dollar, defend themselves together, and resolve their disagreements?
These are serious concerns, but they can be addressed. Other countries have already built the tools an American Union would need: common markets, shared currencies, defense pacts, financial settlements, and negotiated asset division.
This is not a finished blueprint — specialists would need years to settle the formulas and mechanics — but it offers evidence that a workable approach exists.
If red and blue America are so divided, some will ask, why do we think they would cooperate within a joint central bank, defense council, or strategic command? The answer is that shared institutions would focus on the interests both would still have every reason to protect, and on which Americans have long broadly agreed — namely security, a stable currency, and an integrated market — not the areas of stark social division that set the two apart.
Political economists Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore describe a tradeoff between large and small states. Large countries gain from scale — bigger markets, stronger militaries, costs spread across more people. Smaller ones often govern closer to citizens’ preferences; when a population disagrees sharply, the cost of staying in one state rises.
Globalization has eroded the advantages of size: as trade expands, small countries reach large markets without sharing a government.
The result is more political jurisdictions with deeper economic integration. In 1945, the United Nations had 51 member states; today it has 193, even as global trade has expanded. Fragmentation and integration often advance together — making an American Union less an anomaly than a continuation of a global pattern.
The clearest modern example is the European Union. Its members remain sovereign — their own governments, taxes, languages, and social programs — yet share a common market with free movement of goods, capital, services, and people; many share the euro; and many of the same countries cooperate militarily through NATO.
Though not flawless, the E.U. demonstrates that sovereign states can integrate economically and militarily without merging politically.
An American Union would begin from a far stronger foundation. Europe had to integrate nations with 24 different official languages, legal and cultural traditions, and histories of armed conflict. The United States already shares a language, a currency, an integrated market, common citizenship, military institutions, and two centuries of civic identity. The A.U. would not be creating integration after a long separation, but preserving one that exists — while giving red and blue America greater self-government.
The American Union would keep the existing U.S. common market intact. Trade would stay tariff-free, businesses would operate across the border as across state lines, and goods, capital, and labor would move freely. As in the E.U., citizens of both nations could live and work anywhere within the A.U. — essential to keeping the shared market, and the people in it, free.
To manage those interests, an American Union would need a limited set of common institutions, not a new national government.
An “American Union Council,” with representatives from both nations, would supervise the framework and approve common budgets. Each function would have its own expert body — a Federal Reserve successor for the dollar, a continental defense council, and joint commissions for other cross-border systems.
Shared rules mean each nation will sometimes abide by decisions it would not have made alone. But, as a practical matter, this is already something Americans endure. Texas and California today both live under one monetary policy and one defense posture neither controls — a compromise that often fully satisfies neither but that both can tolerate.
The difference is that such compromise would be confined to the dollar and common defense, not extended to every social and moral question.
Importantly and beneficially, shared control insulates these decisions from any single nation’s politics. A central bank and continental defense structure answerable to two governments are far harder for one president or party to capture. Recent controversies over presidential pressure on the Federal Reserve and unilateral military action show why institutional checks matter. In an American Union, neither management of the dollar nor shared strategic force would rest with one nation’s executive.
The United States today maintains one of the world’s most integrated military and nuclear command structures, and an American Union would preserve the parts necessary for continental defense — though not every asset or decision would be shared.
Here the A.U. would preserve an architecture built over generations, overseen by a new “American Union Defense Council” of civilian leaders from both governments, with a unified professional command for continental defense, nuclear deterrence, cyber and space operations, and alliances.
A longstanding model for continental defense is the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) — the defense alliance between the United States and Canada — that could be updated to include red America and blue America along with Canada.
NORAD already shows that sovereign countries can cooperate through a binational command for North American defense while each remains subject to its own laws, policies, and directives. The updated NORAD model would continue to operate under pre-approved rules of engagement, including ones that allow rapid response when minutes matter.
Each nation would keep its own forces and sovereign authority over ordinary military decisions — a rescue mission, peacekeeping deployment, or limited overseas operation — while North American defense would proceed under jointly approved standing rules, as NORAD does today.
What neither could do is use shared AU assets — nuclear weapons, joint intelligence, missile defense, continental command — for offensive action, or trigger common defense obligations, without the procedures the founding compact would set. Above all, that compact would bar the two new republics from turning force on each other — the entire premise of a new peaceful union.
