It is now clear. It can now be revealed. Donald Trump has prepared a special 250th birthday gift for the United States of America.
Humiliation.
Trump has boldly decided to commemorate the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence with a series of embarrassments that will surely be remembered as among the most mortifying not just in the history of the United States but in the history of any country, anywhere.
Together, they tap into every source of shame, ignominy, and indignity imaginable. Some are tacky. Some are failures. Some are sleazy. Some reflect badly on the president, some on his party, and some on the entire country.
Call it the semicringecentennial.
Marking a parallel with George Washington, who was famously called “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” Trump will forever be known as “first in incompetence, first in tastelessness and first in the minds of psychiatrists who study narcissism, megalomania and public displays of dementia.”
He wanted to mark the 250th with a series of concerts. But no significant or even credible artists would agree to take the stage, so instead he turned to defunct and, in some cases, disgraced (Milli Vanilli) musical acts that are hardly suitable for an Elks Club Arbor Day celebration, much less one of the most consequential milestones in our nation’s history. But then even those artists abandoned ship when they realized they were being utilized as political props.
Now, instead, via a long post on the most susmaxxed of all social media platforms, Truth Social, Trump attacked the artists and announced that instead of entertaining the American public on the occasion of the country’s birthday, he would instead provide them with the one thing they wanted least of all—another long speech.
How did he frame the offer? Of course, in the most embarrassing way possible. He wrote that instead he is “thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!) DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate “Artists…”
(Admit it, even just reading it, you wince and gag simultaneously.)
The humiliation was deepened when Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett felt obliged to step in and find some musical cannon fodder to make the president’s dream of a MAGA concert series come to life after all. Burchett is deservedly obscure, having made headlines only once before when he asserted he does not use drinking straws because that’s “what the women in my house do.”
But the failed concert series is not the only toe-curling 250th-birthday plan to go wrong in the past few weeks. Right now, rising on the White House South Lawn is an elaborate $60 million set for a UFC match that the president thinks is the right way to celebrate our nation’s birthday…and his own 80th. He may be right about the latter. Trump has always been drawn to combat sports favored by mobsters and head-trauma victims. But apparently he can’t even fill the seats for the event in celebration of himself. So, the U.S. military is going to order servicepeople to do their duty as seat-fillers…if they pay their own way and meet the height and weight requirements that our president demands. (After all, his most recent medical report asserts he is 6’ 3” with the body of an Adonis, yet another development that triggers one’s gag reflex… and I mean the one that makes us laugh uncontrollably.)
Not bad enough for you? What about the plan to put Trump’s mug shot—yes, I mean his actual mug shot—on a new $250 bill? It is wholly illegal. Living people have not been allowed to be represented on U.S. currency for over 150 years. It is so out of bounds that a senior director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing had to be reassigned because she objected to it.
What about the president defacing monument after monument across Washington to commemorate the birthday? These include his illegal remodeling of the White House to include a gilded ballroom for billionaires that not even members of his own, usually servile party want to be associated with. His ridiculous repainting of the bottom of the Reflecting Pool on the Mall so it looks like the kiddie pool at Mar-a-Lago. His paving over the Rose Garden. And his spending $5 million in a country facing serious economic problems to cover four horse statues in Washington in 23.75 karat gold leaf.
What about his desire (rejected by the courts) to name everything after himself?
What about his ridiculous round-the-clock outbursts of AI slop that show him as a god or an athlete, and thus reveal what a deeply needy, disturbed man America’s leader is?
He seems to be emulating history’s mad kings and most deranged leaders, like the Roman Emperor Commodus, who tried to rename Rome after himself and staged fake gladiatorial battles in which he would, of course, triumph. He was a terrible leader and a laughingstock for the world.
Imagine how the founders would have reacted to all this. Could anything be more inappropriate for commemorating the birth of our nation?
Well, yes, now that you mention it. There are the serial attacks on the rights American revolutionaries fought to establish and attacks on democracy itself that seem certain to grow worse throughout this 250th birthday year. Trump is using the U.S. government to suppress free speech and to violate the prohibition in our Constitution against the state sponsoring a religion. He is not only a felon himself but is supporting candidates like Ken Paxton in Texas who are known for levels of sleaze that rival his own. (If you don’t believe it, see Paxton responding to assertions that he is scandal-plagued by saying, “you could say the same thing about Donald Trump.”)
He is also marking the year by not just conducting illegal wars but by losing them and by working to empower the kind of tyrants against whom colonists rebelled in 1776. He traveled to China to essentially cede America’s leadership role to another nation. He had an actual descendant of King George III come to America and throw acres of shade with such deftness that Trump did not know what hit him.
For the first time, as reported by Reuters, the Democracy Perception Index for 2026 has shown that the negative perception of the U.S. under Trump has fallen so far that we now lag behind both China (not a democracy) and Russia (also not a democracy).
Could anything be a more humiliating way to mark our 250th anniversary?
In the year we should be celebrating America’s freedoms and institutions, Trump is attacking them. In the year we should be honoring those who helped uplift the nation, he is debasing the nation’s highest office and actively and comprehensively defacing its capital city. In the year we should be striving to find new ways to build on the country’s legacy, he is drawing attention to our defects, seeking to exacerbate our divisions and actively working to reverse our progress.
