Trump’s 250th Celebration Is a Fiasco
The president has turned a solemn occasion into a Day of Trump.
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“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”
That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people. The only thing he had to do was—for once in his life—not act like an insane egomaniac.
He couldn’t do it.
As things are developing, we’ll remember the story of America’s grandest commemorations as follows:
- One hundredth: a giant industrial exposition in Philadelphia.
- Two hundredth: a tall-ships regatta in New York harbor.
- Two hundred and fiftieth: a Trump flop in Washington, D.C.