Both nations would also keep using the dollar through a shared monetary authority, just as the eurozone and other currency unions do.
An American Reserve System would carry forward the Federal Reserve’s core functions — monetary policy, lender of last resort, bank supervision, and inflation control — with the regional Reserve Banks reorganized into districts serving both nations and an American Open Market Committee like today’s FOMC. Fiscal policy would stay separate, each nation setting its own taxes and budgets, but both would accept common rules to protect the currency: transparent debt reporting, coordinated supervision, and crisis procedures.
Another requirement would be dividing assets, debts, and institutions — and history again offers pertinent guidance. The peaceful 1993 dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia — the so-called “Velvet Divorce” — showed that a complicated modern federal state can divide sovereignty, property, and debt by negotiation, using formulas that often tracked population.
And while significantly smaller than that of America, at the time of separation the Czechoslovakian economy was still roughly that of a mid-sized U.S. state.
More recently, Britain’s withdrawal from the E.U. disentangled a multi-trillion-dollar economy — one of the world’s largest — from a deeply integrated system, yielding pertinent lessons on financial obligations, citizens’ rights, and regulatory continuity as well as a negotiated settlement of many outstanding obligations. An American Union would need similar formulas: federal debt apportioned by population, GDP, tax base, or some blend, with the same logic governing pensions, veterans’ benefits, and other earned commitments.
For most Americans a key question is whether the checks will keep coming. They would. The governing principle would be continuity — obligations to current beneficiaries honored without interruption, whichever nation a retiree lives in.
Trust funds for programs like Social Security — like other federal assets — would be allocated by an agreed formula reflecting contributions and beneficiary populations. Portability would be assured, as no worker should lose decades of credit by retiring across the line, and so-called “totalization agreements” — which already let people combine contributions from different countries — offer a template.
Going forward, each nation would design its own social welfare programs; what it could not do is repudiate what was already promised.
Federal land would generally be apportioned to the nation in which it sits, while some assets would need special handling: mineral and water rights, leases, royalties, and tribal rights preserved, and strategic resources like uranium and rare earths governed by supply guarantees and national security agreements.
Energy infrastructure would require joint management, building on rules that already govern cross-border flows of power, oil, and gas.
The United States and Canada already maintain a deeply interconnected energy system of cross-border pipelines and power lines, and the Nordic and Baltic states through Nord Pool as well as the six Central American nations linked by the SIEPAC grid provide other useful examples.
Ordinary military bases and ranges would pass to the host nation under shared use arrangements, while strategic assets stay within the common framework. Precedent is instructive: When the Soviet Union dissolved, the new states did not simply divide the nuclear arsenal among themselves. They consolidated control under a single successor framework, with international assurances in exchange. An American Union would face the same logic: nuclear control kept unified, not divided by map or party.
An American Union would, of course, need a neutral way to resolve inevitable disagreements, and the models are well established: the E.U.-U.K. Withdrawal Agreement routes disputes through a Joint Committee and then an independent arbitration panel; the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) uses arbitral panels; and the Permanent Court of Arbitration has served to help resolve inter-country disputes since 1899.
While most disagreements would be settled by the American Union Council — whose purpose would be to defuse friction before it hardens — the rest would go to a standing arbitration panel, with members each nation names in advance, plus a neutral chair from a pre-agreed roster, so no dispute lingers. Its rulings would bind both governments, with the founding agreement setting consequences for noncompliance, as trade agreements do.
None of this would happen overnight. It would unfold over many years — likely a decade or more — beginning with study and negotiation, then a commission to inventory assets, liabilities, and programs, and finally a comprehensive agreement covering the common market, currency, defense, benefits, and assets. All the while, existing structures would stay in place as successor institutions gradually take over.
Unlike Brexit, where a binding referendum came first and the terms of separation were settled afterward, against a ticking clock — an American Union would fix the terms in detail before any irreversible step, so citizens would know what separation meant before committing to it.
Step back from the mechanics, and what emerges is a new form of governance without a familiar name. The American Union would be neither the full political integration the country has today — one sovereign government over all — nor a clean break of two unrelated nations going entirely their own ways. It would sit deliberately between them: sovereign republics that stay bound where union still serves them and that govern separately where shared rule has only deepened social conflict.
