America’s 200th birthday was inspirational, its 250th is a joke | Opinion
July 4th, 1976, was the first time in my life I stayed up all night watching TV.
Back then, the stations in Phoenix all signed off at midnight — they’d play the National Anthem and the screen would go blank.
But on that magical night of the nation’s 200th birthday, our ABC affiliate stayed on the air all night long — broadcasting from heartfelt celebrations across the country, and interviewing historians and historic figures about the grand and successful experiment that was America. I marveled at the Freedom Train and the tall ships in Boston Harbor.
I think I learned more about America in that one night than I did in a semester of high school history.
As a child of rural Arizona and Idaho, that all-nighter was my 23-inch-diagonal window into an America that I’d visited, but never felt so much a part of. I was so excited, I couldn’t have slept through it if I tried.
Saturday will be America’s 250th birthday, and what I feel today is nothing like what I felt 50 years ago.
The celebration so far has been a national embarrassment (and that’s a generous description), because the president of the United States took it out of the hands of people who knew what they were doing and took it into his own.
He replaced America 250, a bipartisan group that had been preparing for years, with Freedom 250, which is by, for and all about Donald Trump.
Here’s one example: The 1976 Freedom Train was a historic steam locomotive that zigzagged almost 26,000 miles, to every one of the lower 48 states, bringing some of democracy’s most precious documents and artifacts to be seen by countless Americans who might never get the chance to visit the nation’s capital.
This year’s “Freedom 250 Train” is a travesty — an ordinary Amtrak locomotive, in red, white and blue vinyl wrap, pulling ordinary passenger cars on the regular Acela route from Washington to Boston. The only patriotically significant thing on it, an image of the Statue of Liberty, competes for attention with the giant red stripe on the side reading: “Delivered by President Donald J. Trump and Secretary Sean P. Duffy.”
As lame as that is, it’s actually one of the better parts of Trump’s Freedom 250 “celebrations.”
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is in ruins behind a chain-link fence with Artificial Intelligence-driven guard towers, the direct result of Trump’s effort to “improve” the classic design by painting the bottom “American Flag Blue.” Days after the pool was refilled, it became choked with duck-killing toxic algae, and the hastily applied Rhino Lining started peeling off after it had been driven over by a presidential motorcade on the way to a self-congratulating press conference, because what other kind does Trump ever do?
Trump made it worse. In an effort to save face, he made up stories about the pool being vandalized by radical leftists and dispatched soldiers and federal agents to false-arrest any lookie-loos touching pieces of the Rhino Lining floating in the water.
Seven have been arrested. The only one publicly identified so far is David Hearn, a 67-year-old, three-time USA Olympic canoe racer, indicted Thursday on a charge of “property destruction” for touching part of the already self-destructing liner while taking a break from a bike ride.
Members of our Kansas congressional delegation have their spin machines running on maximum overdrive as they laughably try to make this parody of a national celebration look somewhat less horrifying.
Wichita-area Rep. Ron Estes posted a gushing thank you to the president “for hosting me at the White House Rose Garden,” as part of “a gathering for a wonderful evening celebrating American independence.”
What Rose Garden, Ron? The one Jackie Kennedy built was paved over on Trump’s orders, with trees and bushes replaced with Mar-a-Lago-style patio furniture.
The most epic Freedom 250 fail could be Trump’s “Great American State Fair.”
At one end of the alleged festival is a scale model of what has been derisively, but accurately, called the Arc de Trump, a “triumphal” arch that the president is proposing as basically a monument to his own ego.
The model appears to have been crafted from crate lumber, Styrofoam and painted cloth. Numerous videos have been posted online showing it falling apart faster than the Reflecting Pool paint job.
The “organizers” of this 16-day mess seem to have somehow managed to attract fewer visitors to the National Mall than there would be on a normal day.
Kansas 1st District Rep. Tracey Mann posted a picture of himself and his family at the fair Thursday. Judging from the picture, his arrival with his wife and four children significantly increased the attendance.
The congressman enthused: “It was great to stop by our state’s booth and visit with Kansans who traveled to our nation’s capital to share the best of the Sunflower State.”
Those Kansas travelers are otherwise known as the office staff of Sen. Roger Marshall, who put together the state’s booth, one in a row of booths subdivided inside a long tent with a phony classical column facade.
Special shoutout to Dan’s Cool Videos for taking us inside the Kansas pavilion. One can almost smell the exhibit’s, shall we say, farmyard aroma.
The display from the state that brought the country Cessna, Learjet, Garmin, Pizza Hut and White Castle is represented mainly by retractable vertical banners of Kansas agricultural statistics, with plastic buckets of grains that visitors can run their hands through — you won’t get arrested for touching, like at the Reflecting Pool.
There are life-size cutouts of Dwight Eisenhower and Amelia Earhart, and a big picture of the stars of “The Wizard of Oz” that kids can stick their faces through and have their pictures taken.
The overall vibe is Kansas Turnpike rest stop without the free road maps.
The one saving grace is a large Dala Horse from Lindsborg, decoratively painted with elements of the American and Swedish flags. Like everybody always say, “Why go to Europe when you can go to Lindsborg?”
The fair has a large Ferris wheel that sometimes runs, and at the far end is a stage where famous musicians — including Martina McBride, Bret Michaels and The Commodores — were supposed to play.
They backed out when they saw how much the event was getting politicized.
Smart move.
Video surfaced Thursday of a heavy metal object crashing down onto the rehearsal stage, narrowly missing a dance troupe.
Musical headliners have been replaced on the main stage by MAGA influencers. One of them, Michael Knowles of Daily Wire, said this:
“The one area where the Salem witch trials went a little far is, I would say, they weren’t organized enough. So, you had these, like, random judges who were, you know, kind of, burning these ladies. I don’t know if they were guilty or not. But I think . . . if it were more formalized, built up a little bit more, maybe with like a grand inquisitor or something, that would’ve been the way to do it.”
He said that to a 10-year-old girl.
Welcome to what passes for a celebration of the best of American history and culture in the Age of Trump.
On our 250th birthday as a country, Washington has failed us, miserably.
If we are to salvage anything good from this, we’ll have to do it ourselves.
Personally, I’ll start my 4th of July by putting on my centennial-era uniform and playing 1870s vintage baseball to entertain the visitors to the celebration at Old Cowtown. I might even play in two games.
Later, we’ll get some freshly grilled spareribs from Dillons for dinner, and go to the fireworks show in Goddard with dear friends of ours, Canadian by birth, U.S. citizens by choice.
I won’t watch Trump’s 4th of July speech and I for sure won’t be up all night riveted to the TV like I was in 1976.
I consider myself a patriotic American, and I’ve had more than enough of seeing the country I love being humiliated in front of the world.
This story was originally published July 3, 2026 at 5:40 AM with the headline "America’s 200th birthday was inspirational, its 250th is a joke | Opinion."
