Two hundred and fifty years of American self-governance produced, on its milestone weekend, the following inventory: one $60 million UFC cage fight on a national monument, screened for attractive soldiers and staffed with Honor Guards as décor. One 90-minute concert in Manhattan featuring Bette Midler, streamed to 330 watch party locations, one of which had a food truck. One Truth Social peace deal that Israel declined before the ink was dry. One MAGA ballot fraud conspiracy set in a city that a congressman confirmed does not exist. The republic is 250. This is what it looks like at 250.
Slate’s Jim Newell wrote June 14 about how the birthday got hijacked. The argument writes itself: the official America250 anniversary celebration, a government-funded commemoration of the nation’s founding, became indistinguishable from one man’s 80th birthday party. The UFC event on the South Lawn cost over sixty million dollars of government money. It used the Lincoln Memorial as a weigh-in venue. It screened military attendees for body composition. Trump floated keeping the arena permanently afterward, comparing it to the Eiffel Tower, which is the kind of comparison a man makes when he has run out of people who will tell him no.
The opposition mounted a counter-event. Rise Up Sing Out at The Town Hall in Manhattan. Jane Fonda organized it. Patti Smith performed. Rufus Wainwright. Bette Midler. Joy Reid. It was free to stream. It was earnest and well-intentioned and held in a 1,500-seat theater, and the people who watched it were, to a person, already on the same side as Bette Midler. Somewhere on the other channel, a man born in Queens, who now lives in a house the public owns, watched two athletes punch each other in a ring he built with public money and called it a gift to the country.
The ballot fraud story arrived Sunday morning. Per Raw Story, a pro-Trump influencer posted what he described as “BREAKING” evidence of voter fraud involving former reality star Spencer Pratt in a location that, when Rep. Ted Lieu looked into it, did not appear to exist. “Wait till you see all the ballots for Spencer Pratt that were found in Atlantis,” Lieu wrote on social media. “The MAGA conspiracies get stupider every day.” They do get stupider every day. They also work every day, traveling faster than the correction and landing harder with the audience they were built for.
The Iran deal was the morning’s other development. Trump posted to Truth Social that the war was over. Oil fell. Markets soared. Netanyahu said Israel was not bound by the Lebanon provisions. The formal signing is Friday in Switzerland, pending talks in Doha, pending Iran receiving funds, pending whatever Israel does in southern Lebanon in the meantime. The deal is “complete” in the sense that the announcement has been made, which in this administration is most of the work and also, frequently, all of the work.
The Founders anticipated faction and ambition and the steady gravitational pull of concentrated power toward more concentrated power. They built a document to resist it. What they did not anticipate was a president who governs by social media post, declares wars over in the register of a restaurant announcing a new menu item, uses military ceremony as birthday party staging, and has a defense official who summarizes the troop screening process as “no fattys.” The mechanisms exist. The courts. The amendment process. The vote. Whether those mechanisms move fast enough to keep pace with the era is the question the country is now 250 years into answering, and the answer is not settled.
Saturday night, the cage fight ended. The concert ended. The Lincoln Memorial kept standing, as it has since 1922, which is a longer run than any of the people who used it this weekend as either a backdrop or a weigh-in venue. The argument, the endless American argument about what the country is for, continues at full volume. At 250, that part is still working.
Two hundred and fifty years of self-governance, and the question is still the same one: who exactly is this country for, and who gets to decide?
Sources
Courthouse News Service: Inside the crowd drawn to Trump’s unusual UFC fight night at the White House
Raw Story: ‘Stupid’ new MAGA election lie dismantled as city at heart of scandal shown not to exist
CBS News: Trump says U.S. deal with Iran ‘is now complete,’ authorizes removal of Navy blockade of Strait of Hormuz
NBC News: United States and Iran reach framework deal to end war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz
Rolling Stone: Jane Fonda to Headline Protest Concert on Trump’s Birthday
Raw Story: ‘I’m literally flabbergasted’: Rage as Trump deploys sacred Honor Guards at UFC event
