Nobody likes a party crasher

Trump has ruined America’s 250th anniversary. I’m still celebrating.

A boy sits by American flags at the Great American State Fair. (Photo by UCG/Contributor via Getty Images)

I don’t feel like celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, and the fact that I don’t is pissing me off.

The semiquincentennial is the anniversary of a country that, whatever else is true of it, has functioned for a quarter millennium as a bet that people who show up with nothing can build something. Donald Trump and Trumpism have spent the past year and a half turning the anniversary into a branding exercise to further the inherently unpatriotic MAGA project.

You’d be forgiven for not following the inside baseball of the country’s 250th, because a nonpartisan anniversary should not be something to keep an eye on.