Most arguments about America’s future assume a binary: hold together as we are or break apart for good. The American Union is a third path between them — union where union helps and autonomy where it heals.
How Red and Blue America Can Stay Together by Pulling Apart was originally published by The Western Journal and is republished with permission.
Jordan Karp is a lawyer and writer based in New York with a keen interest in American political culture, institutional reform, and civic life.
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SpaceX, Twitter and electric car maker Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an event during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, on June 16, 2023.
(Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
Elon Musk’s new ‘trillionaire’ status is a good thing, actually
Jun 20, 2026
I am not a huge fan of Elon Musk as a political activist or commentator. I think he’s made Twitter — sorry, X — worse. His support for the nationalist right in Europe has been ugly. His tenure leading the Department of Government Efficiency mostly amounted to a missed opportunity and often descended into little more than performative vandalism. His personal life is not exactly consonant with my preference for bourgeois family values. Though, one can hardly accuse him of being a deadbeat dad.
On the other hand, I am a huge fan of his accomplishments in business and engineering. He helped create the foundations of the digital economy with PayPal. At the helm of Tesla, he made the electric car into a viable industry (something climate activists once lionized him for). Starlink, his internet satellite business, has been transformative. And, finally, there’s SpaceX, which went public last week. It’s a testament to human ingenuity, immigrant success and American greatness, on a scale that is hard to describe.
If Musk is successful in his ambitions, he will be more responsible than any other human for making ours an interplanetary species. That would mean that long after nearly every name of every politician and businessman you can think of have been forgotten, people will still remember Elon Musk.
But none of that is very relevant to the explosion of outrage over his status as the world’s first trillionaire. I offer my opinions about Musk only because a remarkable number of people think if you defend the morality or legality of him being so rich you must be on Team Elon. I am not. I am on Team Capitalism.
But the confusion hardly ends there. If you followed the reaction on social media to Musk’s shattering of the trillionaire barrier, you’d think that he now has a trillion dollars in the bank. Indeed, indignant politicians rushed to propose taxes on Musk’s wealth as if it was a suddenly discovered treasure ship (with laughably questionable math). Many people talked about Musk “hoarding” dollars that rightfully belong to the poor, the people or perhaps Social Security beneficiaries.
That trillion dollars doesn’t exist, save as a function of accounting. He owns a large number of shares in SpaceX. Those shares have an estimated book value of about $1.03 trillion — as I write this. The stock price will change daily, and if it dips in the future, as I expect it will, he might not be a trillionaire for very long.
Let’s say, heaven forbid, that SpaceX has a disaster on the launchpad, loses some major NASA contract, and the stock price tumbles. What happens to those dollars he supposedly hoarded? Do they vanish? No, because they never existed in the first place.
A shocking number of people think — or demagogically pretend to — that the economy is a static pie. All of the wealth in the economy exists in the form of a finite number of dollars. This zero-sum fallacy is why people think he’s hoarding wealth. He’s not. He’s creating wealth, and I don’t just mean for all of the SpaceX welders and cafeteria staff who now own more than a million dollars’ worth of stock.
Increased innovation and productivity grow the pie, which means more pie for more people. That’s what economic growth means. In 1969, the year I was born, the U.S. gross domestic product was about $1 trillion, in nominal dollars. (If you adjust for inflation, U.S. GDP was around $1 trillion a century ago.) Does Musk now own all of America’s wealth? Of course not, because the economy has grown massively since then.
Other than dislike for Musk, the main driver of all this outrage is our obsession with income inequality. To some, it’s just not right that anyone be so rich when others are so poor — or feel so poor compared with Musk. This is an aesthetic complaint masquerading as a policy position. In objective terms, no one was made poorer by Musk getting richer. Subjectively, however, we’re all poorer in the sense that the richest person in the world became marginally richer.
That’s a vibes argument.
If your neighbor wins the lottery, you will be poorer in comparison. But your ability to clothe, feed and house yourself and your family will not have changed.
If I cure cancer tomorrow, I will get very rich. Where’s the injustice? The world gets a cure for cancer, the economy saves countless billions fighting cancer, and I get to buy a bunch of cool stuff. Everyone, except maybe some drug companies and oncologists, comes out a winner.
I’ll never cure cancer. But capitalism probably will, eventually. Which is just one of a trillion reasons why I am on Team Capitalism.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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The worst deal in the history of deals