“Our masters, they have lived under the flag, they got their wealth under it, and everything beautiful for their children. Under it they have grind us up, and put us in their pocket for money. But the first minute they think that old flag mean freedom for we colored people, they pull it right down and run up the rag of their own. But we’ll never desert the old flag, boys, never; we have lived under it for eighteen hundred six-two years, and we’ll die for it now.”
Corporal Prince Lambkin, 1st South Carolina Colored Infantry
What is the 4th of July to Americans?
Besides the obvious play on Frederick Douglass’ famous speech, that question has occupied, no troubled, my mind these past several months. Not only for Americans as a people, but for myself as well. Why does our 250thanniversary simultaneously inspire me, but also repel me? I recall the energy and excitement of our bicentennial in 1976, although through the lens of a 12-year-old.
As a patriotic American that served in uniform and served in our foreign service overseas in war and conflict zones, this anniversary bothers me. It vexes me because I think, it is deeply tarnished and soiled. Mostly because it has been stolen and appropriated by Trump for his personal glorification and enrichment. I ‘ve been to countries where tinpot dictators’ rule and Trump’s America has many hallmarks of these petite regimes.
There are two national plans on how to celebrate our nation’s story of independence. One, a bipartisan celebration planned by a commission authorized and funded by Congress in 2016, and the second, a partisan celebration highlighting one faction: The Trump Organization.
America250 is, according to its website, is the “U.S. Semi-quincentennial Commission established by Congress in 2016 to plan and orchestrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.” It is led by persons “Appointed by the House and Senate leadership of both parties, the nonpartisan Commission is composed of 16 private citizens, 4 U.S. Representatives and 4 Senators, as well as 12 Ex Officio members from all three branches of the federal government and its independent agencies.” For close to a decade this commission has been working across party lines to plan for our 250th anniversary celebrations.
Freedom250 is a Trump initiative managed by an event planning firm – Event Strategies LLC — with long ties to Trump. As with anything Trump, things are opaque and murky, like the reflecting pool. Its’ website is silent as to its leadership, organization, and make-up. The White House calls it a ‘public-private venture.’ The company, according to a Wired article, has raked in tens of millions of tax payer dollars, to including a potentially $100 million windfall in government contracts with the General Services Administration. (https://www.wired.com/story/they-helped-plan-the-january-6-rally-now-their-events-company-is-raking-in-millions-in-government-contracts/)
Initially, from what I could gather, both the America250 commission and Trump’s Freedom250 organizers worked together. The original event organizer for America250 was let go and Event Strategies LLC got the gig. This explains, I think, what happened to $150 million that was appropriated by Congress for the 250th anniversary in the “big beautiful bill. The bill did not designate whether the taxpayer dollars went to America250 or Freedom250. From what I learned from an NPR interview regarding Freedom250, it was initially agreed that $100 million would go to America 250, with the remaining $50 million going to Freedom250. That decision was reversed. As of this writing, less than a week before the 4th of July, America250 was allocated only $25 million. This begs the question, where did the $125 million go?
Freedom250 quickly monetized July 4th by selling Freedom250 logoed merchandise through its website, mimicking America250 website selling America250 logoed anniversary products. Sales from America 250 would go to the Congressionally authorized Commission presumably. Where then, do the sales from Freedom250 go? Event Strategies LLC? It seems Trump and his corrupt cronies are perhaps profiteering from our grand 250th anniversary.
This arrangement highlights, I think, that Trump’s love of America is purely and simply transactional. “Make America Great Again” is a multimillion-dollar profit center for Trump. A slogan to capture the MAGA masses imagination and rake in their hard-earned dollars.
Our country has many blemishes, our history is troubled, great injustices were perpetrated, but as Corporal Lambkin intoned in his remarks, this is our country good or bad, we love it, and we will die for it. It is as much our land as it is anyone’s, slave master or freed slave, and we will fight for it. And we [the former slaves now soldiers] have the patriotic moral high ground. He probably wouldn’t understand the MAGA slogan, or, more likely, think it more fitted to the slave master’s rebellion than his own quest for freedom and equality.
Lambkin and his fellow soldiers knew something about what it means to be a patriotic Americans. Something that Trump can’t ever grasp. America is about community, about service, about sacrifice, about progress towards a better good, to work for something bigger than oneself. Trump is and always will be about himself. Greed, corruption, money, power, and fame. Trump had an opportunity to fight for his country. He did not. He thinks those that served and died for their country are “suckers.” His words not mine.
Trump is like those slave masters who got their wealth under the American flag, but when it became too pluralistic, too inclusive, too democratic, they rebelled like spoiled pampered aristocratic slave masters. Instead of moving forward toward a better America, Trump wants ‘real’ Americans to follow him as a redeemer, a modern-day liberator of white Christian America.
This self-styled autocratic piped piper of Mar a Lago is trying to take America back to a mythological, godly ordained America where great white men ruled wisely and justly, women swooned and had babies, and blacks knew their place. That is the America Trump yearns for. I can’t tell if he wants to go back all the way to 1856 or just 1954. Erasing the history of blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and women is part of that strategy.
Trump and Freedom250 hijacked our 250th anniversary. It is the coronation and deification of Trump, not a celebration of America and all walks of American life. The mixed martial arts extravaganza on the White House lawn is an example of this Trump centric spectacle. An eroticized male theater of mostly naked white men grappling with each other for the affections of our dear leader Donald Trump, with Trump sitting ring side admiring their hard, sweaty bodies, in a space mostly devoid of women. Happy Birthday wishes big boy!
In the run up to into 2026 we have been subjected to a barrage of endless Trump vanity projects. Renaming the Kennedy Center after himself. Building a billion-dollar ballroom, hanging three-story tall portraits of himself on government office buildings, bejeweling the White House with gold, having the Treasury mint coins with his image, ordering special U.S. passports be printed with his image superimposed over a famous print of the signing of Declaration of Independence. The message: Trump is America, America is Trump.
It is hard to remain enthusiastic about our 250th anniversary when it is overrun by rats and imbeciles. The constant conveyor belt of assaults on our constitution, on who’s a citizen, on our rule of law, on our civil society, on our courts, on our men and women of color who serve our country with dignity and honor, fatigues the everyday American. This list of Trumpian inspired vainglorious squalor can go on for pages.
So, what then is the 4th of July to me? For me it remains a time to reflect on our American origin stories, the confluences of many nations, representing peoples already here and those that immigrated, willfully or otherwise. We were conceived as a nation built on an ideology of equality, not race or nation. It was this enlightenment promise that all men are created equal that drew people to this country in the decades that followed. That promise today is still seen as equally valid as it was the day it was penned.
We still have work to do, however, as anyone not blinded by rightwing propaganda can see. Our founders in the preamble to the Constitution recognized that achieving this grand promise was just a beginning. The preamble is a statement of a goal, an endpoint in some distant future. It is a goal I think most Americans continue to strive for. To go backwards is un-American, to go forward is quintessentially American.
I am proud to be an American, but I find myself more akin to Corporal Lambkin’s ideal of what it means to be an American, to make for a more perfect union, despite our imperfections. Not the backwardness, hate, and greed represented by the current person soiling the White House and its hallowed grounds. America and Americans are better than that.
