The Defiling of the 4th of July

The White House occupant can't hide his lack of respect for America's values and history. The mayor of New York, meanwhile, offered a hopeful, pro-immigrant vision of America.

A little man spoils America’s big day. (Photo by Alex WROBLEWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)

We live in a complex, multi-racial, multi-ethnic society of more 340 million people. Over the next two decades, the white population in the United States will no longer be the majority. These are demographic facts—facts that a white supremacist president cannot alter, no matter how much he despises the reality of our country.

An intelligent president who loves America and its democratic values would use a singular moment like the 250th anniversary to bring the country together. To focus on what binds us not what divides us. To express how diversity is our strength.

But in this perverse period of our lives, we are stuck with a broken buffoon, a desperate braggart, a shallow con artist, a corrupt authoritarian who only cares about money and power.

He was handed a speech that required him to mouth words that reminded us what a real president would say. But there’s no getting around how sad and tattered those words sound when uttered by a man who believes none of them.

Mother Nature tried her best to stop it with lightning and thunder. But her fury could not keep this man from forging ahead and defiling the night.

“Here on our National Mall, we’re celebrating freedom’s triumph over tyranny, liberty’s conquest over oppression and the enduring victory of the American spirit,” he said.

“Our founding fathers summoned the courage of giants and the wisdom of centuries to boldly proclaim these timeless truths. They declared that all men are created equal,” he said.

“This country has been the greatest force for peace and justice on earth in the last century. We defeated tyrants, demolished evil, and saved freedom again and again and again,” he said.

These things are true. But these things ring hollow and cheap when spoken by a man who obviously does not believe them.

It was not enough to express such thoughts out loud, confident in their intrinsic value. It was necessary for him to put others down over and over, to remind the audience (waiting for fireworks) that we are the best.

“For 250 years, the United States of America has been the hope, the promise, the light and the glory among all of the nations of the world,” he said. “All over the world. They try and be like us. Nobody can be like us. And with God’s help, we will always be this or even better.”

“We will always be on top,” he said. “We will never let our country fall. We will always be the best.”

“Americans won the West and built the modern world,” he said. “Because America is a nation of winners. And today our country is winning again. And we’re winning like never before.”

This man who spits on our Constitution and its values nearly every day even mouthed the words praising the document America’s founders produced—although this “victim” couldn’t avoid ad-libbing a typical grievance.

“It’s because of their genius that we remain the finest people on the planet,” he said. “After 250 years, unlike so many others in the world, in this country we have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal justice under the law, although I wasn’t treated that well. But we won’t get into that.”

He didn’t linger on how justice hasn’t served his bottomless needs, but he repeatedly targeted his new villain to incite his cult to hatred. “We don’t want communists in our country,” he said. And, America will never be a communist country. Won’t happen. Communism is a loser, and it always will be.”

He also used the speech to plug his Save America Act and oppose mail-in ballots, as well as trot out his tired “golden age of America” line, as if it reflected reality rather than his untethered fantasy world.

But it was one of his closing lines that particularly displayed how disconnected this speech was from the nasty world he’s worked so aggressively to turn our beloved country into.

“Over 250 years, the mighty nations and terrible tyrants—they came and they went,” he said. “After us they came and they went. But after two and a half centuries, this American republic still stands tall and strong. And we love each other.”

And we love each other.

We will get through this corrupt, cruel and absurd time in our nation’s life, in part because the avatar of corruption, cruelty and absurdity could utter lines like this and imagine that there’s anyone in the audience who thinks that he actually believes or cares about it.

He may read the speechwriters’ lines that appear on his TelePrompter. But the gap between what he says and what he has wrought continues to widen, and there’s no chance in hell that he will ever bridge that gap.

That would take an intelligent man, one who actually believes in the values of America, respects America for the diverse country that it is and cares about the well-being of Americans more than feeding his own ego and stuffing his own pockets.

One day we’ll have a president like that again.

Meanwhile, a day earlier, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani gave a 250th anniversary address to newly naturalized citizens in City Hall. His words about America—both about this moment in our history and those focused on tearing us apart—offer an antidote to Donald Trump’s false talk. Here is one of two excerpts:

You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means. The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.

And Mamdani, a long-time New Yorker born in Uganda, ended by sharing his hopeful vision of America and its possibility, a vision that does not depend on division or demonization—and one that requires a dedicated people:

Those ideals upon which our nation was built—they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them. Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived. A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America—the striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection.

What a privilege each of us has, to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape. What a responsibility each of us possesses, to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before. What power each of us holds, to bring America ever-closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores — the greatness that, for 250 years, has been America.

In contrast to the man determined to destroy America’s heritage of immigration and the yearning for progress, this was a genuinely American vision.

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